Media Consciousness

Having established that all consciousness is mediated, I would now like to lead you into the consciousness of all media as mediations which are mediating. Let us start with the obvious linguistic element. The medium is not only the middle, which we also see the Latinate via media, or the mean between extremes, and in media res, or in the middle of things. Additionally, it is a matrix, or a thing out of which stuff is born. Thus we say that the medium of the exchange was money, or that the medium of the reaction was some or another acid or base. We speak quite concretely of the arts in this respect when we say that an artist’s medium is painting, or writing, cinema, or photography—their medium is the means and ground upon which they craft artistic ends and draw figures. Of course, medium as an adjective most frequently denominates a magnitude or intensity: a medium-sized coffee, a medium steak, a medium difficulty, a medium font weight, and so on. (We may also speak of a psychic medium as an intermediary, though this is a special case of the medium as matrix.)

Media, of course, are the plural of a medium. As misplaced concreteness has spoken of them, however, the media with which we communicate have increasingly become singularities. Thus we speak of the “news media” or perhaps just “the media” as those salacious or otherwise sultry and exposed industries in which communications are a sine qua non. Of course, there are are also social media, digital media, advertising media, storage media, and so on.

In every case, though we may speak of such terms in their average and everyday sense independent of their etymology, by way of historical consciousness we are entitled to interpret each beyond their ordinary senses. Every kind of medium or media, which I tabulate below, may be interpreted as an act of mediation. Not only this: it must be if we are thinking historically:

Let us generate the conditions for all above uses. Beginning from the Latinate etymology, medium preceded media through the neuter medius meaning “middle.” We, therefore, are entitled to subsume all of the above use cases according to this meaning, classically instantiated in the Aristotelian Syllogism’s “middle term.” This term, quite literally a medium, was the means whereby the judgment in the first premise was bound to the conclusion:

Here, “man” is the middle term linking mortals to the Greeks. Thus: mortals-men-Greeks. In the philosopher G.W.F. Hegel, this process becomes the entirety of thought itself. Thus he writes that “Not only is the syllogism rational, but everything rational is a syllogism.” The ontological commitments of this claim aside for all entities whatever, we may at least say that all media are syllogisms. The media themselves, indeed, are always a middle term between two extremes. Let us proceed to some examples.

Marx, and all economists after him, conceive of money as a medium of exchange, as was said. Unlike those economists, Marx is quite explicit: money is the middle term between the seller and the buyer concretely and the medium for the commensuration of any possible value between any two possible persons abstractly. Thus, Marx writes that money is indeed a “middle term, as a minor premise of a syllogism.” Those more familiar with Marx’s Capital will see this dramatized in Volume 1 as the CMC’ circuit between a commodity (had by the seller), money (first had by the buyer but after exchange had by the seller) and the commodity after exchange, C’.

Language itself has also always been a medium between sender and receiver, or speaker and audience. Thus Aristotle wrote that “spoken sounds” and written marks are “symbols of affectation in the soul” whose visible similarity for all men allows their differences of mind to settle on common means representation. Claude Shannon concurs entirely, as does the linguist Roman Jakobson. Or, as the social systems theorist Niklas Luhmann put it, “It is through language that the constitution of consciousness and the constitution of society are possible in the first place.”

Now, beyond language there are many gestures of the body that are not yet structured like a language. The totality of these structures, and their loose associations with other images of the environment, we tend to call culture. As I have argued in my work on cultural consciousness, what we have come to call culture is a late-enlightenment formulation for all procedures for demonstrating that one is “inside” and not “outside” a given group. Culture too, then, is a medium. Or, as the cultural anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski says: “Culture is the handiwork of man and the medium through which he achieves his ends.”

Before we can get to artistic media as mediations, we must speak to how the arts as productions are themselves enmeshed in a network of prior cultural media. As Marshall McLuhan writes in his Notes on the Media as Art Forms:

Our knowledge of the modes of consciousness in pre-literate societies together with our sense of the processes of culture formation in many literate societies past and present, have sharpened our perceptions and led to wide agreement that communication itself is the common ground for the study of individual and society.

The origins of the distinction between pre-literate and literate societies as maintaining distinct modes of cultural media, of course, traces at least to Plato’s Phaedrus, wherein we read famously of Thoth’s having given writing to King Thamus as a “pharmakon.” Following Derrida, writing was medicine, something pharmacological: it would allow extended reminiscence among the Egyptians. But, as king Thamus rejoined, this would also be a horrible pharmakos, a poison like the hemlock drunk by Socrates. Why? Using writing, the oral command that Thamus had over his priests would be dashed against the rocks on which engravings were inscribed. Now, instead of a centralized command of oral knowledge, every scribe would write independent of Thamus’s paternal authority. The “name of the father,” as Lacan would later call it, would thus become democratized to all those who could write. By extending reminiscence through writing, oral memory and active recall would thereby be diminished. Though Plato himself worried about this, recent claims about Plato’s “warning” against writing have been overblown. Indeed, as the Phaedrus draws to a close, Socrates calls thought and memory a “writing on the soul.” How much worse could writing on bodies be, then, if it was like unto the highest faculty of the soul?

Such claims aside, the Phaedrus serves as a worthy episode in the cultural history of media. As McLuhan has so famously described, “the medium is the message”—what we can say depends upon the means by which we say it; or, as Luhmann has put it speaking of the mass media in particular, our media select for some events worthy of communication and disregard others. Intuitively, you can’t paint a symphony’s sound—you might depict them as the medium allows you, but a painting is not an aural medium (unless you rip it apart!) The medium, as it were, has not only developed over time. In addition, time has developed media and our opinions of media. Media have, as communications scholar Walter Ong put it, transformed us from oral into literate societies: “writing restructures consciousness.” As Plato had already argued, meaning and intention could be autonomously detached from the name of the father. With such detachment, religious conception was no longer under the rule of “voices” heard from on high—it was systematized, codified, and made law. Zeus (Deus-Pater) thus passed from the holder of the lightning bolt to the scepter of Rome. Yahweh passed from merely speaking reality into being, as in Genesis, into fashioning the Hebrew language itself as he spoke (as in the Zohar). Thus, by the Middle Ages through Plato’s Timaeus and Lucretius De Rerum Natura, nature was not merely a theophany, but a Book.

Media, then, do not merely locally allow the mediation of concrete, historical minds. Abstractly, as Hegel might say, they structure the Gestalten of consciousness itself through the encouragement of different kinds of attention to time and space. Instead of aural and sonic pulsations, with written media men and women came to think in terms of structured combination, morphology, and syntax (as above all attested in the early magnificence of Panini’s grammar).

For McLuhan’s colleague Harold Innis, the whole of these Gestalten can roughly be mapped to a historical tabulation of the dominant media in use at a given moment in history:

Practical consciousness of media, or practical know-how about how to use prevailing media forms, thus shapes the kind of civilization using that media. Of course, as Plato had already stated, it also shapes the soul of the user, leading them either into a realm of fleeting, phony simulacra (or imitations) or into a realm of pure, divine forms. As the post-Foucauldian Friedrich Kittler summarizes the whole affair, “Media determine our situation.”

Media, we might say, are to us as the Gods were to the ancients—omnipresent tokens of toil, trouble and travail that, in the case of money, determine whether we live or die. Media, without being as deterministic as Kittler, do indeed shape our destiny. As Grusin and Bolter have shown, media are not fate. Media, like more like Foucault’s epistemes and less like Hegel’s Ages of World Spirit, are contingent even in their contingency (Hegel would say they are necessary in their contingency—hereby Spirit transforms necessity into freedom by transforming freedom into a necessity). Media, however, determine the conditions for the possibility of human activity. They structure our transcendental Gestalten, the field of perception whereby we may recognize anything, and our empirical Gestalten, as the forms upon which empirical art-forms are inscribed.

What, then, of the arts, the “media”? Artistic media, we have come to believe at least since Hegel, are the general environments within which particular practices may reveal the fullness of concrete individuality. If, as Hegel has said, speech is the concrete being-there of consciousness, and aesthetic sensibility is a precondition for language (since, indeed, sense-certainty precedes force and the understanding in the phenomenology), then the arts are a more abstract formulation of consciousness’s being-there. Aesthetic experience as a condition for speech thus led Hegel’s contemporary Schelling to regard the arts as more spiritually significant than philosophy or religion, a tradition that begins with Kant’s Critique of Judgment and which is carried forward in Nietzsche and Schopenhauer’s writings on music, the Dionysiac underground through which we may directly access the thing-in-itself. Of course, Plato (following Pythagoras) had yet again already anticipated this view in his conception that musical experience of various harmonoi, or today’s musical modes, would bring the listener into more aggressive or temperate dispositions. This too followed the mythic tradition of Orpheus, whose charming of the environment with the right tones has since been remediated by McLuhan as a “tuning” of the environment (“turn on, tune in, drop out”):

Regardless, artistic media have long been understood to put men into a trance, to re-mediate them. Such is the allegory of the cave, within which the “media” of phenomena are but projections of the noumenal Forms behind them. In Gnostic thought, this is raised to the paranoid principle that the Demiurge has cast a spell (a spelling) over reality, producing the fallenness souls in a world of deliberately-distracting mimetic media. The chief solution for the post-gnostic Christians was mere iconoclasm—if media had their own powers apart from those of God, they had to be destroyed. (See Owen Barfield’s “Saving the Appearances” for more on this). Secondary solutions, of course, came in the form of strictly institutionalized religious dogma about media, whose practices solved not only the cultural demonstration problem (as said elsewhere) but were thereby able to strictly separate the sacred from the profane. Indeed on the non-Gnostic view maintained by the medieval Catholics, if God made the world and the independent powers of media were created by God, then such powers had to be rendered into systematic services to the divine. By the 1400s, many Neo-Platonic Catholics had considered church services, with their collective, musical and en-chanted anamenesis which, like Platonic recollection, brought man back to remembrance of Christ, a white, natural magic against which was counterposed the “black magic” of the ars goetia.

For the Medievals and Renaissance Platonists, as in Plato himself, media effected change through a kind of sympathy. As he put it in the Timaeus, macrocosmic the harmony of the celestial spheres was imitated through the microcosmic harmonies interior to the soul. Indeed, just as one could sketch the ratios (and thereby the harmonics, or fit) of the solar system, so Plato dictated in the Timaeus that one could sketch the ratios of the parts of the soul, and their inner harmonies:

Music, through the same physics that governed the macrocosm, could thereby sympathetically govern the soul. By the Renaissance, these sympathetic governances were called “occult powers” producing “action at a distance.” Media consciousness, here, was this participatory—through the right kinds of media sympathy, one could participate in this divine governance of reality.

After Kepler, Newton, and Lavosier mapped with greater clarity the solar system, physics, and chemistry more clearly, such “occult” associations broke down. There was no action at a distance that could not be mechanistically broken up into what Descartes called “clear and distinct ideas,” and/or located in what David Hume called the “constant conjunction” of phenomena. Though recent work on quantum entanglement has made this picture more complex, immediate consequences for media consciousness were striking. Media consciousness thus became remediated as what Kant had called “man’s self-incurred immaturity.” Enlightenment, above all through Newton, was “man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity.” Instead of occult powers of participation, media were declared little more than inert inscriptions with which every man could “sapere aude,” or dare to know, through their own understanding:

Indeed, the occult powers could thus be seen as mere projections of mankind’s own faculties—anyone who said otherwise was but a masterful spellbinder:

The resulting freedom from such papal mediations reached its apogee in France’s “cult of the supreme being” which, per Robespierre, was to be nothing more than a cult of Reason and Virtue themselves. Auguste Comte dramatized the movement as an escape from a theological consciousness (God controls causes and change) to a metaphysical consciousness (occult posits control causes and change) to a positive consciousness: only scientific evidence could determine cause and change. Everything else was a backwards delusion. Media consciousness, then, was purely human, little more than a projection of man’s faculties.

By the time of Marx, Feuerbach, Nietzsche, and Freud this becomes an explicit social charge—priests were nothing but charmers of men, deluding them into an inverted, slavish world of empty theological posits. Here, media consciousness had become critically instrumental: he or she who could control the means of media production was, as Marx summed up in the German Ideology, in charge of producing the “ruling ideas” of the epoch. With Nietzsche media consciousness became a “slaves revolt” against master morality, and with Freud it became a projection of life history and trauma onto practical action. In every case, appearances were media of distortative thinking which required a critical project of “unmasking” to get behind. This “suspicious hermeneutics” as Paul Ricoeur would later put it thus suggested a twofold media consciousness:

1. First, the ruling class (or slaves, or cultural neuroses) could be shown to be behind the mask of phenomena.
2. Second, this mask actively contributed to shaping the life of human intercourse and transaction.

Through the 1890s these ideas underwent fusion with the general “degeneration” theories of Max Nordeau, the theories of time and matter of Henri Bergson, and the comparative religious studies of James Frazer. With George Sorel, the creativity of time-consciousness and matter could be fused with religion and Marxist self-consciousness about inverted appearances to suggest a “general myth” with which the workers may be convinced to shake off their chains. Then-contemporaneous nationalist movements likewise drew on the national-epic tradition of Homer, Virgil, Tasso, and Wagner to suggest national myths, whence the fusion of Sorel’s idiosyncratic Marxist syndicalism with French proto-fascism. Media consciousness, by this point, had become something magical in a new sense, especially in the group psychology of Gustav Le Bon and Sigmund Freud, both having argued that crowds were like unto children, easy to sway and quick to passion. As Hannah Arendt critically summarized after WW2, such magical thinking was epitomized by the idea that “everything is possible” if only enough people believed. On these grounds Marinetti called the theater and war a great school whose magnitude and destruction shaped men’s hearts into a common mold, and on these grounds Hitler (once an artist) believed that by forbidding the right kind of art Volkish civilization could be created.

Across the Atlantic in the US, such a belief took on a much more technocratic character. In the propaganda and public relations theory of Edward Bernays and Walter Lippmann, this much is transformed into a neutral organizing principle. Both, indeed, were quite proud that professional managers were now governing the mass of attitudes of men. (Much to the dismay of progressive socialists like John Dewey). As Adam Curtis has so wonderfully shown, the Bernays-Lipmann attitude would have been impossible without Freud and was, like Lenin’s appropriation of Marx, an attitude of critical unmasking turned against itself as an attitude for the positive organization of power. With Lenin, likewise, this technocratic-managerial media consciousness reached its apogee. Walter Benjamin summarized the entire opposition between these magical and technocratic attitudes in his Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction quite pithily—”this is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art.”

Following WW2, the magical and technocratic opposition in media consciousness largely broke down: media did much more than magically spin up a Volk or technocratically manage a mass.

With Adorno and Horkheimer’s culture industry, it meets Marx’s CMC’ to produce a general theory of media ideology—wherever there is media produced by the capitalist regime, there is a reproduction of capital mediations in the flesh. Indeed, one cannot but be reminded of the pied piper fairy tail, in which the great musician lulls the unwitting masses (represented as children) into a false consciousness:

The idea of such “spectacles” as wooing the masses into delusion was, likewise, a more general theme for Plato, who accused the ancient Sophists of doing the very same. For him, the cook was but a sophistic doctor—the former aimed merely to lull, please, and extract a dime whereas the doctor aimed to heal. Of course, by the 1950s, the criticism of art as a tool of mass deception had already become a rather significant theme, ranging from Adolf Loos’s 1908 formulation linking ornament to crime, Siegried Kracauer’s linking of the ornament to mass distraction, Guy Debord’s “society of the spectacle,” Roland Barthes’ conception of capitalist advertising as “mythology,” Baudrillard’s sign-value and Bourdieu’s distinction as anthropologically-inflected prestige markers acting before deliberate cognition (which we today gloss ex post as “pretty privilege”). Writings on technicity and technological society in Jacques Ellul and Jürgen Habermas similarly pointed to what the political theorist Langdon Winner summarized as “technics out of control,” men having become mere appendages to their media (roughly equivalent to what Marx called the “automatic fetish” and what Plato had discerned as the inferiority of poetry to philosophy). Here, media consciousness had reached its late capitalist, or industrial-consumerist, stage. Pace the Enlightenment unleashing of the individual onto the market to act individually, Plato’s old shadows were still suturing and binding men into relations of submission and obedience to their capitalist (or, if we are paranoid racists, Jewish; or, if we are paranoid progressives, racial-natalist) specters. Here is where most average, everyday media consciousness sits, a pallid recapitalitionist atavism (media do nothing but reiterate the past) that ought to be either destroyed (Ellul) or rehabilitated (Habermas).

By the 1990s, Neil Postman had argued that this had a civic component in his famed “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” (as had Chomsky in his “Manufacturing Consent”) whose general theses now lead us into interminable investigations about the relationship between media and attention span, which is itself supposed to spell the doom of western civilization (or something).

Of course, my own standpoint stands inside of this history. The ecological-transformative media consciousness of Ong, McLuhan, and Innis has its latter-day successors, of which I am one. With Derrida’s Plato, this consciousness is but an historical consciousness that, unlike the merely suspicious consciousness of Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, encourages a more general historical attitude toward the whole of media’s production and reception. Like Hegel’s own conception of the middle term as a suturing of any and all media, media are conditions that determine and re-determine our social situation. Communications media, as Kittler and Luhmann describe them, are environments, and environments are themselves media. Unlike atavistic consciousness, we deny that media are merely abrasive acids against the hard-won securities of rational-critical debate in the bourgeois public sphere. Indeed, unlike scholarly and pseudo-scholarly atavists who insist on digital media’s destruction of our ability to “talk to each other” we deny any necessity to these trends. No media can causally determine us; all media are nodes in an environmental ecology, and that ecology can, with Marxism-Leninism and John Dewey’s pragmatism, self-consciously reorganize and reconstruct the whole of our situation. Indeed, only such a manufacture of possibilities has ever (re-)composed late capitalist development; it must also (re-)compose that of media.

Ecological media consciousness thus asserts the Gestalten of media forms, both organizationally and perceptually, as so many shapes of human communicative development. Indeed, this is what “media” have always been—middlings, spaces of encounter and appearance, between parties. Intuitively, these middle-grounds are the encounters of figures, structuring what figures can be seen, how they are seen, and what kinds of inference are intelligible in consequence thereof. Like anything else, they have a history. Indeed, since all consciousness is mediated, the consciousness of media replaces Hegel’s account of “science” and Marx’s account of capital. While indeed the philosophers have hitherto interpreted the world, consciousness as such, or the practices of attention and the concrete-sensuous objects reproducing it, are as much constitutive of capital as capital constitutes them (whence Bourdieu). No subsequent practical consciousness can be achieved without an historical consciousness of our media situation such as the one which I have offered here.

Our ecological media consciousness not only suggests that media may determine our situation but that newer forms of media have determined it thereby. The history of these determinations must be left to a history of media in shaping media consciousness proper, a task I have not set for myself here. Indeed, the modes of media consciousness here are only so many Gestalten of apprehending the problem of media, or the problem of mediating multiple minds through a middle term. How different kinds of mediation perform such works must be left to another time. These abstract Gestalten are chronologically as follows: