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<TITLE>Alan's questions about media theory/ies</TITLE>
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<FONT FACE="Calibri, Verdana, Helvetica, Arial"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:11pt'>As Jonathan said in response, these are great questions. Ten cents worth:<BR>
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Axiomatically, there is mediation. It comes before such accidental and contingent binaries as subjects and objects, space and time. It even precedes communication. Mediation is a name for the fundamental connection between (and within) everything. Sometimes it communicates, sometimes it just opens channels, sometimes it is pure poetry, and exchange of energies. The biggest question for any historical theory of media is: how come, in a universe where mediation is the law, there is such concentration, delay, detouring, and hoarding of it?<BR>
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Wealth, for example, is a form of mediation. Goods and social obligations flow round in gift economies and in commodity economies, but in the latter (and quite possibly in the former) they do not flow constantly or evenly. Same thing is true of other flows like love, food, news, words, pictures. The long history requires the kind of macroscale thinking which Innis did in the Boas of Communication, but also the microscales of understanding, for example, the origins and structure of the raster display. <BR>
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So one answer is that theory is only as good as the data at its disposal (eg natural history before Darwin). In our case, the sheer lack of knowledge — and knowledge about our ignorance – concerning the human brain is a ‘condition of emergence’. Most of our psychological surmises are consciously just that: hand-waving in the general direction of probable occurrences, with the cnstant risk that we might be barking up the wrong tree (is psychology somehting to do with the structured grey mush locked inside the bone box on the top of the neck? Or is it fundamentally social, born by media like language, sex, food ?). We may celebrate the coditions of emergence as well as critique them, but we ignore them at our peril. <BR>
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There are media theories (plural) because we do not agree on what media are. I propose that if a theory is a media theory, it should take as axiomatic that mediation is primary, and that everything else (sex, power, exploitation) are effects of mediation and its vicissitudes. If everything from architecture to sunshine mediates, we have the critical agenda mapped for us – issue sof reciprocation and mutuality, solidarity, dependence and contingency. Once that is set out, we disagree on other issues – modes of causality, interplay between media formations (see for example the meticulous histories of the arrival of recorded sound in the North American movie industry by Donald Crafton and others, where artistic creativity, industrial espionage, audience reluctance, economic disturbance, linguistic diversity and a a hundred other factors play on an ostensibly simple innovation. And who would have chosen sub-atomic physics as the source of the biggest revolution in communications since the invention of electricity?<BR>
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Separate note: Jonathan mentions “we have not left representation behind entirely, even though we have a new set of terms that would include affect, intensity, viscerality, visuality and others, that are available as tools to calculate, measure, think, feel and strategize with. This is where we work -- all of us, at least to some degree -- isn't that what the theories of cognitive capitalism point to? “<BR>
-- representation has migrated from narrative prose and illusionist imaging to far more meticulously arithmetical media: spreadsheets, databases and geographical information systems. Two consequences: A: the inner life of people has now complex yet manageable functions in society such as taste, actuarial likelihood of illness or crime ect etc; affect is of considerably less commercial and political value than before. Our societies are fundamentally behaviourist. B: precisely because they are no longer central arms of governance and ideology, narrative and ilusion are once again open to innovation and experiment, precisely in the fields where contemporary governmentality no longer operates such as the inner life and – vitally important for the production of a public counter to commercialisation – the half-forgotten sociology/psychology of the crowd. This is where Virno’s Grammar of the Multitude is so interesting, and why Hardt + Negri are so intoxicating (if less persuasive). They speak to a “We” formed by the exclusion of treasured human faculties from the commerce of contemporary life, inchoate, passionate, and therefore dangerous. In terms of consciousness, it is that nagging undertow of a sense that “I” is somehow slightly unreal, a sense that arises from the restrictions our deep socialisation make son the capacity for whatever we might truly call action. <BR>
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If so, then the inner life becomes more and more like the unconscious, the excluded other of an increasingly expansive symbolic domain of rule, regulation, code, system, structure. To that extent, the inner life is likely to be more and more uncivil, perverse, violent, self-destructive and nihilist.<BR>
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Good grief. I think I am becoming a behaviourist. <BR>
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sean<BR>
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</SPAN></FONT><BLOCKQUOTE><BLOCKQUOTE><FONT FACE="Calibri, Verdana, Helvetica, Arial"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:11pt'>Is there a media theory, or media theories? Must a media theory be <BR>
_responsive_ to anything in particular or at all? Does any theory _have_ <BR>
to be anything in particular? Must a theory be 'critical of its conditions <BR>
of emergence'? <BR>
</SPAN></FONT></BLOCKQUOTE></BLOCKQUOTE><FONT FACE="Calibri, Verdana, Helvetica, Arial"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:11pt'><BR>
Prof Sean Cubitt<BR>
<a href="scubitt@unimelb.edu.au">scubitt@unimelb.edu.au</a><BR>
Director<BR>
Media and Communications Program<BR>
Faculty of Arts<BR>
Room 127 John Medley East<BR>
The University of Melbourne<BR>
Parkville VIC 3010<BR>
Australia<BR>
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Tel: + 61 3 8344 3667<BR>
Fax:+ 61 3 8344 5494<BR>
M: 0448 304 004<BR>
Skype: seancubitt<BR>
<a href="http://www.culture-communication.unimelb.edu.au/media-communications/">http://www.culture-communication.unimelb.edu.au/media-communications/</a><BR>
<a href="http://www.digital-light.net.au/">http://www.digital-light.net.au/</a><BR>
<a href="http://homepage.mac.com/waikatoscreen/">http://homepage.mac.com/waikatoscreen/</a><BR>
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