Media Theory 6.2 (2022) is now available: a special issue on Pharmacologies of Media, edited by Scott Wark and Yigit Soncul.

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Available here: http://journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt/issue/view/10

Cosmomedia: Natural Dyes in Japan

GANAELE LANGLOIS

York University, Toronto, CANADA

Abstract

This article explores John Durham Peters’ concepts of ‘communication as (impossible) communion’ and ‘elemental media’ by turning to the Japanese traditions of naturally dyed textiles. The article explores the politics of encounter that naturally-dyed textiles enable and links them to the question of world-making. It further examines how the extraction and application of color from the environment engages not only with humans and culture, but with non-human agencies and environmental politics as well. It links John Durham Peters’ work with that of Yuk Hui, particularly through elaborating on cosmotechnics as the ethics of technics, understood here as transformative modes of relations to the world, to non-humans and to more-than-humans.

Keywords

Non-Human, natural dyes, communication, cosmotechnics, environment

 Version of record: http://journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt/article/view/157

My personal experience of reading John Durham Peters has always been one of being endlessly provoked, pushed into thinking in new ways and in new directions. What I mean is that Speaking into the Air and Marvelous Clouds are books to think with, to escape with and, as I focus on in this article, to compose with. And the theme that for me has always been most important in both books is this deep desire for communication as communion that Speaking into the Air so beautifully articulates, how it turns specifically to communion with the non-humans and the more-than-humans in Marvelous Clouds and therefore becomes a question of both material and environmental communication. The question of natural dyes in Japan further adds to such inquiry, linking such environmental and material focus on communication with non-western conceptions of nature, specifically Japanese conceptions of the relationships between humans and nature (Kalland, 1995).^[1] In so doing, it helps highlight how traditional practices of natural dyeing in Japan are not only remnants from an idealized (and non-existent) past where nature was respected, but directly articulate a politics of relationality for the present and which forms the basis on which to rethink the work of communication as the building of relations. In that regard, the impossibility of perfect communion as communication is always at once “bridge and chasm” (Peters, 1999: 5) and helps us highlight a renewed ethics of communicative relations, one that is always multiple, involving not only many humans, non-humans and more-than-humans, but also divergent forces that both create equilibrium and chaos.

But let me start again, with an example: in the spring of 2019, the exhibition Living Colours: Kasane – the Language of Japanese Colour Combination at the Japan House London (UK) offered the western public a rare chance to discover the Japanese tradition of textile and natural dyes. Featuring the work of Textile Yoshioka (Somenotsukasa Yoshioka), one of the most renowned natural dye companies in Japan, the exhibition was much more than just an exploration of colour combinations. This was not a colour design event, but an opportunity to explore how making colour by combining natural dyes and textiles has been a key medium in Japan, a language indeed (Yoshioka and Fukuda, 2000), not just for communicating with humans in sensorial ways as I explain in this paper, but also for communication with non-humans and more-than-humans. With natural dyes, colour is produced through the use of plants, muds and sometimes insects and molluscs (Cardon, 2007). In so doing, naturally dyed textiles constitute a unique and forgotten medium that articulates nature and culture via techniques in ways that are radically different from what we usually understand as (western) communication media. Western accounts see media as technologies of abstraction that encode information to make it storable and retrievable across space and time and that strive to make information malleable yet eternal, escaping material constraints such as decay and obsolescence. We see in the trajectory of dominant communication media systems a continuous effort to leave questions of materiality behind in actuality, but also through the denial of production and lifecycles of media devices and infrastructures. Current ideologies about the power of media promise the bypassing of both nature and the limits of human bodies altogether to reach self-sustaining artificial life.

Natural dyes put the dominant media model and teleology into question: they are entirely dependent on collaboration with nature as they mobilize non-human elements to create colourful textile objects. They entail technologies transforming natural materials into cultural modes of expression via a series of chemical transformations (Boutrup and Ellis, 2018), most of which require the assistance of non-human entities and environmental media such as water, air, and sunlight. In so doing, naturally dyed textiles embody a communion with the environment, a form of communication between humans and non-humans that has been understudied; the making of natural dyes necessarily involves the cooperation of non-humans, so much so that, I aim to show, it becomes a form of composition. I borrow the concept of composition from Deleuze and Guattari, who in What is Philosophy? describe the resonances between animal species by, in turn, citing Jacob von Uexküll (1934) at length: how not only the song of a bird will get other birds to answer in kind, but how different animal species each fashion their habitats, which cross over other habitats and in turn react or incite responses from other animal species. The spiderweb, say Deleuze and Guattari, contains the portrait of a fly as it is designed specifically with the qualities and characteristics of the fly in mind and indeed desperately calls for the presence of flies. Less lethal is the example of oak leaves which channel rain drops, and in so doing, not only fulfill biological needs, but also create a music, a rhythm. These, according to Deleuze and Guattari, are instances of melodic compositions (1991: 176), lively and changing exchanges that require engaging with divergent and other forces and in so doing, I argue in this article, create a world made up of constantly repeated, harmonizing, yet fragile relations. Natural dyes invite the humans in this process of composition of worlds, where moments of communion are rare and fleeting, but their ghostly presence can be captured.

Specifically, I explain in the following pages that the resulting naturally dyed textile objects are the result of cosmotechnical processes and should be understood as cosmomedia objects: objects that result from the formulation and formalization of an ethics of relationships with a world, with a cosmos. It is the trace of such composition combined with the sensorial communicative qualities of textile that enables forms of transmission that create, as I aim to show in this paper, new temporalities of encounters. Naturally dyed textiles from Japan allow for an exploration of two of John Durham Peters’ concepts: that of communication as communion, as explored in Speaking into the Air, and that of Elemental Media. What links these two concepts is cosmotechnics, further explained by Yuk Hui (2016) in The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics; the ethics of relationships with a cosmos that is expressed by different technologies and technological systems.

Cosmological Culture

Textile Yoshioka is one of the few natural dye companies left today that continues the millennial Japanese tradition of natural dyeing. As with all craft that encountered the industrial revolution and mass capitalism, natural dyers all but disappeared throughout the second half of the nineteenth century the world over, and with them the immense knowledge of the natural world as a source of colour. In the west, natural dyeing is being rediscovered today as awareness of climate change and mass scale pollution, of which the mainstream textile industry is one of the main contributors (Anguelov, 2015), and requires finding alternatives or, in this case, reviving craft that almost disappeared a century and a half ago. Japan is in a unique position: as a country that underwent centuries of economic, political and cultural isolation from the rest of the world during the Edo period (1603-1868), its later mass industrialization did not completely erase a millennial tradition of natural dyes and textiles that played a crucial cultural role for elite and folk cultures and economies alike. In particular, it is important to see the function of textiles in Japan as one of augmentation of the human body and psyche, and further as indeed extensions, in McLuhan’s sense, into time and space, but from a very material place rather than the virtual one touted by western digital media technologies. Textile and fashion studies have shown that textiles communicate but not like traditional media. Rather, textile is a sensorial medium and, as textile scholar Mary Schoeser argues, textile consists of “three-dimensional objects within which structure, texture, insertions, additions, manipulations and movement can interact. In fact, it is more accurate to define textile not as a visual art, but as a sensory art, one that calls into play all of the senses: touch, sight, smell, sound and – for curious infants – taste” (2012: 463). Following this, it is more appropriate to look at the colours and imagery on textile as having not simply visual effects, but haptic ones as well: one never just looks at textile even if it is behind a glass, but always has a prehension of how it would feel against one’s skin: textile prompts sensorial imagination. And this is a key way in which to understand how textile communicates: by sensorial closeness, even at a distance. Naturally dyed textiles extend and augment human bodies, not only by providing protection, but also by inscribing individuals in sensorial relations to one another, and to the world. To wear naturally dyed textile is to gain a social identity that is necessarily mediated by nature.

This mediation via nature is something that was explored to its full in high-end clothing in Japan. It was used to establish a system of tripartite relationships between wearer, viewer and nature that resulted in defining a cosmological culture, in that in any textile-based expression human relationships recognized the importance of a cosmos with complex logics, rules and processes that escape human control. Culture, in other words, was not abstracted from nature, but rather heavily indebted to nature, both in the sense of the non-human, such as materials (plants, roots, flowers, etc.) but also the more-than-human—the elemental processes (e.g., the filtering of water through rocks) that develop over thousands of years. In The Power of the Weave, Yuko Tanaka explains the combination of haptic and visual processes in Edo-period landscape naturally dyed silk kimonos:

The artisans of the Edo period took the techniques of weaving, embroidery, and tie-dyeing to new heights. The result was the unique “landscape kimono”. When spread out, each robe formed a seasonal vista like a painting […]. Plant-extract hues had long stood for nature, but in landscape kimono people could clothe themselves in nature in a very concrete way. As in other cultures, textiles were a medium between humans and the divine or natural world […] (2013: 22).

The landscape kimono was as much a testament to human craftmanship as it was a display of the expressive power of nature as source of colour and as enabling indeed a language, a grammar of colour. The landscape kimono, like other garments reserved for elites worldwide, separates the wearer from common people. But at the same time, it asks about the recognition of one’s place in relationship to a cosmos. The importance of the environment—both as source of expressive material and as asking the question of the ethics of a relationship with the entire and more-than-human environment—highlights the cosmological aspect of traditional textile in Japan, one that does not proclaim the superiority of the human over nature contrary to western modernity but one that sees virtuosity in the capacity to work with nature according to cosmological relations. At the same time, it is important to notice that the landscape kimono expresses relation to a specific kind of nature: one that has been idealized (Kalland, 1995: 250); in this context, the rendered nature has been tamed by human hands.

This tripartite relationship—that cultural expression among humans always requires recognizing one’s place in the cosmos—was not limited to high end traditional Japanese textiles. For common folks, naturally dyed textile was a question of necessity, and the kinds of cultural aesthetics that emerged from it reflect an economy of relationship with scarce and valuable materials. Being cut off from the world and with a geography and climate not susceptible to the growing of common sources of textile fibers such as cotton, sheep or camelids, Japanese common people had to rely on domestic fibers for weaving: hemp, ramie, banana and pineapple leaves, but also kozo paper twisted into fine fibers, and wild wisteria that grow in the mountains (Nagano and Hiroi, 1999). Overall, cloth was rare and time-consuming to make until after WW2. Similarly, colour was scarce for common folks. Historically, bright colours were reserved for the nobility and common folks mostly had access to neutral colors, with the exception of indigo. The plant for producing indigo in Japan—polygonum tinctorium—could be cultivated in the Japanese climate and was the source not only of some of the brightest blues—from sky blue to the almost black blues—but also served practical purposes. Natural indigo dye reinforces cloth, making it more durable, and it is also a natural bug repellent. Being labor-intensive and made up of scarce materials, and yet very much needed for everyday life, the cloth culture that emerged in Japan for common folks involved aesthetics borne out of preservation. Mingei (folk craft) aesthetics reflected such necessity and forced economy in dealing with materials, and that translated a unique kind of communicative care towards textile as both object and interface to the world (Japanese Garden Society of Oregon, 2011).

A key instance of this is boro (“rags”) which at first glance is the careful mending, upcycling and recycling of fabric (Tuzuki, 2009), but should be understood as a form of generational communication through temporal transmission. A farmer’s jacket, for instance, would be patched with scraps of textiles and reinforced with stitch-overs. When it started falling apart, it would in turn be cut up into scraps to sew or patch other clothes. Scraps too worn to be sewn or stitched together would be used as bedding fillers or rags. Yuko Tanaka explains that boro is a form of communication in that it is a patchwork of different times and existences—it is a quiet, subtle mode of cultural transmission that nevertheless fostered a unique aesthetic. Boro indeed is the precursor to a form of Japanese embroidery knows as sashiko, where aesthetic expression and the reinforcement of cloth through stitches work together. A boro farmer’s jacket, which paradoxically now would be highly sought after as a collector item, embodied generational presence: one wearing such a jacket would be surrounded by ancestors, in a very material way. Boro thus “bears witness to the people who wear and use it” and “is charged with their life essence” (Tanaka, 2013: 171). The practice of boro made possible the encounter in the present of pasts and futures.

Cosmotechnics

The necessary cosmological cloth cultures of Japan are inseparable from a very unique conception of techniques for extracting and applying colour. And here, the Japanese natural dye tradition offers an illustration of cosmotechnics, that is, the set of ethical principles for relating to a cosmos that are embedded in a given technological system. As Yuk Hui argues, cosmotechnics offer a necessary correction to the monotechnological thought that is dominant today: the belief that the only technological model available is the one that emerged in the west from modernity, capitalism and colonialism, and which involves the ruthless extraction and transformation of materials, workers’ exploitation and the assumption that technology is a means to exert absolute human control over environments. The techniques for extracting natural dyes in Japan compared to the rest of the world are telling in offering a contrast between two very different cosmotechnical systems as far as natural dyes are concerned. But first, let me offer some pointers as to how natural dyes are extracted.

Natural dying has a long history—it was the only means of producing colour up until the invention of synthetic dyes in 1856. Today, we have those little packets of instant dye that dissolve in water, but before, the making of colour required careful use of living materials, some of which are only available at specific times of year and in small quantities. Further, it required craft in extracting colour from leaf, bark or roots, some of which had to be further processed through, for instance, months of composting in the case of indigo leaves. Furthermore, to be able to coax deep, bright, long-lasting colours from natural elements requires an immense amount of skill and knowledge as other materials with chemical properties are required to fully bring colour out and onto textile. Indeed, textile itself has to be properly treated in order to maximize colour fastness, from processing textiles before dyeing—a process called mordanting that involves substances such as alum or tannin rich plants (Garcia, 2016)—to post-processing once the dye has been applied, for instance through the use of a protein bath (e.g., in soy milk) in order to more firmly bind colour to cloth. Finally, textile itself plays a key role in that different textiles will react differently to natural dyes; safflower, for instance, produces bright pink on cotton, but coral orange on silk. Overall, while one could throw a bunch of leaves or flowers in hot water and dunk textile into it and obtain some kind of colour, the ability to not only produce bright, lightfast and steadfast colours, but also to be able to maintain consistency of results over time, requires an immense amount of skill both in scientific knowledge and in constant years of practice.

The natural dye tradition in Japan is unique in that it pays attention to temporalities and seasonality, specifically how seasons both demand and structure specific and appropriate human activities (Kalland, 1995: 253). By contrast, the dominant natural dye tradition that emerged in the west applied a whole different set of techniques that obeyed the tripartite logics of modernity, capitalism and colonialism. Today even, the Japanese natural dye tradition continues to distinguish itself by insisting on closeness to the seasonality of nature. For instance, natural dye extracts, either in liquid or powdered form are common tools used in the west. They are easy to store, are portable, and derive from a long history of the global exchange of colour, from the Silk Roads onwards (Phipps, 2013). By contrast, the Japanese natural dye tradition distinguishes itself by generally refusing the abstraction of natural dyes from their environment: importance is placed on collecting leaves, bark, flowers and other sources of natural dyes and using those directly in dye baths. This is not to say that the Japanese natural dye tradition is any less complex than the western one: rather, it actualizes specific ethics about how humans should relate to non-humans and more-than-humans, one that recognizes the need to compose with rather than find ways of asserting human control.

This becomes particularly evident when looking at the parallel histories of natural indigo in Japan and within the western colonial system. Indigo is a unique dye because it is a source of colour found in many plants across the world, from tropical to temperate climates. In order to obtain deep blues, the plants need to be processed to extract indigotin, which in turn further requires transformation so that it becomes soluble and adheres to textile fibers. For extraction, the western colonial system adopted a water-based method originating from India: the leaves are rinsed, submerged in water, heated and/or fermented, then alkalized, oxidized and filtered. Out of this process indigo is extracted as a concentrated blue powder that can then be pressed into cakes. The Japanese indigo tradition makes use of a compost method, wherein the leaves are chopped, sun dried and then spread inside to compost, getting turned over and watered on a regular basis over the winter months (Ricketts, 2021). The resulting product is loose and contains lesser concentration of indigo than in the plants and methods originating from India.

As mentioned, the extracted indigotin in both cases is not water soluble and has to undergo a unique process of transformation that no other natural dyes involve. There are two ways of rendering indigo into a dye: either through microbial or chemical means. The microbial method is the oldest and consists of adding substances to the indigo vat to increase alkalinity and foster fermentation. The chemical reduction method is a more recent invention from the mid-nineteenth century (Balfour-Paul, 2011: 129-130) and involves ammonia to raise alkalinity and sodium hydrosulphate to provoke a reduction of the indigo into a soluble dye. The chemical vat allows for a large scale of dyeing—it is much faster and easier to control than the fermentation method, which is dependent on weather and temperature and a multitude of other factors. The western colonial indigo production system is one that actualized capitalist logics of never-ending expansion through high productivity. Combined with the existing colonial logics, it comes as no surprise that it was built on brutal exploitation of human labor including slavery in large numbers. The path of destruction of colonial indigo, from mass oppression, famines and massacres in India to the slave trade extended over hundreds of years, is still present today in the ways in which textile workers are treated as disposable and cheap labour. Further, the aim to control the indigo process resulted in the use of very harsh chemicals that are toxic to human bodies and the environment. The invention of synthetic indigo in 1897 further enabled the appropriation of blue cotton within industrial mass capitalism. Today perhaps denim is the epitome of mass consumerism, with the pollution that it produces visible from space.

The extraction and transformation of indigo from plants to dye is key to understanding how what from the outside appear as different means to the same end actually express a politics and ethics of technology in relation to the world. The history of colonial indigo was driven by the portability of indigo cakes that could then be used as global commodity central to the triangular slave trade, which was organized around British and US “empires of cotton”. The Japanese indigo by contrast has small yields and is meant neither for travel over long distance nor mass scale production. The question of technology—of how to make things—comes to the fore here. Typically, making or techne is divided into two models: one where the human maker is central and in charge of the entire process of extraction and transformation, and the other where the human element becomes a cog in a broader complex machinery. The divide is between craft and industry, between holistic and prescriptive models (Franklin, 1999: 10-11), between creation (poeisis) and instrumentalization (Heidegger, 2013). All of these models assert the ability for the maker to control the process of creation. Through Tim Ingold, however, we access another definition of techne via the concept of textility. Ingold contrasts hylomorphism—the imposition of form onto materials (2010: 91) and textility—the weaving of materials, or “the way in which materials of all sorts, energized by cosmic forces and with variable properties, mix and meld with one another in the generation of things” (91-92). Textility redefines making as productive and transformative relationships between humans and non-humans, including plants and elemental media. The maker, in that process, emerges not as the main actor, but the one who helps non-humans and more-than-humans compose with each other. To further explain the composition of non-humans and more-than-human actors: the Japanese method of fermenting indigo requires the mobilization of bacterial actors, which have to be encouraged through proper heating and feeding. Just like the difference between making sourdough bread or using chemical yeast, with the fermentation vat, the maker can at most put together actors in the best set up possible but does not get to control how or when they will react together.

Further, when talking to indigo dyers about the most important aspect of a successful vat, respecting the temporality of bacterial activity was but one component. Another key element, or rather, elemental media, is water, they said: the quality of water determines the success of the dyeing process. City water is usually avoided for this reason, and many indigo dyers in Japan choose the location of their dyeing studios based on the quality of spring water available. Another key aspect for master indigo dyers is respecting the life of the vat, and here is another layer of complexity: the fermentation pushes oxygen out of the vat, which is key to successful dyeing. The dyer, in turn, adds oxygen by dipping textile into the vat: one of the first things one learns when dying with natural indigo is therefore how to properly and carefully dip textile into the vat, making sure to disturb it as little as possible. In any case, at some point the vat will require to be left alone in order to resume its fermentation. The vat is temperamental, a fragile equilibrium at best that the dyer is always trying to both manage and disrupt as little as possible. For master indigo dyers as well, the life of the vat is not only about its day-to-day existence, but also about its overall life. The life cycle of the vat starts indeed with vibrant and deep blues, but as the vat is used, more and more indigo is removed. This enables working with different shades and depth of blues; whereas a young vat will make it possible to attain dark blues, older vats make possible much lighter blues, so that by the end of its life the vat will give beautiful pale blues the same color as an early morning sky. It would be easy to keep adding indigo to the vat to try to maintain consistency, but Japanese indigo dyers, as master indigo dyers from other traditions, usually argue that the life cycle of the vat should not be interfered with. Knowing that one works with a living hybrid entity—the indigo vat—forces one to be in constant communication with the vat, a communication process that is based on respect of the agency of the vat itself. In so doing, highly skilled indigo dyers are able to produce up to fifty different shades of blue from indigo. Being able to consistently obtain the same shades given the temperamentality of the fermentation vat takes fine attunement to the vat using all the senses: not only what the vat looks like, but also differences in smell, and even taste, which some indigo dyers use to judge the fermentation process. Overall, this constant state of communication puts the human not in control, but rather as an interlocutor among many, as a facilitator that enables encounters between non-human and elemental media. It comes as no surprise then, that the indigo and natural dyes tradition of Japan allows for communication with the more-than-human, especially with time itself.

Cosmomedia

Working with natural dyes in the Japanese tradition means working with time and temporalities: the temporalities of seasons and non-human life cycles, which then enable a work on memory, reminiscence, and imaginaries of encounters. A few Japanese and Japanese trained indigo dyers have become installation artists, using indigo blues in ways that highlight its magical radiance, its more than human characteristics which result directly from the kinds of composition it entails. Synthetic indigo can never get to the same radiance: the natural Japanese indigo blues are indeed alive and a celebration of encounters. Indigo artist Hiroyuki Shindo’s installations of indigo-dyed panels and balls of fiber were among the earliest to rekindle an international appreciation of colour as a live and mystical medium (Taussig, 2009). Similarly, Japan-trained indigo artist Rowland Ricketts focuses on the life of indigo in his installation—not only its multiple shades but also its fading over time. Fukumo Shihoko is also another instance of an indigo artist working with traditional and vintage textiles such as wisteria and hemp to create pieces that have cosmological resonances, some of which achieve the kind of blue that the earth looks like from space, others look like the darkness in between stars.

The resurgence of Japanese indigo traditions on the international art scene has played an important role in rediscovering natural dye colours, and one can hope the Living Colour exhibition is the first of many to come to the western world. The language of Japan natural dye colour is one of multiple and layered entities and the hybrid lives that they enable and in so doing, open a space of communication that is nonverbal and deeply sensorial. For Living Treasure and Kimono weaver Fukumi Shimura, colour is felt not only through the eye, but also awakens smell, and it is worth quoting her at length to illustrate this:

Powdery snow was still falling when I visited the foothills of Mount Ogura one year. There I met an old man who gave me one of the branches he was pruning from the sakura trees. Back in my studio, I simmered it into a dye that turned the fabric such a beautiful pink it seemed to fill my room with the fragrance of the blossoms. At that moment, I experienced what it was like to smell a color. Not as an actual scent, of course, but because all our senses seem to be connected at some deep level, elements of beauty perceived through one sense resonate subtly across the rest as well […] When I received word that plants were afoot to trim the sakura near Omi ahead of the September typhoons, I practically flew to the scene to receive some prunings. However, the dye I got from them did not have the same ‘fragrance’ as before. The color was the same gray-tinged pink, but it lacked the previous batch’s radiance. Pondering this difference, I realized that plants, too, have their cycles. In late winter, when I had received the branch from Mount Ogura, the sakura had been preparing within its trunk to bloom to the tips of every bough. That color was the very spirit of the sakura, I thought (2019: 15).

What natural dye does then, is to fix a moment in the life of a non-human element, to capture life energies before they transmute into blooms, flowers, leaves and fruits. For Shimura as well, weaving designs further activate other senses, such as sound. In Shimura’s works (2019; 2009), one can see the multiple ways in which indigo blues are mobilized in conjunction with other colours: to recall the surface of a lake in winter, to call forth, in combination with yellows in a bold pattern, the memory of a summer music festival, or in subtle touches to evoke the haziness of rain under the moonlight. In Shimura’s work, colour combinations are woven into rhythmic patterns that resonate with natural energies that are then given back to the human in the form of unconscious, sensorial associations. These memories of a lake, of a music festival, of a misty night are not personal memories like the Proustian madeleine: they are impersonal yet deeply moving. When I look at Fukumi Shimura summer festival kimono, I experience echoes of joy and celebration, a nostalgia for a past that I never lived, but also an imaginary prehension of music approaching even though I do not know what Japanese summer festival music is like. Such cosmomedia does not only pay homage to the natural world: in capturing non-human energies it creates new temporalities, it awakens experiences that have not yet existed but are at the cusp of coming into being. In other words, it opens a world of potentials through triggering sensorial imagination.

Naturally dyed textiles become living interfaces, and the current interest in boro textiles mentioned above reflects this nascent understanding of cosmomedia. Tanaka explains that boro entailed that “cloth was a living thing, and as such it had a lifespan and should be kept alive until that time came” (2013: 167). The idea that textile could be considered as living is more than just provocative. Indeed, textile does not fall neatly into a category of what we consider “the living” in the standard sense of the biological. Artificial life is a popular topic these days, and it usually conjures up images of synthetic machines and high-end computing power. But looking at textile as a form of artificial life, as a living hybrid interface—and as something that had to be nurtured and protected through its life span—opens up our horizon about the encounters between the human, the non-human and the more-than-human. Boro reminds us that artificial life has a long history, and that it relied on a set of technically mediated relations between humans and the world. This insight stands in stark contrast to the contemporary discourses of artificial life as providing an escape from the limitations of biology and materiality, from the limitations of life and the world we live in. Boro as artificial-life-making was about the creation of new temporalities, memories, futures and lines of existence, relations that endured through the cycle of human life and death. What is key to note here is a kind of relationship with artificial, fabricated, technological objects that takes into account their particular life and changing agencies. Rather than thinking about technical agencies as de facto surpassing human capacities and therefore being stronger and unchanging, the practice of boro embraces technological decay. The cycles of boro, from reinforcing to patching together to layering to stuffing, follow textile as it degrades, as its threads get thinner and eventually fall apart. This is completely unimaginable in our western technological mindset oriented as it is toward immortality and incapable of thinking about degrowth in the first place: to account for the decay of fabricated actants as enabling important modes of cultural expression and transmission. Again, the ethics of a relationship with the cosmos—not only in its environmental but also temporal and more-than-human aspects—is key here: the time of human existence is articulated with the lifespan of fibers that get thinner and more brittle and colour that fades away.

To go back to the Living Colours exhibit mentioned at the beginning of this article: I hope to have shown in these few pages how something as seemingly obscure, from a western perspective, as the Japanese traditions of naturally dyed textiles actually opens a door towards forms of communication that have almost disappeared: sensorial, cosmological based communication that emerges from the composition and entanglements of humans, non-humans and more-than-humans, from a technological communion that is deeply indebted to environmental media. In the time of the Anthropocene (Moore, 2016; Tsing, 2017; Tsing et al., 2017), such communication is even more needed to forge new connections to the cosmos that are emerging. Such communication is deeply political, because it is deeply transformative: the mobilization of nature enables new modes and temporalities of experience and of being to each other. In that regard, Living Colours was more than a celebration of an ancient craft and a nostalgia for a far-away place of always harmonious relations with nature. Such understandings are traps and in order to avoid them, it is necessary to focus, in turn, on the techniques of natural dyes, which are not only craft techniques, but also ways of coaxing forms of communication. The techniques put different elements together to create moments of resonance culminating in compositions that produce colours that in turn leave a trace of a fleeting, short moment of communion. For Textile Yoshioka in their Living Colours exhibition, colour combinations include such seasonality and temporality. What is important here is that as much as the colours from Yoshioka textiles are flamboyant and bright, they also translate a restraint, a recognition that such textile is indeed rare, and precious. And while it has been pointed out that natural dyes, for this reason, are not necessarily a universally eco-friendly alternative as they tend to require, for instance, lots of water, they nevertheless offer an example of how the power of communication can help rethink our damaged present: how it can be without words yet be a transformative experience of being in the world; how it teeters on the verge of failure and is so fragile and how it can nevertheless produce lasting sensations and profound transmissions; how it requires so many technical mediations to produce an already gone moment of direct communion among humans, non-humans and more-than-humans; how it has to be constantly reworked and should never be fully systematized, because it is a composition with the living, a being-with that is both material and abstract, present and refracted.

Acknowledgement

This research was supported by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

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Notes

[1] This article is based on fieldwork observations and interviews conducted with eight Japanese textile artists in June 2019 in Kyoto and Osaka.

Ganaele Langlois is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Media Studies at York University. Her research focuses on digital media, from textile to social media platforms.

Email: gana@yorku.ca

The Eavesdropper and Onlooker as Proximate Agents of Social Change

CARRIE RENTSCHLER

McGill University, CANADA

Abstract

The eavesdropper and the onlooker have become models of activist potential. Their proximity to enactments of racist and gendered social violence, and their abilities to witness, record and disseminate records of this violence via smartphones and social media networks, define some of the conditions for social change around the situations in which bystanders are located online. Drawing from John Peters’ analysis of eavesdropping as the transformation of private talk into public communication, this article examines the contemporary activist reclamation of eavesdropping and onlooking as small-scale, networked conditions of social transformation. Imagined as small acts of intervention tied to participation in contemporary social media environments, their models of social change leverage the positionality of the eavesdropper and the onlooker, transforming the “listening in” that people do on social media and elsewhere into acts of agentic response. In the process, they recode the conditions in which harm is enacted from being surveilled online into conditions that also enable activist intervention. 

Keywords

Onlooking, eavesdropping, bystander, small-scale acts, social media, social change, politics of scale

Version of record: http://journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt/article/view/156

“A good theory helps shape what we pay attention to and how we live and imagine living; it can be an anchor when things are awry, but it can be a harm when it stops us from taking in singularity, anomaly, and unpredicted forms of life.”  – Lauren Berlant quoted in Zarranz et. al., 2017: 13)

“What you pay attention to grows.”   – adrienne maree brown (2017: 43)

“It is in the microstructures of social interaction that the innovations of political culture become apparent.”   – Jeff Goldfarb (2007: 38).

The positions of the onlooker and eavesdropper have increasingly come to matter in social change efforts and social movement thinking. Whether in feminist anti-harassment efforts online and in the streets in groups such as Hollaback! and hashtags #YouOkSis? (Nakamura, 2014; Rentschler, 2017; 2018) or via Black cellphone witnessing initiatives to counter-surveil the police (Richardson, 2020), social movements recognize the potentials of onlookers and bystanders to act as proximate, internet-connected social change agents. For many social movement actors, the conditions of peer surveillance and proximate social relations online are opportunities for bystander intervention into structural oppressions, harassing behaviors, and the enactment of microaggressions (see Rentschler, 2017). And in social media economies where the commodity of attention is so highly valued and the presumption of peer surveillance is so normalized, the person who pays attention while listening-in can also become someone who intervenes into acts of gendered and racialized oppression. By fostering interventionist forms of attention to oppression online, bystander activism treats social media attention as the currency through which harmful interactions can be interrupted by onlookers. As transformative justice activist adrienne maree brown puts it: “what you pay attention to grows” (2017: 43).

Bystander intervention represents an emerging model of social change that frames violence prevention as a networked and spreadable phenomenon online. It identifies the monitorial conditions of witnessing violence against others online as opportunity structures for eavesdroppers and network participants to intervene in oppressive acts of communication. Their activist models of ‘listening in’ aim to transform the eavesdropper into an accountable witness, because “to witness an event is to be in some way responsible to it” (Peters, 2001: 709). If “eavesdropping is always a potential in any communication system in which strangers must handle personal cargo” (Peters, 1999: 176), as John Durham Peters asserts, then bystander intervention into online harassment and violence activates a call to talk back and act against the harms a listener might hear online. The forms of personal cargo to which they pay witness includes harms committed against LGBTQIA+ people, women and gender non-binary folks, and racialized individuals, who disproportionately experience harassment and violence online.

Recent studies demonstrate just how much gender and racial violence people pay witness to online against others and as primary targets themselves. A 2017 Pew Research Center report found that 40% of their U.S. respondents experienced online harassment while over 65% witnessed others being harassed online. The percentage of people surveyed who witness online violence increases to 86% for individuals aged 15-29 (Duggan, 2017). A few years prior, in a 2014 Pew Research Center study, 73% of respondents reported witnessing someone else being harassed online in the form of name-calling and intentional acts of humiliation; 25% witnessed someone being physically threatened, while close to 20% witnessed others being stalked and sexually harassed on social media, often for sustained periods of time (Duggan, 2014). In Canada, the 2014 General Social Survey found that 17% of respondents aged 18-29 reported being harassed or stalked online, 1/3 of whom experienced both.

In these contexts, in which people report significant levels of witnessing harassment and violence online, social change is being re-conceptualized around the interventions that eavesdroppers and onlookers can make by virtue of their participation as monitors on social media platforms. These monitorial citizens often keep watch “even while he or she is doing something else” (Schudson, 1998: 311), enacting a distracted form of surveillance. They “scan the informational environment” (Schudson, 1998: 310), and attend to “gestures, behaviors and patterns” that might reveal impending harassment and present harm, without necessarily paying close attention (Love, 2010: 378). Drawing on Erving Goffman’s concept of “eyes on the street”, they might also come to recognize the “way that different kinds of persons suffer the attention and inattention of others” online (Love, 2010: 379, emphasis added). The movement models I examine here not only presume that conditions of social media surveillance exist, but that these conditions enable certain kinds of bystander-based interventions via people’s social media participation. They conceive of eavesdropping and onlooking as proximately (and even distractedly) situated positions from which to respond to acts of oppression in online social networks.

John Durham Peters’ (1999) analysis of eavesdropping as a condition of telephonically mediated communication in the early twentieth century seems especially prescient in this moment, then, when the practices of surveillance and listening-in online define some of the key parameters of participation—and intervention—in contemporary social media environments. As Peters explains, eavesdroppers occupy positions of “passive witnesses—accidental audiences” that “observe the events of the world” (Peters, 2002: 709). But their “having been present at an occurrence” comes with expectations that they will tell others about it. In doing so, they become witnesses who bear some of the responsibilities, and burdens, to act (Peters 2002: 710). For Peters, the actions of the accidental witness reveal the larger collective purpose, and difficulty, of communication: to “transform experience into discourse” and action (2002: 711). In our networked media environments, eavesdropping and onlooking are conditioned by imperfect and often invasive forms of peer surveillance that, for some social movements, could be re-oriented toward more caring ways to look out for each other. Movements target bystanders in their roles as both participants and observers in cultures of online harassment and violence, who can disrupt incidents of harm as a different kind of witness to them. While the internet is where so much harmful sexualized, gendered, and racist violent takes place, it is also a key milieu in which people learn how to counter-act it and around which several movements are organizing (see Jane, 2017; Mendes, Ringrose and Keller, 2019; Penny, 2014; Phillips and Milner, 2021).

This article extends Peters’ theses in his book Speaking into the Air on eavesdropping as a condition of networked communication systems, the indeterminacies of communicative reception, and the conditions of indiscriminancy between the personal and public in online communication to conceptualize the social change work people are doing in online conditions of intimate publicness. Intimate publicness constitutes both inter-subjective relations of care and pleasure as well as system-supported acts of humiliation and harm. Done in view of and in audible range of others on social media infrastructures, online intimacy is produced in connective conditions that can be caring but also cruel. Some people may care about you, who you are and your individuality online, but some may also betray and punish you and your presentation of self in front of others, creating rituals of humiliation that are meant to be audienced by others. Sometimes these acts are carried out by the same people. Sometimes they are also indifferent to who people are as individuals and how they identify themselves, and yet their power comes in how personal their effects are and can feel.

Peters’ focus in Speaking into the Air on the imperfections of communication and impossibility of perfect communion between interlocutors reoriented scholarly inquiry in communication around the finite, non-transcendent, contingent and even tragic realities of inter-subjective and collective life. I take up Peters’ invitation to rethink communication around the attempts people make to connect with others in conditions that are both profoundly indifferent and also sometimes incredibly personal. His text is, perhaps, a somewhat unexpected place to start re-examining what social change might look like from a scalable interactional framework in contemporary social movements. Peters may not consider social change or movement actors in his work, yet the contingencies of inter-subjectivity, the experiences of loss, love and grief, and the difficult attempts people make to act together point to some of the ways that social movement actors conceive of social change in emergent, non-determined, relational, and scalar ways, communication work that social movement actors are doing in the fungible and situational contexts in which social violence and the everyday enactments of oppression occur.

I connect Peters’ (1999) thesis on eavesdropping and the democracy of indifference in broadcast media to the conditions of harm and oppression that social movement actors identify in interactional contexts that bridge online and offline situations of harassment and violence. I examine what it might mean to “embrace the frail stuff we are made of” (Peters, 1999: 60) at the heart of how we conceive of justice as something that gets enacted in situational practices of communication. The position of the eavesdropper and the onlooker illustrates ways of thinking about what it means to feel, think, and act politically in the current moment around proximate relationships, attention economies, and small-scale interactions online. Thinking from the position of the eavesdropper as a potential social change agent situates witnesses as participants within relationships of power and oppression, as observers and actors. People who use social media, whether they consciously admit it or not, are participants in an attention economy whose currencies of exchange are affective as much as they are communicative. Online, people are situated in the dynamics of these economies in differential ways: as subjects of and to them, as producers and propagators of them, and even, in some cases, as co-strugglers against them (Mariame Kaba cited in Russo, 2019: 27-28). This is the context of social intervention on which this article will primarily focus. My interest lies in the ways social movement thinkers reconceive people’s co-implication in networked systems of oppression as bystanders, and how they model ways to listen to, watch, and interrupt “systemic power relations [that] are sustained and elaborated by the daily, routine behavior of individuals” (Orlie, 1997: 4).

Contemporary ideas about where and how social change happens are increasingly associated with what it means to be on social media and to comport oneself there. These conditions create certain limits for bystander intervention. As Jodi Dean (2010) argues, online activity gets captured in the circuits of attention and capital on social media platforms, where participants are “caught in intensive and extensive networks of enjoyment, production, and surveillance” that “exploit communication” (2010: 4-5). In these conditions, as Dean argues, making or sharing a post constitutes the act of making a social contribution, where a post is “the primary unit designating contribution” online and “contribution” may signal little more than “the fact of sending a message” (Dean, 2010: 49, 101). Dean challenges readers to reconsider the very idea that making a post on social media is the same thing as conducting a political act, as corporate social media platforms profit from the political energies and feelings users produce in the process of their repeated participation on these sites.

In turn, ideas of social change and what it means to participate in political dialogue online are intimately tied to the ways it feels to participate in online attention economies and to become a recipient of their affective currencies (see Nakamura, 2014). Materials like pledge campaigns, for instance, have become central to some bystander intervention training, particularly at universities, where the very idea of drawing online attention to a cause is central to the model of social change. Online pledges to ‘not be a bystander’ offer visual profile templates to users that easily fit into social media economies of status updates and online profile maintenance (Marwick, 2013; see figure 1). Profile templates easily replicate the self-branding work that users exchange in online economies of attention, propagating another memetic form that reproduces the ‘edited self’ while also making a kind of political claim—a promissory note to one’s future self (Marwick, 2013: 195). Campaigns like these function as forms of currency in social media attention economies, where participation is exchanged for being seen as a self-branding participant.

Figure 1: A screenshot of the 2014 U.S.-based “It’s On Us” bystander intervention pledge campaign against campus sexual assault. The program was started under President Barack Obama’s administration as part of a U.S. White House Task Force initiative to address campus sexual violence.

With these limits in mind, this article examines how attention is understood across a range of bystander intervention models. I examine public awareness campaigns created by individuals and organizations that model new justice practices regarding gender and racial violence, focusing on infographics and other visualizations of eavesdropper and onlooker interventions that are themselves posted and shared through online social networks. These spreadable media model some ways to intervene into communicative acts of oppression within many of the very circuits of capture Dean (2010) identified. Their formats materialize some of the increasingly “standardizable and transmissible components of feminist [and anti-racist] practice” that presume intervention is, at least in part, online and exchanged in attention economies (Murphy, 2012: 29).

I turn first to recent theories of social change that identify small scale interactional interventions as the foundation on which some bystander intervention draws. This scalar theory of change extends beyond bystander intervention initiatives to include non-violent social movement models of civil disobedience and transformative justice frameworks that, for instance, approach problems of intimate partner violence and child sexual abuse through community accountability practices that explicitly avoid police and criminal justice system involvement. Building habits of response to conditions of violence cuts across these bodies of social movement thought. Bystander intervention, for example, establishes scripts that can be routinized in responses to interactional elements of oppressive behavior that might also disrupt their easy replication. I then turn to an examination of how these models shape notions of bystander intervention in conditions of social media surveillance, and how these conditions span relationships in which people know and don’t know one other. I draw on the concept of relational responsibilities to push beyond the limited sensibilities of care for others that are articulated in some bystander intervention campaigns, particularly around online interventions, and suggest what these efforts might mean for theorizing social change in social media environments.

Theories of Small-Scale Change and Habit

Current theories of social change approach social transformation as something that can be scaled up from smaller, situated acts of response to larger collectivizing processes, what adrienne maree brown, drawing on Nick Obolensky’s (2014) work, calls “emergent strategy” that “build[s] complex patterns and systems of change through relatively small interactions” (2017: 2). Issues of dissemination and scale are central to brown’s theory. For brown, “the large is an expression of the small” (2017: 41). Through “relatively simple interactions”, people learn to practice complexity, openness and connection to one another in ways that can be grown and dispersed (2017: 20). Other movement theories take up “the politics of small things”, tuning people into the backstage, kitchen table, meeting room conversations and strategy sessions that sit at the heart of community-level organizing work (Goldfarb, 2007; Kintz, 1997; Eliasoph, 1998). Jeffrey Goldfarb identifies the “microstructures of social interaction” as the building blocks of recent movement organizing. The mobilization of small groups of highly engaged social change agents defines several current models of non-violent social movement.

The climate crisis organization Extinction Rebellion, for instance, models social transformation on the mobilization of a small core of very active participants that engage in civil disobedience, while others play essential support roles that their movement texts recognize as central to activism. Their organizing model imagines a scaling up effect created through the civil disobedience activities of this relatively small but highly committed group of participants (Hallam, 2019). Extinction Rebellion draws from Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan’s (2011) research into non-violent revolutionary movements, which found that movements that successfully overthrew dictatorial governments mobilized around the participation of relatively small numbers of highly engaged supporters—constituting about 3.5% of the population (see Engler and Engler, 2016: 107-111). Those highly engaged people were central to the popularization of their movements and their goals, transforming bystanders into supporters by intentionally shifting public opinion.

My analysis focuses on similar movement conceptualizations of the bystander as a potential supporter who can be mobilized to change their thinking, but more significantly, their habits, as part of some current movements for gender and racial justice. While so much social change is represented in overly spectacular forms, anti-violence activists approach social change as a matter of changing how people do things. They establish new routines and protocols for how to speak and behave in less violent, dominating, and oppressive ways. This is an activist project that targets what Carolyn Pedwell calls the “material processes of habituation” (2017a: 151), those embodied practices and routines that both sustain relations of power and can also transform them. This is the “paradox at the root of the concept of habit”:

On the one hand, “habit” conjures unthinking reflex, mindless repetition and hence stasis. Yet on the other hand, without the formation of enduring habits, no substantive embodied social or political change can take shape, and become rooted enough to sustain (Pedwell, 2017b: 101-102, emphasis in original).

By targeting the “imbrication of the revolutionary and the routine” (Pedwell, 2017b: 95), Pedwell seeks to explain how social change happens “through what specific material processes and mechanisms”, processes which she identifies with habituated, routine ways of doing things (2017b: 96).

Activists target habituated routines of discrimination and violence in order to replace them with new habits of non-violent communication and interaction. Bystander-based intervention frameworks, for instance, target how structures of power are habitually patterned in social interaction. They provide frameworks that show people how to do situational assessments of oppressive communication and behavior and learn to recognize patterns of sexualized, gendered and racialized violence; they also help onlookers script reports of and responses to them. Octavia Calder-Dawe (2015), for example, refers to the organized patterns through which sexism is routinely enacted in interaction as the “everyday choreographies of sexism”. These are patterns that repeat across multiple incidents of sexual harassment. Websites such as the UK project Everyday Sexism and the feminist blog project Strategic Misogyny led by students at Goldsmiths University “collect, publish and report sexist acts” of sexual harassment and gender violence as part of a feminist movement that makes the violence more visible as a structural problem and thereby more actionable (Whitley and Page, 2015: 36; see also Ahmed, 2017; Bates, 2015). Both projects catalogue online instances of sexual harassment, creating “a deposit system to show the scale of sexism”, a “structure to give evidence of structure” to the problem of institutionalized gender violence (Ahmed, 2017: 30).

As an agent of social change, the bystander is not often portrayed as someone who makes a report, but rather as a person who documents violence using an internet-connected mobile phone (see Rentschler, 2018). In social change efforts that center bystanders, eavesdropping is conceived as a distributed phenomenon: if anyone at any time can be a bystander, then (almost) everyone is situated to become a change agent by virtue of their participation listening-in to networked environments and the internet-connected devices that put them into relation with others. The conditions of networked connectivity, then, are fundamental to the politics of distributed agency on which bystander intervention models depend. Civil liberty organizations such as the California chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, for instance, portray the interventionist positionality of the bystander in their mobile app, “Mobile Justice”. Cartoonist Lalo Alcaraz’s 2015 image posted on the Mobile Justice CA app site depicts the app user recording police harassment of racialized individuals on their mobile phone. In the image, he holds his phone in the same position as the police officer, who raises and aims his gun at a Black civilian who stands with their back turned and arms raised (see Figure 2). The app is designed to automatically send recordings of police violence to the ACLU, collapsing the actions of recording and reporting police violence in acts of what Allissa Richardson (2020) calls “Black witnessing”. Here the ability to disseminate recordings is automated: to record is to have already decided to report and disseminate the evidence. The act of recording by the white male mobile-phone witness in the cartoon does the work of evidence-building and storytelling about police violence against racialized communities that constitutes some of the essential work of witnessing on behalf of Black communities. The act of witnessing modelled in the app includes not only the ‘digital video capture’ of the incident of police harassment but also its dissemination to a non-governmental organization and to social media networks (see George, George and Moquin, 2021). The app presents “bystander digital video” as an “emancipatory technology in restoring justice” against structural anti-Black racism in U.S. policing (George, George and Moquin, 2021: 6376).

Figure 2: Lalo Alcaraz’s cartoon representing the mobile phone-enabled witness recording police action against a racialized civilian. ©2021 by Lalo Alcaraz. Cartoon appears courtesy of Lalo Alcaraz and Andrews McMeel Syndication.

Other bystander intervention models present the witness as someone who is known to target/victim and other witnesses, whether as friends or other intimates, or as the familiar strangers of networked relationships of programmed sociality online (see Bucher, 2019; Humphreys, 2018). Black feminist author Mikki Kendall’s comic book Paths, for instance, is aimed at male-identified teenagers and their peer relationships. It models how to interrupt the non-consensual sharing of young women’s nude images online, a growing problem of image-based sexual abuse and technology-facilitated sexual violence (Henry and Powell, 2015; Henry, Flynn and Powell, 2018; Maddocks, 2018). Sam and Taylor, two young male friends, are shown commenting on a text chat in which another young man, “Reese”, has shared a nude image of a young woman in their school. Paths depicts the kind of conversation in which such an intervention might happen, in text bubbles and drawings of their exchange. Sam feels that Reese is “getting away with something” harmful: none of the other people participating in the chat say that the non-consensual distribution of the image is wrong, and no one holds Reese or any of the bystanders accountable for their actions.

Sam is situated as an intervener, but he does not initially see himself as one. The process-orientation of the comic portrays peer intervention as a form of infolding interaction, locating points of social change in situations where peers can explain the harms of another’s actions, suggesting ways to become accountable for those harms while working through the feelings of that accountability work. In the conversation that Sam and Taylor have, Sam’s comments imply that someone else should be responsible for putting a stop to the non-consensual sharing of the photos. Over the course of the narrative, we see Sam take more responsibility as a bystander, including talking to Taylor and challenging his blaming of the young woman for having taken the nude image in the first place, a common defense in image abuse cases like the one represented here (see e.g. Hasinoff, 2017). Sam explains how the theft and non-consensual distribution of his classmate’s image is a violation of the girl’s privacy, who, in posting them, did not expect “them to wind up on the internet”. Taylor gets defensive and chastises both Sam and the young woman for not seeing the whole situation as a joke, as “not that bad”, a statement that diminishes the seriousness of gender violence (see Gay, 2018). The young woman, meanwhile, has taken an overdose of pills in response to her violation, echoing recent cases like that of teenager Amanda Todd in British Columbia, who committed suicide in 2012 after being repeatedly harassed online after she shared a partially nude photo of herself with an older man online (who had also used a false identity like Reese in Paths; see Figure 3).

Paths models bystander intervention as something friends and peers do for each other when they degrade, harm and/or violate others through their words and actions. It presents a chain of interactional moments between friends through a visual format where “subtext, performative encounters, and conflicted feelings can be represented graphically” as part of social change efforts (Feigenbaum and Almalholdaei, 2020: 161). We see the conversational strategies that Sam uses, and we witness the conflicted feelings he and Taylor have over the course of their talk. Paths also narrates how interventions scale up from the interpersonal spaces of interaction between friends, peers, and in families, to the institutional scales of school authorities, the police and the hospital.

Figure 3: A screenshot from Mikki Kendall’s comic book Paths. The image appears here with the permission of Mikki Kendall.

Paths presents bystander intervention as actions that peers communicate in the context of their online participation. It is based on the idea that young people (as well as middle aged professors) relate to one another in conditions of peer surveillance: they follow each other’s social media feeds and regularly communicate through mobile texts and messaging apps. On social media, they are situated as networked ‘witnesses’ to each other’s lives, and the stories they tell of those lives. They monitor other people’s posts, enacting forms of peer surveillance that “watch over what peers upload”, redistribute and say online (Trottier, 2012: 319). Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are designed to enable users to easily gossip about, ‘creep’, and stalk others, to conduct the ‘social surveillance’ that occurs between people on social media: “the ongoing eavesdropping, investigation, gossip and inquiry that constitutes information gathering by people about their peers, made salient by the social digitization normalized by social media” (Marwick, 2012: 382). While this surveillance is increasingly understood by users as mutual and normal on social media, it also demonstrably affects how people behave. It also affects how people present themselves and relate to others in ways that might be caring or harmful (see Trottier, 2012; Marwick, 2012; Andrejevic, 2005). As demonstrated in Paths, people oppress and dominate others online through conditions of social surveillance, by harassing them, saying hateful things, and violating the privacy expectations posters have. Other participants in these networks of social surveillance can interrupt these acts.

Bystander intervention materials and infographics are designed to be shared online and distributed across the same networks where the conditions of social surveillance facilitate harm. They communicate how online witnesses can ready themselves to assess verbal micro-aggressions and respond to racist and sexist jokes and harassing and non-consensual behaviors online. The social media bystander is impelled to pay attention to and read situations for their potential harms and learn to recognize behaviors and actions that can cause harm, including ones they participate in and/or may be subject to themselves. An infographic created in February 2016 by designer and communication strategist Ashley Fairbanks, an Anishinaabe woman and activist from the White Earth Nation, offers a scalar analytic of “how harassment and problematic language lay the foundation for sexual violence and murder”. Her Facebook post was broadly circulated on social media and was used by social movement groups such as Heart Mob (a group that addresses online gender and racial harassment), feminist rape crisis centers and sexual consent campaigns.

The infographic provides an example of how a listener could respond to a sexist joke as part of a larger framework of anti-violence prevention. As Fairbanks explained on Facebook, she made “this tool to explain to one friend why I can’t laugh at rape jokes” (Fairbanks’ post, March 16, 2017). Using a pyramid structure, the image visually represents a scalar understanding of how harassing verbal statements or jokes not only connect to conditions of deadly assault but serve as some of the cultural foundations that reproduce gender violence at the institutional level (see Figure 4). By modeling verbal responses to a rape joke, the image also illustrates how bystanders can react to statements that downplay the harmful effects of misogynist jokes, by directly stating how oppressive humor contributes to a culture of violence. At the same time, the appearance of the interlocutors’ relaxed and smiling faces in this context might seem to contradict the difficult (and uncomfortable) experience of planning for and having to respond to this communication. Perhaps the infographic is meant to depict these conversations as less difficult than one might expect them to be, to communicate that response is do-able. In this way, the infographic offers a proxy representation of what it means to facilitate social change through inter-personal communication, that practice of making difficult work and conversations easier for people to do together (brown, 2017: 30). In such conditions, people can “share analysis, engaging and facilitating deep small transformations that pick up and echo each other toward a tipping point” of behaving and relating in less oppressive ways (brown, 2017: 55, emphasis added).

Fairbanks’ infographic models how to respond to the verbal manifestation of sexist and misogynist speech, and in doing so, take accountability as someone who hears it by interrupting and naming it (Russo, 2019: 25, 29). While the infographic models individual response, other strategies might be required to visualize what more collective iterations of response look like, to scale up from the interpersonal to the collective and institutional. Most of the infographics I identify in my research on bystander intervention model interpersonal rather than collective responses to oppression, where the interpersonal scale of response might stand in for the collective. Models like this show how people can enact new habits of intervention in the form of scripted responses. But they often do not, and perhaps cannot, as easily show the work that people do and the processes people use to scale up these habits from the person-to-person contexts of interaction to larger shared and organized response (see Russo, 2019: 136-138).

Figure 4: Screenshot from Heart Mob Facebook page, 2019. Designer Ashley Fairbanks posted the image on her own Facebook page in February 2016 with the message “Feel free to share and use it where you need it.” The message was reposted on Facebook on March 16, 2017 here: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1010205‌983411‌9702‌&set=pb.199104866.-2207520000..&type=3

A Politics of Care Between Strangers

Other models articulate intervention in more collectivized terms around a politics of care, like the care webs that Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (2017) and others envision around disability justice activism. Recently published feminist manifestos and disability justice mutual aid manuals, for instance, articulate a politics of care based in looking out for one another, including strangers and those with whom one does not have close emotional connections (see Butler, 2015; Spade, 2021; The Care Collective, 2020; Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2017; Samaran, 2019). The feminist Care Collective frames care as a politics of interdependency that requires building “the social capacity and activity involving the nurturance of all that is necessary for the welfare and flourishing of life. […] To put care center stage means recognizing our interdependencies” (The Care Collective, 2020: 5, emphasis in original). Models like this one are based in relational responsibilities between strangers. Care here does not only or even necessarily mean one has strong feelings of care for others—though one might—but instead signals ways of relating to one another through the expression and work of care. Care constitutes forms of practice. It can be all-encompassing, which often leads to burn-out when adequate supports for carers are not in place, but it can also be limited, task-based and bounded by one’s own needs and abilities, as disability justice advocates themselves articulate. As John Durham Peters explains, “to treat others as we would want to be treated means performing for them in such a way not that the self is authentically represented but that the other is caringly served” (Peters, 1999: 268). In this way, caring for others is not about “getting our communication right”, as the scripted bystander responses to oppression presented in the infographics above might initially suggest; it is about working to alleviate the conditions of precarity and oppression in which others are harmed in the relationships of interdependency in which we are already implicated, using practices of communication that are often imperfect, contingent, incomplete and sometimes just plain messy. It also, as Peters suggests, does not require that we necessarily know each other intimately, and this is, in part, the difficulty of modeling social change on practices of care.

I myself have grappled with the significance of making small, relational changes between people when the needs for broad system-level transformations are so urgent. Social movement thinkers increasingly focus on social change as a dynamic and emerging process of social relationality, such as brown’s emergent strategy. To scale up this strategy requires intentional practices of “adaptive, relational ways of being, on our own and with others” (brown, 2017: 2). Recognizing patterns and creating new ones is central to the social change process brown identifies. Without using the language of habit per se, brown proposes that social change emerges from new patterns of practice geared toward “critical connections over critical mass” (2017: 9), a term she draws from Grace Lee Boggs. A model of social change located in building new habits recognizes both the durability of embodied routines of power and the possibility that they can be turned and re-oriented toward more enduring patterns of justice (Ahmed, 2007). A politics of care gets embodied in habituated routines of how we relate to one another.

To get there, brown presents facilitation as the guided set of processes through which people learn to cultivate less harmful and more caring relationships and build new patterns of relating that could, ideally, be scaled up. What happens at, and because of, the small scale of interaction models ways of in-habiting different patterns of non-violent social relationality (see Butler, 2020). These changes are not easily represented through spectacular visuals or dramatic and sudden registers of revolution and action. They are embodied, routine, and everyday; they materialize in repeated and nearly automatic interactions (see also Scarry, 2011). To think of social transformation as tied to new habit formation recognizes the “immanent and ongoing” nature of change. It focuses, as Carolyn Pedwell describes it, on how the shock of revolutionary thought and action transforms into “the longer-term cultivation of new habits, rhythms and forms of embodied coordination” (Pedwell, 2017b: 107, 114). This view of what Pedwell calls “social change in a minor key” approaches the disruption and transformation of habit as the generative site and material of social change (Pedwell, 2021). These “minor ontologies of change” scale up through the interplay of habituated embodied acts, transformations in the environments that shape them, and the materials and infrastructures that condition and support them (Pedwell, 2021: 15-21).

As these approaches suggest, social change requires shifts in relational dynamics between people, non-human animals, and their environments. For brown, social change aimed at creating less harmful societies and redressing existing harms happens when people create less harmful patterns of interaction. She urges individuals to “see our own lives and work and relationships as a front line, a first place we can practice justice, liberation, and alignment with each other and the planet” (brown, 2017: 53). People can cultivate relationality through embodied daily practices. Social change takes shape through facilitative processes that build relationships and communities, reimagining how one works with others in proximate relations. brown describes facilitation as “the art of making things easier”—to “make it easier for humans to work together and get things done” (2017: 30). Things become easier as they become habitual. This work takes time and trust, conditions which must themselves be cultivated. Guided facilitation helps people learn to intentionally pay attention to how they relate to one another, the harms they might witness, experience and participate in, and the patterns of social relationality that reproduce those conditions of harm. What people intentionally pay attention to nurtures movement building and the conditions for social transformation.

brown’s model focuses on small-scale interactions and practices that nurture what another movement thinker and transformative justice practitioner, Nora Samaran (2019), calls the “relational responsibilities” we have to others. We have these responsibilities “regardless of our emotional closeness” to one another (Samaran, 2019: 7).

When we begin with this awareness of our already-existing interconnectedness, we can look at harm in an entirely inverted way, in which we are connected from the start. Harm, whether in the form of violation or neglect, is then understood as a harm to the integrity of those bonds, or as a failure to meet relational responsibilities, not only as a violation of a presumed disconnectedness (Samaran, 2019: 8).

Violence, she suggests, “is nurturance turned backward”, harming people’s relationships of interdependency with each other (2019: 18). As Samaran and others note, part of the difficulty in recognizing and coming to terms with interdependency is the unchosen nature of those structures of relating. Judith Butler argues that our interdependencies are “reducible neither to consent nor to agreement”, and extend beyond our own familiar community bonds (Butler, 2015: 105). They “impos[e] themselves upon us against our will” (Butler, 2015: 109). As Butler asserts: “I am already bound to you, and this is what it means to be the self I am, receptive to you in ways that I cannot fully predict or control” (2015: 110). We are always already in relation, and we do not choose our interdependencies with others. We, in turn, “do not have to know each other or deliberate in advance” in order to act on another’s behalf (Butler, 2015: 186).

Paris illustrator and filmmaker who goes by the handle @itsMaeril on Tumblr posted an infographic of bystander intervention into Islamophobic misogynist harassment that models bystander intervention as a caring form of low-level monitorial (and unchosen) action by and between strangers. The comic panel demonstrates how someone can respond to a stranger committing an Islamophobic verbal assault against a young woman who wears a hijab. The comic is one of a series of comics Maeril created, 10 histoires ordinaires (10 everyday stories), that model how individuals experience the dynamic intersection of multiple systems of oppression in the situational contexts of interpersonal and group interaction. The comics explore a range of situations that include how a Sephardic Jewish man experiences anti-semitism and Islamophobia in the workplace and how a young Chinese woman experiences anti-Asian racism, exoticism and non-consensual touching in her interactions at school. Posted to Tumblr, these images are re-blogged and shared across online networks; in my own social media feeds, I witnessed how people circulated and commented on the infographic as a feminist model of anti-racist intervention.

The one-page comic-format infographic focuses on how bystanders can enact care for the target of the harassment, modelling a conversation the bystander starts with the young woman and, in turn, ignoring the harasser and taking the attention off of him and his attack. It uses the feminist concept of safe space in order to describe the conditions the intervener cultivates by talking with the young woman (see Figure 5). At the same time, the incident in the infographic does not represent conditions in which harassing behavior can escalate, or the ways in which multiple harassers can transform the contexts of harassment and intervention into something more threatening and dangerous. In some recent cases, bystander intervention put both the targets of harassment and interveners in danger when they faced weapon-wielding assailants. In 2017, the year after this infographic was published, three male bystanders in Portland, Oregon intervened when a locally known white supremacist was making threats and yelling anti-Islamic slurs at two young Muslim women while they were riding the city’s light rail system. Two of those bystanders were stabbed and killed by the assailant when they were coming to the women’s aid, while the third bystander survived the stabbing (see Wamsley, 2017). I mention this not to critique the model of intervention that Maeril’s comic represents, but to instead recognize that conditions of racialized, misogynist, Islamophobic, transphobic and homophobic harassment can turn into physical violence that might require other forms of collective response and assistance to disrupt and de-escalate the situation.

Figure 5: A 2016 Infographic on bystander intervention into Islamophobic harassment modeled through the communication of care for the target of harassment. The image appears here with the permission of Maeril.

Maeril’s infographic represents the intervener as a kind of first responder: someone (or anyone) whose position of proximity to an emerging situation or event enables her to witness it, assess the danger and risks, and offer assistance, where it is possible and safe to do so. In the infographic, ‘watching over’ is meant to enact care for unknown others, but in conditions that can sometimes escalate into forms of physical violence. This comic helps to visualize practices of intervention that are otherwise not that easy to see and may not meet expectations for what social change is supposed to look like. It also begins to illustrate the forms of care that can be enacted through relatively easy communicative interventions and what it feels like to be the target of harassment and a witness to this violence. In a single-page illustration, it manifests witnesses’ “capacity to maintain solidarity within a tangled space of antagonism, inconvenience, and non-recognition” (Berlant quoted in Zarranz et. al., 2017: 15): on a subway car, in the midst of strangers, and in close proximity to a large angry man harassing another person. Such an act of ‘standby citizenship’ models the actions of someone who is already in a state of awareness of what is happening around her and who takes responsibility for intervening through her capacity to act (Amna and Ekman, 2014: 2).  She communicates care and support that disrupt acts of harmful speech and threatening behavior.

Conclusion

These practices increasingly constitute contemporary visions of social change. The examples of interventionist eavesdropping and onlooking examined here represent an emerging set of standards of movement practice that see bystanders as interveners and social change agents. These standards and their models of intervention reveal ways of thinking about social change at the small scale, around interactional tactics and the creation of new habits tied to care for others that are meant to be scaled up through repetition. They call for behind-the-scenes facilitative processes that can cultivate and train people in how to take response-ability as witnesses to oppression (see Rentschler, 2014; Oliver, 2001). They offer ways of thinking about the prevention of online and in-person harassment as a practice of networked ‘community witness’—of using social surveillance, online, in the street and on public transit—as a tool for anti-violence work that can be transformed from the interpersonal to more collective forms of response. This evolving model of social change builds a system of protocols that aim to transform how people see, hear and interpret the hostilities around them as witnesses to it.

As forms of small and specific strategy, bystander intervention may actually reveal a larger set of transformations transpiring across current conditions of social change that inform communication studies and media theory. As John Durham Peters reminds media and communication scholars: “Civil disobedience, nonviolent resistance, and exaggerated civility are all underexplored resources in the theory and practice of democratic communication” (Peters, 2005: 247). Contemporary activists see online communication and dissemination as ways of enacting care for people they become connected to online, via shared experience and concern. The close ties of social media engagement and social surveillance are also, in many cases, presumed and expected. And as Nora Samaran suggests, “in a healthy community, most human interaction takes place in this relational area in between closeness and complete stranger” (2019: 127).

These models necessarily start at the small scales of interaction and inter-relation. Alix Johnson, a transformative justice practitioner from the Bay Area in California, describes the necessity of starting small:

While I deeply believe in collective action and collection transformation, the place I start transformative justice intervention is small-scale. I think, “Who are two people who are going to show up for you? Who are two more people you can talk to about this?” I think about building from the ground up, rather than assuming support is already there, because building trust one by one is where a lot of communities are starting from (quoted in Samaran, 2019: 126-127).

The politics of care articulated here does not require us to love, or even like, people with whom we exist in interdependent relations and with whom we have relational responsibilities. We might recognize, as Samaran suggests, “I may not be your best friend, but I can show up in a few specific ways” (2019: 130).

All “communication is a risky adventure without guarantees”, Peters reminds us (1999: 267).  If “any kind of effort to make linkage via signs is a gamble” (Peters, 1999: 267), then what we have are the imperfect yet necessary attempts to alleviate harm and become more accountable in our relationships with those we know, and those we do not know. We are already witnesses to numerous harms committed against others: “as bystanders to genocide, to litter, to daily chatter, and to everything that happens within the range of our presence” (Peters, 2005: 244). So much bystander-ism, as Alix Johnson suggest, comes from telling ourselves:

“I’m not intimate with that person, they wouldn’t listen to me; I’m not a coparent, or an intimate partner, or a best friend, so I don’t have stakes or a say in this”. When in fact we can often build trust and closeness and community by choosing to actively support survivors, and actively interrupt violence and harm (quoted in Samaran, 2019: 130, emphasis in original).

Current social movement models recognize our situatedness in conditions of social surveillance, and they encourage us to attend to these unchosen relationships with a commitment to not only do no harm, but to extend care to those we do not necessarily know.

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Carrie Rentschler is an Associate Professor in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies and an Associate Member of the Institute for Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies at McGill University. Her research examines feminist movements, social media and mobile networking technologies, and the politics of response, care, and witnessing around gender violence. She is the author of Second Wounds: Victims’ Rights and the Media (Duke UP, 2011) and co-editor of Girlhood and the Politics of Place (Berghahn Books, 2016). She is currently writing two histories: one on bystander culture and movements for social change, and another on student media activism against gender violence. She has also started new research on how Type 1 diabetics embody relationships with medical technologies as quantified selves.

Email: carrie.rentschler@mcgill.ca

Mutually Assured Heteronomy: On the Ethics and Politics of Dialogue and Dissemination

AMIT PINCHEVSKI

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, ISRAEL

Abstract

Setting dialogue in opposition to dissemination is one of the main themes of Speaking into the Air. This however does not entail regarding them as dichotomous or mutually exclusive. This article proposes that dialogue and dissemination are in fact interconnected, forming what I call “mutually assured heteronomy”: each finds its justification and limitation in the other. Neither autonomous nor combining to create a greater whole, dialogue and dissemination are caught in an interruptive bond. This reading allows reconsidering the ways ethics and politics are conceptualized in Speaking, revealing them as similarly linked in a non-dialectical, mutually implicating bond. 

Keywords

dialogue, dissemination, ethics, politics, Levinas, Arendt

Version of record: http://journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt/article/view/155 

Twenty odd years ago, I was contemplating writing a dissertation about the ethics of communication as inspired by the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. I was looking for a way to go about it that would be different from the properly philosophical work that had been previously done mainly in phenomenology and rhetoric. One strategy involved going to the McGill library and pulling out books from select shelves, pretty much randomly, seeking inspiration, or at least an ally in making the Levinas case for communication. I remember the day I pulled out a black hardback by an author I had not known about back then. While browsing, I found this line: “Today the most influential thinkers about communication are probably Jürgen Habermas and Emmanuel Levinas” (Peters, 1999: 20). I had to read it twice. No one had put it so boldly before. Placing Levinas side by side with Habermas not only signaled an unmistaken priority to ethics, but introduced a competition to mainstream thinking about communication ethics. Years later, I told the author, who has since become a dear friend, that this line is more of a wishful thinking than an accurate account of your typical Intro to Comm. syllabus. While Habermas is a household name in communication studies, Levinas was and still is somewhat esoteric. So, for me, as a doctoral candidate just starting to putting together ideas for a dissertation, this was a resounding affirmation: I found shoulders to stand on. And in the book as a whole, I found much more: an entirely new way of thinking and writing—indeed of going about this whole business of academic research. Rather than philosophize about communication, it did something far more ingenious: it communicationalized philosophy. There is much more to say about the intellectual pathways it has opened for many of us, but for now let me just say that my debt to this book and its author cannot be conveyed dialogically; it takes a long, extended, and still ongoing dissemination.

In the following, I would like to offer a few thoughts on the ethics and politics of communication as arising from Speaking into the Air. Ethics and politics: this conjunction appears front and center on the first page of the book, and continues to accompany the discussion throughout. By the end, the point is put most plainly: “The question should not be Can we communicate with each other? but Can we love one another or treat each other with justice and mercy?” Therefore communication “is more basically a political and ethical problem than a semantic or psychological one,” and so we ought “to be less worried about how signs arouse divergent meanings than the conditions that keep us from attending to our neighbors and other beings different from us” (Peters, 1999: 268-9). The argument repeats a number of times not only in content but also in form: a negative claim stating what communication is not, or should not be about (technical problem, message transfer, understanding), and a positive claim, which as above, takes a conjunctional structure: justice and mercy, politics and ethics, neighbors and other beings. The conjunction is not simply stylistic but reflects a tension at the core of the positive argument concerning communication. That tension, as I propose in the following, corresponds with the basic division accompanying the book: that of dialogue and dissemination. Yet unlike earlier readings that deem dialogue and dissemination as mutually exclusive, I suggest that the two are inseparable and, moreover, that their relation is indicative of the relation between ethics and politics as arising from Speaking into the Air. Dialogue and dissemination, like ethics and politics, form what I call here “mutually assured heteronomy”: each finds its justification in the other, which makes them interdependent. This reading invites new insights into the continuing import of Speaking.

In her book, Medium, Message, Transmission, Sybille Krämer calls Peters “the Levinas of communication theory” (Krämer, 2015: 68). I concur, even if Peters would probably disagree. This is not so much because of his direct employment of Levinas’s thought, but more because of affirming the idea of communication as an experience with otherness. In doing so, Speaking grants legitimacy to incompletion, failure, and even refusal of communication, which I think is one of its greatest achievements. Difference and distance are therefore inherent to communication; indeed, are its conditions of possibility. Thus “the gaps of which communication is made” do not bode the end of communication, rather its beginning. The concept of dissemination, which Jacques Derrida introduced in the early 1970s, is extended here toward pragmatism while still retaining much of its critical bite. It is through dissemination that the fundamental openness of communication is sustained, and that openness is key to conceiving the relation with the other precisely as a disseminative relation, which, in line with Derrida and Levinas, is asymmetric, nonreciprocal and nonequal. It is the other, rather than the self, that has privilege; it is the other, not the self, that “should be at the center of whatever ‘communication’ might mean” (Peters, 1999: 265).

Importantly, this is neither a factual description nor an ontological account of communication; it is not about what communication “is.” Rather, it is about the way communication ought to be. It is from the start an ethical evaluation. It bears wondering whether the distinction between “is” and “ought” is at all tenable when it comes to communication. For if we think of communication in terms of message transfer or exerting influence, this view already determines the privilege of the self and the source while relegating the other and the receiver to a subservient role. Alternatively, if we think of communication as transpiring with the aim of reaching an understanding or cooperation, whereby communicators are to achieve something together, this view already deems communicators as equal and equally predisposed to pursuing a collective goal. If instead we consider communication in terms of constitutive gaps, openness and dissemination, a very different view emerges whereby the other and the receiver are privileged. Here incompletion and divergence are welcomed rather than reckoned as problems to be overcome. To describe communication is already to take a stand as to how it should take place. Statements of “communication is” are preconfigured by notions of “communication ought,” even if implicitly. The ethics of communication is intrinsic to however we imagine it to be. The ontology of communication is already an ethics.

Adopting a disseminative view of communication also reveals it as a necessarily mediated relation. This is because for communication to transpire, the difference and distance that give rise to it call for mediation. If communication takes place because of, rather than despite, the gap between self and other, between here and there, there must be a medium mediating across the divides. Mediation sustains the paradox of communication: connecting differences while maintaining separateness—connecting because maintaining separateness. From this follows the rejection of any preexisting or innate communicability from which manifest communication proceeds. Likewise, the rejection of any antecedent commonality by virtue of which communication comes to pass. This is because assuming such fundamental communicability inevitably violates difference and otherness, and hence ultimately exerts violence. As Giorgio Agamben puts it in a more political vein: “What hampers communication is communicability itself; humans are being separated by what unites them” (Agamben, 1993: 81). The message of Speaking can be put as the reverse: what enables communication is incommunicability itself; humans are being united by what separates them.

Setting dissemination in opposition to dialogue is of course one of the main themes of the book. Yet this does not entail regarding dissemination and dialogue as dichotomous or mutually exclusive. While some parts in the book permit such an interpretation, I think it was mostly later commentaries that turned a distinction into a dichotomy. I see them more as two modalities of communication, rather than two ontologies, especially when it comes to questions of ethics and politics. I would further suggest that the difference between dialogue and dissemination does not ultimately amount to material or structural conditions. It would require another discussion to explore the historicity of the dialogue-dissemination distinction, which in Speaking begins with a trans-historical staging of Socrates vs. Jesus, and as the book progresses takes on different instantiations and manifestations. By the time we get to the fifth chapter on animals, machines and aliens, the stakes are at their highest as the tension between empathy and incommunicability is pushed to the extreme. When dialogue is impossible, dissemination remains the only option. Yet it is instructive that at this point embodiment enters the scene and reasserts itself as basis for empathy, despite (or arguably because of) incommunicability. As said, this calls for a separate discussion, one that I attempt to develop elsewhere (Pinchevski, 2011).

Insofar as dialogue and dissemination are concerned, I suggest that what separates them are two distinct logics of relation to the other, two approaches to alterity. In dialogue, the other’s otherness is transcended so as to impart knowledge, share experience, establish a common ground, or reach an understanding. Dialogue reaches to the other in order to achieve something with or through the other. In dissemination, the approach to the other draws on and maintains the distance to and separation from the other. What will be the outcome of communication is not the prime concern in dissemination; it may take place for its own sake without assurance of reception and without necessarily serving greater goals. Seen in this way, dissemination may well happen face-to-face: “dialogue may simply be two people taking turns broadcasting at each other” (Peters, 1999: 264). The opposite may also be true, namely, that broadcasting may attempt a dialogue across distance. Think of the simulation of a conversational mode of address in broadcasting, or of the various forms of telecommunication that are set to close the circuit and confirm receipt. Dialogue may then take on a disseminative form while dissemination may take a dialogic form. Which means that the line separating communication that is hospitable to otherness from communication that is not, does not run between dialogue and dissemination but within each of them. Hence, we can discern between a disseminative and non-disseminative dialogue and between a dialogic and non-dialogic dissemination. The two disseminative modes—namely, disseminative dialogue and non-dialogic dissemination—are other-oriented.

What stood out to me upon a recent rereading of Speaking is the unapologetic embrace of impersonality in communication. This might seem a minor point but I think it holds much. Typically, we associate impersonality with indifference, formality and matter-of-factness. But Speaking openly endorses impersonality, discovering it to be virtuous for moral reasons, and this is owing to the thirdness it introduces into interaction. We read that impersonality protects against the madness of love; provides a model for just treatment of others; it is egalitarian and universal; and reminds us of the fundamental otherness at the base of our contact with others. The one-way flow of dissemination goes hand-in-hand with the equal treatment of impersonality. Impersonality, as performed through the general access system of dissemination, provides a release from the sometimes-harsh demands of particularity and uniqueness. It can expose the indecencies that might hide under the cloak of free and open one-on-one talk.

What better exemplifies this than the figure of Bartleby, Herman Melville’s unresponsive scrivener. Bartleby is the impersonality in communication personified: the antihero of dissemination, as we read in chapter 4. Like writing, he gives no answer, rejects dialogue, is not particular, and most of all, resists interaction. His stance is of “pure dissemination”; he becomes a dead letter (Peters, 1999: 158). The narrator, Bartleby’s employer, appears as an overbearing fatherly figure whose consistent attempts to reach and decipher the scrivener discloses the cold righteousness of dialogism. And yet, I believe this story captures another lesson about dialogue and dissemination. For if Bartleby represents impersonality and non-particularity, the narrator clearly represents the personal and the particular. After all, the story begins with the lawyer stating: “I waive the biographies of all other scriveners for a few passages in the life of Bartleby, who was a scrivener of the strangest I ever saw or heard of” (Melville, 2012: 3). Say what you will of the lawyer, he clearly cares about Bartleby, even as his state of mind vacillates from pity to murder ruminations. The narrator, for better or worse, operates from the realm of dialogue and interpersonality. Indeed, the clash between the interpersonal and the impersonal is what drives the plot, which is ultimately about the discontents of dealing with otherness pointblank. As such, it could never be told from the standpoint of impersonality. Bartleby, unmoved as he is, would make a lousy narrator; there would no ethical dilemmas, no rage, guilt or remorse—no story, really.

Put differently, if there is a moral drama in this story, it is fed by the demands of the interpersonal. For it is in the interpersonal that our basic ethical orientations form. There is nothing in impersonality to instruct us one way or the other; it is by definition indifferent. If we can judge the outcomes of impersonality for good or ill, or even find it virtuous, it is only by measuring it against virtues cultivated in the interpersonal. From whence we acquire our dos and don’ts, which then serve as a yardstick, albeit a constantly revisable and scalable one, for our dealings with the rest of the world. Equality and fairness would be morally void without the animating power of fundamental values such as respect, love, openness, and responsibility—all bred and nurtured within the primary group. That impersonality might be “a protective wall for the private heart” (Peters, 1999: 59) is therefore dependent on a “good” that is cultivated in the face-to-face. Yet, the same goes in the opposite direction: namely, the introduction of thirdness into the moral scene. What dissemination teaches us, is that for the face-to-face to be truly ethical, it cannot be closed unto itself and be content within its intimacy. It cannot remain exclusive of the outside. For the private to be ethical it must invoke the public—and for the public to be ethical it must invoke the private.

Let me develop this point further. The ethical and political message of dissemination has to do with accepting and embracing the gaps that are inherent to communication. This is also the reason that brought Derrida to favor writing, as it has its own time and space, “escaping better than speech from empirical urgencies.” And so, the writer, according to Derrida, is the one who “absents himself better, that is, expresses himself better as other, addresses himself to the other more effectively than the man of speech” (Derrida, 1978: 102). The same holds for dissemination. But what is the measure by which the disseminative approach is deemed “better” and from where does it draw its justification? It does not come from the act itself, from writing or disseminating or broadcasting, but from the values attached to it, values that acquire their significance elsewhere—in the realm of the face-to-face. The face-to-face is the bedrock of ethics. Therefore, impersonality can be ethical only as long as it maintains its tie to values of the interpersonal. As we know, this is not always the case. Impersonality can be the basis of many evils, as modern history starkly demonstrates. Today, perhaps more than when Speaking was first published, we encounter the darker side of dissemination. Some of the greatest disseminators of our time sit in Palo Alto, Mountain View, and until recently in Washington D.C., and their idea of dissemination is clearly very different. And what is our current algorithmic culture if not personalized impersonality? Impersonality does not necessarily make dissemination ethically favorable; but it can be so if it operates without losing touch with the ethical precepts forged in the interpersonal.

To be clear, there is nothing in dialogue to make it necessarily ethical either, even if occurring face-to-face. Proximity does not safeguard against harm; in fact, closeness and familiarity might easily translate into disrespect and even abuse. As Levinas taught, the face of the Other is a powerless force: it cannot prevent the aggression that it calls against. Co-presence can be coercive, and dialogue self-righteous. We can therefore conclude that facelessness may be ethical and faceness may be unethical. What makes them ethical is the extent to which they avail themselves to otherness, the extent to which they are other-oriented, respectful of the other. In the case of dissemination, it is the introduction of grace into distance, and in the case of dialogue, it is the introduction of distance into grace. To put it in Charles Sanders Peirce’s terms, what makes thirdness ethical is secondness, and what makes secondness ethical is thirdness (cf. Peirce, 1992: 270–271). Love suffers without justice, and justice suffers without love.

The entangled relation between the particular and the general, the second and the third, also figures in Levinas’s philosophy. As a formative relation of the self—indeed formative of the self—the responsibility toward the Other is unidirectional and unlimited. It reaches out without qualification and without seeking reciprocation. But the social is never one-on-one. It is multiple from the start. Once there is an Other, the is another Other, who is also the Other’s Other. In the face of the Other, there is already the call of all others, who demand equal concern. “The other is from the first the brother of all the other men,” writes Levinas, “The neighbor that obsesses me is already a face, both comparable and incomparable, a unique face and in relationship with faces, which are visible in the concern for justice” (Levinas, 1998: 158). The incomparable and incalculable relation to the face must then undergo comparison and calculation. The indivisible must be divided, responsibility must transform into justice. But this does not mean that justice operates irrespective of the face and responsibility—to the contrary: justice can be just only insofar as it makes itself exposed to the call of the particular face. The third and justice are already announced in the relation to the face, and the appeal of the face always implicates social justice. Second and third, responsibility and justice, are simultaneously incompatible and inextricable—and this entangled relation is what lies at the base of ethics that is at once particular and universal.

I suggest that the same entanglement holds for dialogue and dissemination. While constituting two distinct modes of communication, dialogue and dissemination are in fact necessarily linked and inter-implicating. Recall that we begin Speaking with a strong argument in favor of distance and end up with the irreducibility of touch. This journey from the general to the particular, from impersonality to personality, and from space to the face, might seem as ultimately expressing ambivalence regarding the question of dialogue vis-à-vis dissemination. Another reading might be dialectical where thesis and antithesis complement and transcend each other. I believe that neither is the case. If anything, the two modalities produce something like negative dialectics, a kind of elective nonaffinity, for when rubbed one against the other they each reveal their respective limitations. Precisely for this reason they are inseparable. Each needs the other to lay bare its own deficiencies while pointing to the other for a corrective. To use a notion that I’ve been trafficking for a while, they interrupt each other, which means they are deeply interconnected yet at the same time incommensurable (Pinchevski, 2005). Such is an ethical interruption—an ethics of interruption.

Dialogue and dissemination should then be regarded not as two autonomous modalities but as an intertwined couple. Their entanglement is of a mutually assured heteronomy: each has its normative compass pointing to the other; each is lacking in justification without recourse to the other. The reciprocal interruption of dialogue and dissemination bears out their interdependency. This has important implications to the understanding of communication. First, it affirms the impossibility of complete grasp by means of communication; that is, that neither dialogue nor dissemination has monopoly on what communication is. Nor does their combination, which if anything constitutes an incompletion rather than totality. Second, and consequently, the impossibility of a complete grasp of the very idea of communication: that whatever falls under “communication,” what communication “is,” should always remain lacking. If dialogue and communication are bounded up in a state of mutually assured heteronomy, then not only neither encompasses a comprehensive account of communication, they each mirror their distinctive deficiencies through the other. Far from forming a whole greater than its parts, they constitute an oscillating dyad, never resting in a steady state.

So how might we imagine the conjunction of the ethics and politics of communication as arising from the mutually assured heteronomy of dialogue and dissemination? What kind of public sphere can bring forth both love and justice into play? I think it comes close to what Hannah Arendt identified in The Human Condition as the condition of plurality, but with an important amendment. To Arendt, plurality is the highest achievement of the vita activa, above and beyond the realms of labor (physical survival) and work (social and economic activity). Plurality is the basis of the realm of action and can only be realized collectively, as a political achievement. Plurality is revealed in the space of appearance where people appear to one another through speech and action—indeed through communication—coming together as different beings. Arendt makes a point in distinguishing between otherness and distinctness: the former is a general category inclusive of human and nonhuman, whereas the latter is distinctively human. And it is precisely that distinctness, the uniqueness of each and every human life, that animates plurality: “human plurality is the paradoxical plurality of unique beings” (Arendt, 1998: 176).

Speech and action are united in the effort to create and maintain this plurality. The public realm is never given but always to be achieved; it is the result of a common political effort, but such that is based on the fundamental multiplicity of human life. Indeed, it is the multiplicity of human life, the distinctness of each and every one, that brings people to collaborate and act politically. Importantly, human distinctness comes to pass through speech whereby the speaker appears as a unique being, answering an implicit question “Who are you?” (Arendt, 1998: 178). What Arendt has in mind is not simply physical appearance but a form of individual address, something akin to what Levinas designates as the address of the other as a face. Thus, for Arendt, as for Levinas, social life can never be divorced from human singularity, from the unique signature of the particular, the face and the address. This and more: human uniqueness can only be appreciated and maintained under conditions of plurality and publicness. There is no paradox, therefore, between individual and public insofar as the actualization of the condition of plurality is concerned.

Arendt considers speech as more than mere means of communication for passing information, which could be achieved in other, more technical ways, and arguably outside public speech altogether. The kind of speech she envisions is not subordinated to other agendas but is an accomplishment in its own right, and one that is necessarily public and performative. Yet because necessarily public, and because critical to contemporary political life, such speech, broadly understood, cannot be thought of without recourse to media. Arendt has practically nothing to say about media, insisting as she does that speech is “the only activity that goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter” (Arendt, 1998: 7). This is presumably because Arendt associates things and matter with the material realms of labor and work, thus rather problematically disassociating communication from materiality and mediation. It is here that dissemination offers a corrective to Arendt’s notion of the public realm, allowing to reconceptualize it as an essentially mediated realm that, precisely because mediated, supports collective plurality. The space of appearance is profoundly mediated, symbolically and technologically, and therefore a space of disseminated speech (Silverstone, 2007).

If Peters adds to Arendt mediation, Arendt adds to Peters action. Arendt’s philosophy of action might help infuse political urgency into the idea of communication as dissemination. It invites us to rethink the conditions for actualizing dissemination, to rethink dissemination as action-based, that is, as something to be achieved rather than given. Moreover, it invites rethinking dissemination as a collective public activity that can be achieved only collectively, and is therefore deeply political. In the space of disseminative appearance, the conjunction of face and distance is not antithetical but forms the conditions for genuine plurality which draws equally from love and justice. To be sure, plurality is not a state of reconciliation between dialogue and dissemination, rather the result of their perpetual reciprocal interruption. If plurality is the highest human political achievement, as Ardent argues, it is because it stretches from the particular to the universal and back, having its ethical primal scene in intersubjectivity and its ultimate horizon in the collective public domain.

Seen in this way, dissemination should be conceived as more than open-ended address, its effects going beyond the releasing of hermeneutical possibilities. Dissemination as a form of action should extend to the nonhermeneutical, the inarticulate and the voiceless—a politically motivated commitment to a profound plurality of modes of address and addressers. Constituted on spatiotemporal hiatus, dissemination is inherently disposed to accommodating a variety of forms of expressions, including those that defy immediate explication. Dissemination is more tolerant than dialogue to non-sense and idiosyncrasy, which may be embryonic of what is yet to be expressed. Here we can perhaps find an anticipatory note to be taken up later in The Marvelous Clouds insofar as nonhuman communication is concerned. Adopting a disseminative view of public discourse thus entails not only openness to whatever may come, but further entails fostering the conditions for an ever-broader range of expressions. It demands not only liberality but hospitality. It is then that dissemination takes on its full ethical and political dimensions.

References

Agamben, G. (1993) The Coming Community. Translated by M. Hardt. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Arendt, H. (1998) The Human Condition. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Derrida, J. (1978) Writing and Difference. Translated by A. Bass. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.

Krämer, S. (2015) Medium, Messenger, Transmission: An Approach to Media Philosophy. Translated by A. Enns. Amsterdam: Amsterdam Univ. Press (Recursions : theories of media, materiality, and cultural techniques).

Levinas, E. (1998) Otherwise than Being, or, Beyond Essence. Translated by A. Lingis. Pittsburgh, Pa: Duquesne University Press.

Melville, H. (2012) Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street.

Peirce, C.S. (1992) The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings. Edited by N. Houser and C.J.W. Kloesel. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Peters, J.D. (1999) Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication. Chicago, Ill.: Univ. of Chicago Press.

Pinchevski, A. (2005) By Way of Interruption: Levinas and the Ethics of Communication. Duquesne University Press.

Pinchevski, A. (2011) ‘Bartleby’s Autism: Wandering along Incommunicability’, Cultural Critique, 78(1), pp. 27–59. doi:10.1353/cul.2011.0019.

Silverstone, R. (2007) Media and Morality: On the Rise of the Mediapolis. Cambridge, UK ; Malden, MA: Polity Press.

Amit Pinchevski is an Association Professor and Director of the Smart Institute for Communications in the Department of Communication and Journalism at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem.

Email: amitpi@mail.huji.ac.il  

Russian Media Theory: Is There Any? Should There Be? How About These?

BENJAMIN PETERS

University of Tulsa, USA

Abstract

This paper makes a bibliographic case for as well as several arguments against the existence of a body of media theory named ‘Russian media theory’. Elements of the Slavic intellectual tradition are briefly surveyed in an effort to accrue eclectic resources for thinking about media in and beyond Russian. As a gesture to the spirit of Peters’ Speaking into the Air as well in borrowing and twisting the title of his less well-known co-edited volume on the field’s canon, this article pays special attention to historiographic, geopolitical, and media philosophical objections to the project of Russian media theory as well as to possible ways forward toward transnational thought on the media environment. 

Keywords

Russian media theory, media history, literary theory, environment, Slavic

Version of record: http://journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt/article/view/154

“Искусство как прием”

(“Art as Technique,” “Art as Device,” or perhaps “Art as Media”)

–Victor Shklovsky, 1917, author’s translation

Introduction[1]

A critical surveyor of media theory will not be surprised to identify in the literature a persistent scrum of national-linguistic traditions of thought clamoring for attention—German media theory (Geoghegan, 2013; Pias, 2016), Canadian communication theory (Carey, 1986), American media theory (Czitrom, 1982), British cultural studies (Schulman, 1993) (and empiricism before that), French theory (Cussett, 2016) (and rationalism before that), Italian autonomism, the interwoven Scandinavian schools (including Swedish whispering in this issue), and, perhaps in a sideways differentiation of the Global North from the industrialized West, medial thought emerging in Israel-Palestine (Blondheim, 2007), Japan, and (as this issue develops) in Chinese communication and media as well as science fiction. What role do such nation and translation play in constituting medial thought? Under what conditions should media theorists even want to play along? Surveying the wide range of different accents in which media theory—a prestige commodity meant to prick the conscience of those reworking the global flows of technology, culture, and aesthetics—arrives on English-language shores, the careful global observer might pause long enough to wonder out loud, as this essay does, about the conspicuous silence of material from eleven time zones north of the 45 parallel:

Where in the world is Russian Media Theory?[2]

The apparent absence is especially striking once we consider the ample intellectual lumber ported in by the Slavic tradition: the adjective ‘Russian’ has already gainfully (if also awkwardly) been appended to a long list of schools of thought such as Slavophilism, Marxism, Orthodoxy, cosmism, nihilism, anarchism, realism, symbolism, formalism, futurism, machism, constructivism, suprematism, and others. Whatever the cause of the absence of a Russian media theoretic school, it is surely not because the Slavic intellectual tradition itself is not up to the task! Add to that the well-known fact that the Russian language was both the second most prominent language of science in the twentieth century (Gordin, 2016) and the lesser-known fact that Russian remains, by several accounts, the second most prominent language online, one can no longer postpone the question, so where is Russian media theory? Why has there been no clear attempt to assemble, if not an entire school of thought, even so much as a modest cabin in which one might huddle together to warm thoughts against the cold blowing in from the global North?

Moreover, given that every major national-linguistic tradition of media theory today, even Canada (Russia’s closest neighbor on average), hearkens back to a former or current imperial power, the critical observer should also ask: should there even be such a thing as Russian media theory, and why might one want to embrace or decline such a thing? Is it not parochial and politically regressive to retreat to a nationally or even linguistically oriented approach to what now appear irreversibly global problems of media and communication when, as media scholar Marwan Kraidy (2018: 337) convincingly argues, the task of any global media studies worth the name is to speak truth to power? When scholars consider the problems of media and communication in, say, the COVID-19 pandemic, can we not see how jingoistic hate, public health communication wrinkles over vaccine hesitancy and safety measures, and other problems effectively retrench public musings to ethno-nationalist politics away from genuinely global contexts? In this light, is not the most obvious truth concerning Russian media theory that, if it exists at all, it should exist only so far as it is first weaned of any claim to nationalist power?

The trouble deepens: once shorn of any toxic nationalist frame (if such is possible), canons, and claims to canons especially, remain infamously explosive. Should one even attempt a project that, in its formation, might reassert colonial hierarchies of intellectual power, marginalize more deserving resources, and even resurrect ancestors better left untroubled? This essay makes peace with those that might do battle over claims to intellectual canon by espousing no interest in naming or defending a veritably christened Russian or Slavic media theory; nor does it principally seek to recover (previously hidden) intellectual influence across the ages and into the current media environment. No exercise in discerning in the distant past the giants on whose shoulders media scholars currently stand, the point of this necessarily speculative essay is somewhat different: it is to assemble the emerging and sometimes miscellaneous resources from the Russian or Slavic tradition that, once reconsidered, might serve in inspiring or guiding media theorizing going forward. It is to say, with a small host of other essays in this issue, how better might media studies orient itself to the world at present except by taking a broader survey of that world?

In commemorating my father John Durham Peters’ co-edited volume (Katz et al, 2002) on the canon of communication theory with a similar subtitle published twenty years ago as well as his lifelong pursuit of seeking out better heresies amid the ‘canon-fire’, this article asks of Russian media theory: Is there any? Should there be? How about these?

This essay responds with anything but a simple affirmative.

Russian Media Theory: Is There Any? (And how would one know if there were?)

No. There is none to speak of strictly. Save for one German-language edited volume, contemporary theorizing by media scholar colleagues in Russia, a few secondary articles, and my musings elsewhere, I am aware of no previous attempt to define or prop up a tradition of thinking about media per se in Russian or Russia, save for this footnote (Schmidt 2006; Klyukanov 2010; 2019; Vartanova 2014; Kurtov 2019; Peters 2020).[3] Yet at the same time there are, of course, almost countless potential resources adjunct to the ongoing project of constructing global media theory, a few of which the body of this essay annotates, but none that trumpets the explicit designation of Slavic or Russian media theory.

And so from content to epistemology. Instead, the question becomes, if sundry resources in Russian media theory were to go by another name, how might the citation-voyager know when they were looking at something worth identifying by the moniker Russian media theory? As I have suggested elsewhere, it is a probable mistake to identify Russian media theory a priori as that which is necessarily Russian, media-relevant, or even theoretical, since much of the richest resources that speak to contemporary media theoretical questions arrive in the peripheries of Slavic empires, attending to concerns in the language of techniques and receptions (and not to anything so neatly labeled ‘media’ or ‘communication’), and remain happily clueless (as much of the best literature and art often is) of its purchase to would-be theorizers. No a priori definition will do. Instead, I offer, at least as a practical acknowledgment of how I will proceed in this essay, three identifying features—none of which are Russian, media, or theory—that one might often find belong to a larger phenomenon of Russian media theoretic family resemblance.

Perhaps the best definition of a Russian media theory is a resource relevant to medial thinking that passes through the Cyrillic script: the moniker ‘Russian’ here, in other words, is principally linguistic and is not necessarily nationalist, cultural, or even devoted to a particular geopolitical space-time coordinate (e.g., the most fertile grounds for Ukrainian nationalism remains the shchi belt in Canada; many of the most vital servers for VK, a prominent social media platform in Russia, are located in California while, conversely, after the far-right social media platform Parler was shuttered, many Americans migrated to use Telegram, the encrypted Russian social media platform; the global reach of Russian-speaking information technologists today are likely, on balance, outside of Russia) (Biagioli et al, 2019). In other words, Russian media theory, if it exists, should come to be through an exercise in translation, broadly read across language, geography, history, and culture; to study Russian media theory is not just to parade out once-famous luminaries that frequented the circuits connecting the hinterlands between Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kyiv, Akademgorodok, Istanbul, and Berlin, but also to accommodate previously unconsidered materials from the vast stretches of intermediating linguistic culture crossing arctic, indigenous, permafrost, and maritime climes (Bernstein, in development; Chu, 2021). As I have argued elsewhere (Peters, 2020), the Russian state makes distinctive claims to being the most Northern, Southern (Antarctic), East-Western, and even extraterrestrial of all nation-states.

Second, Russian and Slavic-language media theoretic resources may go under the radar of many more prominent imperial languages because of the consequences of the fraught political economy that has driven the Tsarist, Soviet, and post-Soviet empires. In this, Russian media theory appears poised to offer an aesthetic counterpoint to flashier headline-driving promises of many other spheres of industrialized Western media and technology. The mark of political revolution, once repeatedly tarred by social collapse and reinvention, can offer a salutary effect on taming overbold claims about tradition. At least partly as a function of the need to make do, many media-ready reflections in Russian were penned in what now may appear in retrospect a style of literary realism. Namely, to paint with broad strokes, we might typify with Erich Auerbach in Mimesis (1953) much of (Russian) realism, whether the groundedness of Chekhov or the imaginative flights of Cosmism, as “conceiv[ing] of everyday things in a serious vein”, with an apparent (if usually factually untrue) “uniformity of the population and its life” while offering “a radical passion […] for thinking something which is at once amateurish and disconcertingly magnificent” (354). In the style of such realism are normalized and framed the remarkable anecdotes of, for example, Nikolai Fedorov, a Russian Orthodox librarian, who dreamed, from the humble circumstances of a rented attic crawlspace near the Rumyantsev Museum (today Russian State Library) where he spent his monastic life in late nineteenth-century Moscow with a trunk as his bed and his coat as a blanket, of nothing less than commandeering spaceship planet Earth in the future to fly about outer space and from its ethereal reaches reassemble from the remnants of all human ancestors the literal (Orthodox Christian) resurrection of the human family. As is often the case, Silicon Valley, despite claims of practical can-do solutionism and bold visions of a brighter future, has little on the realist imagination of Russian media theorists—little, except unreal concentrations of investor capital.

Russian media theoretical insights are also often squirreled away as convenient exceptions: a third reason much of the Russian media theoretic tradition may remain sidelined in the search for media-theoretic insight is the troublesome assumption common at least among other observers in the industrialized West that Russian and Slavic contributions to matters of culture, art, and technology tend to oscillate between being technically capable and politically tragic. Such exceptionalizing caricatures break apart under scrutiny. This stereotype (which routinely flits between contradictory stereotypes of Slavic culture as alternately technologically backwards and technically brilliant) is not so meaningful in its content (for there are, of course, some seeds of truth and fields of falsehood to that claim in the history of Slavic media, art, and technique) as it is for what the stereotype obscures in the reception of that history: namely, the reception stereotype has the effect of prematurely assigning Russian and Slavic resources, often unexamined, to a perennial marginal status as cautionary tales and contrast case studies to more mainstream narratives elsewhere (Graham, 2013). (I should confess that as the author of a 2016 book called How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet, my title participates in this tendency at first glance and then plays on it by reversing the cold war analogy to suggest that it is the other nation at hand—the US—that has since deleteriously networked the world.) This marginal status is often enough to stir comparisons for the scholar interested in making intellectual hay out of cultural misrepresentations (by no means a limitation); however the same perennial exception status granted Slavic resources do empiricists and theorists alike no obvious favors: simply put, if the rest of the world often treats Russia and its near abroad as an exception, or in contradistinction from the popular or mainstream ‘elsewhere’, it amounts to perpetually sidelining out of view fifteen percent of the world’s landmass as well as a weighty transnational intellectual tradition.

Anglo-observer biases offer a another and perhaps more nefarious reason that the Slavic intellectual tradition often goes unacknowledged or under-explored in media debates: it is often also not different enough to consciously qualify for the categorical distinctions privileged by English-language observers. Consider the category of race, for example: namely, despite the peoples of the former Soviet Union hailing from hundreds of ethnicities and languages, the belief in English-speaking cultures that Russians as a whole are a white ethnicity (or sometimes implicitly nearly-white or off-white) means that their resources are racially similar enough to be included in (often unstated) racist self-definition of the West while not being sufficiently different enough to belong, as would much of southeast Asia, outside of an implicitly racialized West. For this reason, as historian Sean Guillory has recently suggested, the American political center deftly employs the threat of Russian hackers rather than the threat of Southeast Asian or native US information technologists as a boogeyman for policing both margins to the American political right and left with an enemy white enough to fear openly—in this view, Russians present the image of a convenient enemy appearing sufficiently white to be criticized without triggering American centrist race consciousness but not white enough to be considered properly democratic or liberal (Guillory, 2020; Stanley, 2015: 152-154). Russians, in this problematic view, (wrongly) appear homogeneously white enough for moderate Americans to oppose openly without racial self-reflection. Similar points could be made about the strangely convenient sexism and classist media portrayals of Russian women and workers in the Western media depictions of Slavs, figures often either too feminine or too much the Stakhanovite to merit the full trust of observers outside of the West. It follows, then, that Russian elites benefit from exploiting and playing into media narratives of the constitutive Enemy Other against which both national identities claim raison d’être exception—a curiously common exceptionalism that benefits both the American center and the Russian elite. (Perhaps all nationalisms belong to the same transnational epiphenomenon that tends to serve the state status quo).

Instead of sidelining Russian and Slavic sources as convenient exceptions from outside, an alternative explanation may be offered that explains some of the challenge facing those who seek to incorporate or mainstream such resources: namely, many Slavic-language intellectual resources often display a remarkable degree (and centuries) of contrarian character and internal heterogeneity. What may appear a cramped school of orderly thought from the outside may encompass a lush rainforest of difference within, and while all intellectual traditions must be somewhat fractally defined, it is a premise of what follows that the degree of internal dissension and argumentative difference (or what I later call “disassociative heterophily”) within the Slavic intellectual tradition is often large enough to make the tradition appear incoherent from within close view and thus simultaneously reducible or forgettable upon encounter from an outside observer. The degree of nested internal differences is the stuff of legend: in the differences between Lenin and his closest right-hand man, Aleksandr Bogdanov, lies nothing less than worldwide revolution; or that Nikolai Fedorov would shun the embrace of Leo Tolstoy at the height of the latter’s prophetic popularity, despite their agreeing on almost everything, is no surprise to surveyors of their history of ideas, politics, literature, as it is in contemporary link structures in Russian-language online sites, where worlds of political and intellectual difference inhabit what may appear at first glance the pettiest of distinctions (Etling et al., 2010). These three characteristics, among others, pose obstacles for the articulation of Russian media theory as such.

Russian Media Theory: Should There Be?

Arguably not. Especially given the internal heterogeneity described above, the normative case against the existence of a so-called singular Russian media theory strikes me as compelling enough for reasons even beyond unwittingly ceding power to categories in the service of imperial nation-states. Namely, in light of the three features above, we may now be closer to sensing why the search for anything so coherent or singular as ‘Russian media theory’ may be a fool’s errand compared to the proverbially sure result of any such search: namely, the positive case for the plural, that there exist many, many Russian media theories.

Before one can even begin to annotate resources useful to the media scholar, let us begin with the foundational question: it must follow that there exist many Russian media theories since there exist many terms to talk about something resembling media in Russian. I’ll briefly list four here, although there are still others: first, the calque from the Latin media, or in Russian (1) ‘медиа’, which has gained traction especially since post-Soviet transition; second, the more classically twentieth-century plural term for ‘media’, namely, variations on the term for ‘means’ средства (sredstva) or (2a) ‘средства коммуникации’ (the means of communication), (2b) средства массовой коммуникации (the means of mass communication, often simplified into the acronym CMK), or more commonly still (2c) средства массовой информации (the means of mass information, or СМИ), where this collective second sense imports a sense of the ‘the’ behind ‘the media’ in English: so are signaled the institutions that make the mainstream news; third, the much broader sense of ‘intermediary’ (sometimes ‘agent’) or (3) посредник that serves in mechanical, financial, and legal contexts (similar to ‘Vermittler’ in German); and finally, the more artful Russian formalist notion of приём (‘priyom’), an often untranslatable term meaning variously reception, device, technique, maneuver, and more, such as in Viktor Shklovsky’s famous 1921 article “Art as Technique/Device” or “Искусство как прием”. Suffice it to note here that one need not even search for plural theories to have already arrived at plural understandings of media in Russian; one troublesome word in English more than suffices. The meaning most plain and basic to me follows in the second sense above. Namely, средства (‘sredstva’)—the first word in the phrase for media, ‘the means of mass communication’—means ‘the means’, which shares an obvious root with the term cреда (‘sreda’), which also means ‘environment’ or ‘surroundings’ (the word also means ‘Wednesday’). As I’ll develop below, cреда and средства, or the environment, the middle, and the means offer a more robust and transnational alternative understanding of how, in Russian and other languages that build on John Durham Peters’ (2015) concomitant argument in Marvelous Clouds, media function as environments and environments as elemental media.

Russian Media Theories: How About These?

I offer below no Russian media theories per se, so much as clustered annotations in the search for theories in the subjunctive case.[4] This section is less concerned with whether Russian media theory may or may not exist, than with what would they look like if they did. My experiment here is to discover whether a more humane interweaving of literary, philosophical arts, and technology resources can sustain media theorizing today in Russian, among any number of languages. What follows are three annotation clusters on (1) media philosophies and literature, (2) world techne and infrastructural media, and (3) the computational return of new media in the Slavic canon.

The first cluster, on media philosophy and literature, raises in a new light two points fundamental to media and communication theorizing: the role of the body as media, and in particular the vitality of secondhand witnessing. Namely, media theorists might do well to first turn to the proto-feminist writings of the Decembrists and their command of the paperwork aristocracy which raise fascinating questions about the embodied power of women engaged in authoring the scripts that define secondhand witnessing. For example, a constellation of feminist actors ranging from Natalia Dolgorukova’s Personal Notes (1810) to Vladimir Soloviev’s “The Question of Women’s Rights” (1897), to Anna Akhmatova’s Midnight Verses (1965), to Svetlana Boym’s “Framing the Family Album” (2008), and Svetlana Alexievich’s Chernobyl (1997) and Secondhand Times (2013) constellate powerfully embodied witnesses of history through secondhand media. No survey of witnessing media should proceed without first foregrounding the long-sidelined voices of women writers.

Second, the Russian intellectual tradition of nihilism—Turgenev, Soloviev, Dostoevsky, Chernyshevsky, and their passive, active, and revolutionary nihilisms, respectively—strike me as a resource for potentially repositioning the troublesome subject-object position at the heart of media theory. Namely, nihilism, even in its fullest evacuation of metaphysical and moral meaning, implicitly acknowledges that the dash in the subject-object duality is more, not less, than either combined: nihilism, especially the politically rowdy Russian variety, distills, perhaps, to nothing but an uneasy subject-object media position. Media, however, persist in offering more than an either-or choice between user and used, actor and acted upon. In a brief portrait of the Russian Orthodox, nihilist, and anti-positivist thinker, Vladimir Sergeyvich Soloviev, for example, makes a telling aside about the major media system of Russia in 1895, the post office, in noting that “in general, the difference that exists between humble and proud people is that the former dispatch registered letters, and the latter dispatch letters that don’t reach their destinations” (Soloviev, 1895: xx). The success of one’s subject position does not just depend on a binary media operation: rather the proud are made humble by media subject positions that turn, and return, a sender into a receiver. Surely contemporary readers may find resonance in that quip to the modern curse that is inbox overload or the vanity void that is social media; elsewhere Soloviev also refreshes an old truism: who the media scholar imagines as the active subject or passive object, the user or used, the sender or sent, the self or other, cannot be reduced to any such clean binary choice for all actors in media systems exist outside of that system too. The medial dash that frames the subject and the object into being, for Soloviev, promises an ecumenical restlessness that resists nihilism’s attempt to collapse the subject.

In a second cluster around the themes of world techne and infrastructural media, the media theorist might be interested to rediscover various techniques and environments for sensemaking. What Ernst Kapp called “Organprojektion” in his 1877 Grundlinie einer Philosophie der Technik (Principles of a Philosophy of Technology), the formalist Viktor Shklovsky perhaps improves on in his 1923 Zoo, or Letters Not about Love, essay #30 when he writes: “A tool not only extends the arm of man, but also makes him an extension of himself” (115). He continues: “What changes man most of all is the machine […] the machine gunner and the contrabassist are extensions of their instruments […] subways, cranes, and automobiles are the artificial limbs of mankind” (115). The Soviet censure had the good sense to acknowledge, if the misfortune of then censoring, the potency of such media theory that spoke directly to the industrialized ‘new man’ imaginary powering many post-revolutionary Soviet luminaries. Other sources that speak to the ways media techniques and techniques as media are hard to separate could include Nikolai Chenyshevsky’s “The Aesthetic Relationship of Art to Reality” (1853), Andrey Bely’s Petersburg (1913) on the prose patterns and anthroposophic cities, Viktor Shklovsky’s “Art as Device” (1917) on art as materialist technique, Pavel Florensky (who often appears by analogy Russia’s C. S. Peirce) and his masterwork The Reverse Perspective (1920) on (religious) icons, and Yuri Lotman’s “Painting and the Language of Theater” (1979) on the necessity of copy metadata (without talking about metadata).

In the service of infrastructural media, or the relationship between environments and media, one might begin by excavating the corollary between the Russian and then Soviet first principle of sredstva: namely, for Marx and then later the Soviet state socialism, the Mittel-medium in “Produktionsmittel” (or the means of production) in German that marks no less than the first term in socialist critique from which Lenin first translates “sredstva massovoi proizvodstva” (or the means of mass production) and then its gripping parallel “sredstva massovoi informatsii, or SMI” (the media). The political economy vocabulary of Marxism-Leninism rereads media as the means for mass communication; of course, it is no revelation in any language that the media cannot easily be separated from the means of production, but this fact is self-evidently fused in the generative phrasings of Russian revolutionary rhetoric.

There is also an obvious tradition of thinking, with Slavic inflections, about the planet as a cosmological medium. To mention only the trinity of the cosmists (which oversaw a curious continuity from Russian Orthodoxy to Soviet revolution): the founding cosmist Nikolai Fedorov offers in his posthumously published Philosophy of the Common Task (1906), a treatment of the planet Earth as an Orthodox medium for restoring the kinship of humanity. The eminent geophysicist Vladimir Vernadsky, in turn, outlines the earth in The Biosphere (1926) as a solar medium, alongside whom Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the father of Soviet rocketry, offers a vision of our planet as a cradle in “the Future of Earth and Mankind” (1928). Common throughout is the scaling out of the medium to the level of the collective environment; for a much later example, the Soviet science fiction author and physicist A. Dneprov’s “The Game” (1961) offers a curious and collectivist anticipation of John Searle’s Chinese Room thought experiment framed not through the individual cubicle (or closet) of the Turing Test but out in the open collective environment of what he calls the “Portuguese (soccer) field”. In each case, the collective scale at which media appear as environments and vice versa appears so obvious in over a century of cosmic-collectivist language that, despite long warranting it, it has not yet demanded its own theorizing.

In the third cluster of notes referring to what we might call the computational return of new media (or the persistent recurrence in digital media criticism), we see themes outlining an alternative genealogy for understanding how, through Tsarist, Soviet, and post-Soviet formal scripts and inscription devices, the information age is now pulsing with unruly symbol sciences. For example, in 1830’s “Silentium!”, the poet Fyodorov Tuchev performs a kind of reading meant to reduce noise in both titular connotation and poetic syntax. Aleksandr Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (1833) gives heroic weight to a series of improbable characters, especially Tatiana, that follow random paths through the traces of texts, thus outlining and anticipating in literature the random walks of Markov chains and statistical projections so central to machine learning today: her tradition of reading traces and marginalia remains sublimated in the algorithms buoying contemporary online texts of Eugene Onegin today. Vissarion Belinsky, in his famous (1847) “Letter to Gogol”, uses punctuation as a kind of early phonography to inscribe sound and silence amid unrest and revolution. Leo Tolstoy narrates in “Sevastopol Story in December” (1855) war with, as Katherine Reischl has developed in her Photographic Literacy, almost photographic precision. The Soviet revolutionary poet Vladimir Mayakovsky also compresses poetry into telegraphic, and even pre-literate, writing for the masses in “A Cloud in Pants” (1915), as Carlotta Chenoweth develops more fully in her book project The Illiterate Text. Mayakovsky’s short-lived peer Velimir Khlebnikov anticipates what we might today call future-casting in that then-revolutionary new medium “Radio of the Future” (1921). Literary theorist Vladimir Propp then develops a standalone sense for ‘mediation’ in the role of hero narration in his (1928) Morphology of the Folk (Fairy) Tale. Many other medial scripts lie ready to be reread.

Computational media have never been straightforward. Against this literary background, we might animate other texts central to a more scientific and equally medial understanding, as the Slavic tradition is wont to do, of how to compute unreasonable differences. As a bridging masterwork, consider what is effectively Raskolnikov’s Entscheidungsproblem in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866). Indeed, the etymological roots of the words de-cision in Latin, ent-scheid in German, and ras-kol in Russian line up to press the distinguishing question, as Raskolnikov asks looking in the rational distorting mirror of his own humanity: does two and two sometimes make five (at least for especially large values of two)? How, in soulcraft and symbols alike, may cutting a whole produce an unreasonable difference more or less than the sum of its parts? Calculating in the face of unreasonable difference also urges Andrei Markov (the mathematician of Markov chain fame) to famously inaugurate formal natural language processing in his “Statistical Investigation of Eugene Onegin” (1913) where the aforementioned random walks happen both in forests (in Pushkin’s prose) and Fourier series (in Markov’s analysis). This tradition is carried on by the theorist of modern probability Andrei Kolmogorov in his (1962) “Study of Mayakovsky’s Rhythmics”, which computationally isolates Mayakovsky’s improbable (and telegraphic) pith. The semiotician Yurii Lotman then outlines scripts and programming alike as twinned humanistic sign systems in Semiosphere (1984), whose positive contrary can be seen in Larry Page and Sergei Brin’s articulation of link homophily in “PageRank: Bringing Order to the Web” (1998), the paper that seeded the heart of Google Search, and whose negative corollary can be seen in the veritable link heterophily in Pussy Riot’s “Punk Prayer—Mother of God, Chase Putin Away” (2012).

To summarize these brief cluster sketches, the interpretive ambiguity of the subject-object in every media environment parallels the turbulence of what Pankaj Mishra finds in the nineteenth century, and the Russian feminist and nihilist traditions in particular. Gender criticism of paperwork machines: namely, the secondhand witnessing language in Anna Akhmatova, Svetlana Boym, and Svetlana Alexievich offers reminders of the feminist powers of their polymathic observation, of the ethnographer poet, of the bystander witness—a tradition predating figures as diverse as Mary Magdalene, the social receipts of kabbalah, the Decembrists’ feminist command of aristocratic paperwork, and modern-day protest witnessing. So too is it curious that the Marxist-Leninist phrase for the ‘means of mass production’ is only a word away from their phrase for mass media, suggesting that long have media, whatever those may be, also appeared revolutionary means of mass information production. In Russian, the root of the word ‘means’ remains particularly revealing: среда (sreda), a term that invokes both the spatial sense of ‘environment’ as well as the day of the week Wednesday; in the Russian word, ‘sreda’, we see a clue to how many media operate as environments that oscillate between being the causal ground and then the temporal middle (Wednesday). The root of media, traced through nineteenth-century cosmist ‘sreda’ environmentalism, are wilder than anything Silicon Valley transhumanism has conjured yet, as Anya Bernstein (2019) has recently chronicled in her treatment of over a century of Russian transhumanist and cosmist attempts into immortality.

Media, in this view, appears as the unstable means for flitting focus between fore and ground, subject-object and syntax, cause and consequence, environment and actor. Other insights may be found in rereading literature as media, such that one might observe Vissarion Belinsky’s proto-phonographic punctuation, Tolstoy’s photographic style, and Vladimir Mayakovsky’s telegraphic style (for a semi-literate Soviet population of former peasants) also as means by which literature bespeaks media that shape it. So too has this essay suggested resources for reinterpreting the computational revolution in the meta-mathematical figures of Bely’s Petersburg, the cryptographic frequency analysis in Markov (as in Markov chains behind AI and natural language learning), analysis of Pushkin’s Onegin, as well as Kolmogorov’s stochastic studies of Pushkin, Lotman’s semiosphere (Umwelten) and the attending symbol sciences driving formidable Russian schools of symbolism, formalism, semiotics, and cybernetics. So too does the Slavic tradition offer preludes to critical algorithm studies through the etymological and ethical parallels between Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov and David Hilbert, Alan Turing, and their common decision problems (Entscheidungsproblem), among others. Still other resources help not congeal so much as reveal centrifugally more submerged icebergs of intellectual wealth, including Alla Efimova’s and Lev Manovich’s annotated collection of thirteen essays in their 1993 Tekstura: Russian Essays on Visual Culture (eight years before publishing The Language of New Media) as well as, again, Ulrich Schmid’s 2005 edited volume including twelve secondary essays on Russische Medientheorien.

But, unless our environment is urgently attended to and cared for, all such icebergs risk breaking apart. Situated as part of the thawing global North, the search for Russian media theory is more than just a burning question with a growing pile of notes: what can transnationally inclined media theorists do to combat and contextualize climate change writ broadly? Google emitted fifty kilograms of CO2 in the time it took to read this sentence. The carbon footprint of cloud computing is now equivalent to that of the economy of Norway and growing quickly. How are we to proceed in the face of the towering costs of the industrialized West, and the global North in particular? If neglecting eleven time zones north of the 45^th parallel appears an intolerable option, media scholars must accommodate its translational Slavic resources and insight as well as countless attending central and northern European, Chinese, Japanese, Canadian, American, Arctic, indigenous, and maritime resources that make up Eurasian media theoretic traditions. How have media technologies sped what McKenzie Wark (2015), after rereading Andrei Platonov, calls the “carbon liberation front”, and how might a postcolonial turn in media theory intervene to slow our uneven global catastrophe? How is the twenty-first century to understand the previous? How do we now live in the wake of a century of the spetsi [technical specialists]? Might Russian elites—with extractive petro-economy, growing income inequalities, major northern-flowing river systems, and thawing northern sea route—even be positioned to (at least relatively) benefit from climate change, even as, in Thane Gustafson’s (2021) recent analysis, the population of Russia itself suffers catastrophically from the thawing methane fields of Siberia and other climate crises? Does this perverse situation not disincentivize pressing conversations about the environment and media, both public and scholarly? A more broadly conceived melting global North project could bring vitally needed Russian-language resources into a more global conversation. After a twentieth century spent worrying about the East and West, a new orientation now presses upon the coming mid-twenty-first century: how will the world unite to mitigate what is coming and already at hand from the thawing North and South?

Perhaps what is at hand, literally, is not a bad metaphor for shepherding this exploratory essay toward a conclusion: hands offer telling and subtle asymmetries of our embodied and fragile environmental condition. It is possible, for example, that right-handedness abounds because, over millennia of cultural and practical orientation—a literal orient-ation toward the east—humans in the mid-latitudes in the Northern hemisphere (30 to 60 degrees latitude) have tended to favor the sides, the East and the South, where the sun rises and shines the longest. Perhaps, in a return to Vernadsky, our bodies reflect the ineluctable spin of the planet: the patterns of the biosphere turn with the geosphere. Might Russian media theory, once reclaimed, help reorient the global North? Or might we, after tasting its tantalizing possibilities, still reasonably insist on declining Slavic media theory?

Conclusion: Declining Russian Media Theory, Twice?

At this moment there is raging across the English-language humanities and social sciences a ferocious intellectual scrimmage for media theoretic insights: in fact, this has been happening at least since World War II, but the heat has been building with generations of contributions from so-called German, French, Canadian, American, and (as a 2017 volume from Steinberg and Zahlten has it) Japanese media theory, among others. Yet from this conversation, Russian-language materials go strikingly silent. If media and communication theory is understood, again, as a prestige commodity—a preoccupation among the jet-setting few whose consciences are pricked by both the riches and the ruins wrought by the media technologies unleashed by the industrialized economies they live in—why then is there so much ample intellectual lumber from the century in which Russian was the second most popular scientific language in the world—the constructivists, the formalists, the cosmists—and yet no obvious cabin fit for rethinking the modern media environment and, with John Durham Peters, the environment as media that bears a Slavic label?

By annotating a few of the many constellations in the transnational Slavic tradition, this essay seeks to set aside the western, often imperial preoccupation with technology and to see behind and through it the question of the technique, and by implication the technical as a principal preoccupation of all humanities, and media culture, history, and texts especially. If English-language media theorists could defamiliarize, renormalize, and eventually accommodate only one technique from the Slavic tradition, this essay hazards the suggestion, borrowing from the language of molecular separation, that ‘disassociative heterophilia’ is commonplace in media environments. In other words, a willingness to link to the other—and thereby to conceive of the other initially as a contrarian position through dissociative discourse that leaves the intellectual record not as a coherent tradition, not as self-naming schools, but as an archipelago-like burst amid an ocean of lonely ideas—that all of this is distinctive, if of course not peculiar, to the Russian media theoretical tradition as well as, perhaps, central for the humanities and social sciences to reclaim the explosive rise of the artificial techniques of difference-making (such as the intersection of the semantic difference in language, the binary bits of computation, or the gaps that constitute networks). The stakes for doing so, again, are not small: the Soviet century was a century of spets (or spetsialisti, ‘specialists’) in ways that reanimated the long nineteenth and twentieth-century concentration of so much knowledge, power, and industry and, with it, the existential stakes of uneven ecological collapse. It is high time to harken to and learn from its lessons.

As a personal comment in a special issue inspired by work done by my father, I hope this speculative essay has performed a passing compliment to the task modeled in his intellectual work in more than name: namely that one might reclaim and improve heresies through commentary (two classical, even medieval, genres of scholarship). What better way to recover communication and media theory, as Peters’ Speaking into the Air (1999) makes profoundly possible for the field, than by looking elsewhere? As the historian Eric Hobsbawm noted, only by looking away from something can we begin to see it in context. For example, the French Revolution does not appear to be the French Revolution until after we can see it in the context of the founding of America and the Spring of Nations in Europe. The first step toward sitting at the transnational media theory table, as John Peters’ work illustrates in its sheer synthetic range, is to step back, draw back the chair, and look away from the current media environment and its pressing problems in order to prepare in the backroom a fuller feast of transnational literature, art, culture, and history. By ‘declining Slavic media theory’, we may also decline the English term media in search of the many non-equivalent terms in other languages, such as, in Russian at least, the relationship between on sredstvo (the means), sreda (the environment), and the phrase for mass media, ‘sredstva massovoi informatsii’. To acknowledge ‘declining Slavic media theory’, one may also follow the obvious historical trendline of the decline and spread of many Slavic prestige commodities in Eurasia into global flows over the last fifty years. Perhaps the delta of resulting scholarship is best navigated by stepping back, looking away, and seeking insights from the timeless techniques that animate media environments by another name. To wit, perhaps a concluding line to capture what it might mean to search for Russian media theories by indirection is to reverse Viktor Shklovsky’s formalist approach to “искусство как прием” or art as technique: namely, this essay calls instead for the collective search for “прием как искусство” or media techniques as art. Namely, if in so doing we must decline Russian media theory, once as a subject altogether and then again as a grammatical object fit for declension and rich reinterpretation, may we at least do so while reclaiming a more ecumenical relationship to techne as art and artifice likely to set a more sustainable transnational table for future feasts of media theory on techniques as art.

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Notes

[1] This essay was written for inclusion in a special issue of Media Theory marking the twentieth anniversary of John Durham Peters’ Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication. A special thank you to my father, John Durham Peters, the source of much more than media theoretic insight in my life and career. I thank Liam Young for his editorial comments and shepherding the essay into fruition as well as my colleague in arms Marijeta Bozovic as well as Sean Guillory. I am also grateful to the participants of the Into the Air symposium whose work, conversations, and comments motivated this essay, especially Melissa Aronczyk, Jianguo Deng, Carolyn Kane, Tamara Kneese, Marwin Kraidy, Sybille Kraemer, Amanda Lagerkvist, Jeremy Packer, Amit Pinchevski, Jeff Pooley, Carrie Rentschler, Jonathan Sterne, Jeremy Stolow, Margaret Schwartz, Armond Towns, and Ira Wagman. Shane Denson sparked a conversation in Lueneburg, Germany that led to this essay.

[2] Note that for the purposes of this essay, I refer to “Russian” as a sometimes catch-all term for what must become, of course, a more nuanced and differentiated notion of variously pan-Slavic and also non-Slavic media theoretic traditions in the Near Abroad. See also Peters (2020) and Schmid (2005).

[3] There are also several other scholarly works by Russian media and communication scholars on this topic that I have commented on in my aforementioned Digital Icons essay (2020), although little of it has survived translation.

[4] In the Russian language, subjunctive actions are fittingly expressed in the past tense with the marker “byi”: if something would be in the Russian future tense, it would also have had been.

Benjamin Peters is an author, editor, and media scholar. Raised in the Midwest, educated on both coasts, and trained in Russian, he speaks and writes publicly about media from the big bang to big data, and is the author of How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet. Cambridge: The MIT Press, May 2016.

Email: ben-peters@utulsa.edu    

Speaking Miscommunication: Bridging a Postcolonial Abyss

RADHA SARMA HEGDE

New York University, USA

Abstract

The dualistic view of communication as both disease and cure, raised by John Durham Peters in Speaking into the Air, continues to gain traction globally. This view of communication has followed the itineraries of the neoliberal economy and its expectations. Communication today is the site where individual aspirations, market expectations and national interests meet and collide. Taking a cue from Peters of thinking with the past, this essay follows the dualistic narrative in the complex linguistic terrain of India today where the English language and communication serve as a space for defining failure and promoting the remedy of self-development. Engaging with postcolonial examples, the discussion illustrates how narratives of miscommunication are integrated and reinforced in the entrepreneurial space of communication skills training. 

Keywords

English, communication, skills, India, postcolonial, failure

Version of record: http://journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt/article/view/153 

To understand communication, John Durham Peters (1999) writes, is to understand much more. Placing ages and discourses in conversation with one another, Speaking into the Air offers an erudite unravelling of “why the experience of communication is so often marked by felt impasses” (Peters, 1999: 1). Some of the chief dilemmas of our age, according to Peters, whether public or personal, turn on communication or communication gone sour. The book offers a compelling intellectual history and critique of the idea of communication and the central place it occupies in contemporary life. Peters argues that the post war years, led to two dominant visions—the technical and the therapeutic—both of which are rooted in American cultural history and rest on the belief of communication’s ability to remove obstacles either due to improved technology or better techniques of relating interpersonally. Given that communication has become the property of politicians, bureaucrats, technologists and therapists, Peters notes that its popularity exceeds its clarity (1999: 6). In an extensive mapping of the subject, Speaking into the Air shows how, while the difficulty of communication confronts us daily, communication also presents itself as an easy solution to intractable human troubles. This critique of the dualistic view of communication as both disease and cure or bridge and chasm that Peters raised over two decades ago continues to gain traction, not just in the United States, but globally as well. These visions have travelled widely following the itineraries of the neoliberal economy and its expectations for the neoliberal subject. In this essay, I follow the travel of these visions in the linguistic terrain of India.

Communication today serves as the supremely malleable, performative site that can be scripted and managed to justify various institutional agendas. Communication is also trumped up as a conduit, a morphing placeholder where individual aspirations, market expectations and national interests are made to reside. Failures in communication, Peters maintains, owe less to semantic mismatches than to unjust allocations of symbolic and material resources (1999: 125).  If communication derives its force as a compensatory ideal from its contrast with breakdown (Peters, 1999: 6), how then do we approach the politics of defining the norm and, in turn, identifying and naming communicative failure? How are these models of effective communication or more often banal templates of performative conformity reproduced globally? Whatever communication might mean, Peters does stress that it is not a matter of improved wiring or freer self-disclosure (1999: 29) and it is a mistake to think that better wiring will eliminate the ghosts (1999: 9).

Both the field of communication, especially in its early hegemonic disciplinary formations, and the popular consolidation of communication as best interpersonal practices have quite strategically remained apolitical and have steered clear of any contested histories. The material conditions that frame prescriptions for dialogic connection are, most often, left unmarked and evacuated of contextual particularities or acknowledgement of historical entanglements. Peters writes about the troubling “righteous tyranny” about communication since “the term can be used to browbeat others for ‘failing to communicate’ when they are opting out of the game” (1999: 267). Failure is not only quickly attributed to miscommunication, but also attached to the qualities of an individual or group and their communicative proclivities. This tendency for reductive explanations diverts attention from political or structural issues and instead focuses on culture, the individual and the realm of psychologistic interiority. Offering a more critical formulation, Appadurai and Alexander (2019) note that failure is “a product of judgements that reflect various arraignments of power, competence and equity in different places and times. As such, failure produces and sustains cultural fantasies and regimes of expectations” (1). Communication breakdown and the perception of failure is entangled within precisely the power relations that sustain a web of judgements, fantasies and expectations.

Both the dream of communication and the specter of miscommunication assume layers of complexity within the complex multilingual infrastructures of postcolonial geographies. The bristling media and linguistic landscape of India serves as a dynamic example of how both the promise and failure of communication have been defined, enforced, judged and attached to imperial ambitions, nationalist agendas, regional politics and capitalist aspirations. But these vexed questions of postcoloniality were slow to arrive in the communication discipline in the United States and when they did, they appeared in the register of lack. The partitioned aerial study of the non-West instituted during the Cold War years was mirrored within the communication discipline where entire regions were held steady and contained within disciplinary sub-areas like intercultural communication or development communication. These were mainly the spaces where the rest of the world was allowed entry into the discipline and were kept at bay. This model of institutionalizing the separation of world regions within the discipline maintained the centrality of national or specifically American interests (Hegde, 2006). The highly influential contribution of scholars like David Lerner and Wilbur Schramm (1967) linking communication and national development made the global south visible through the lens of modernization and the benevolence of American exceptionalism.[1]  As Rajagopal (2019) writes, “media technologies and the idea of communication in general became crucial ways of rendering the United States’ influence into something apparently inexorable and universal” (411). Within this framework, the non-Western world continued to be imagined in terms of inadequacies or lack or consigned endlessly in Dipesh Chakraborty’s (2000) memorable words to “the waiting rooms of history” (8).

Language choice and linguistic infrastructures play an important aspect of this game of catching up with modernity. The legacies of colonialism, development and Western benevolence have crept predictably into the neoliberal economy’s prescriptions for success and to popular iterations of what constitutes global communication skills in India today. Taking a cue from Peters’ approach of thinking with the past, this essay discusses how an ongoing narrative of deficit and failure with colonial roots is reproduced in the realm of language and communication in the service of the global economy. The language issue has been strategically used to advance political interests at every step and stage of Indian history (see Ramanathan, 2005). The consequences and after-life of imperial decisions made two centuries ago to impose English in India continue to define the politics of communicability in the postcolonial world and creep into ongoing and divisive narratives of communication failure in various spaces of public life. Even though English is widely hailed as another Indian language, the weight of the colonial baggage is too heavy to shake off. Everyone has an opinion about English, its presence, its power and the politics. While disadvantaged Dalit communities see liberatory possibilities in English and some right-wing nationalist groups argue aggressively against the colonial import, the corporate sector seeks to cash in on the presence of an English-speaking workforce in India. During fieldwork in India on this subject, I met an entrepreneur in the outsourcing industry who rolled his eyes in disdain about endless political debates over language or what he described as ‘the continuous hoopla’ about choosing between English or the regional language as the right medium of education. To him, the logic was simple and straightforward: “Who cares about how we got English? We have it now and we are in the global game today”.

It is this global game that drives the frantic search for skilled communicators and redraws the social divide in terms of communication, miscommunication and, even more drastically, the failure to communicate. The dualistic view of communication as both bridge and abyss, advanced by Peters, assumes a complex twist and meaning in the context of India skilling workers for the global economy. In the institutional domains of business, government, and increasingly education, this binary is evoked to commodify communication as well as to fortify the need for individuals and institutions to invest in communication training and soft skills development. Communication as disease and cure work in tandem or as Peters describes it, they are in cahoots as in a homeopathic remedy (1999: 6). While this turn to therapeutic discourses on communication is alive and well in other places, the long histories of English in India give it particular inflection and even an ironic poignancy. The country now seeks deliverance from communication deemed the great solution to what is flagged as a crisis of employability, to which I next turn.

Deficit and Solution

Deficit is an integral part of the ongoing story of the English language in India. Its arrival or rather colonial imposition and its continuing identity in the social life of India are all predicated on some variation on the theme of lack. First of all, the imperial enterprise of instituting English in the areas of education and commerce in India was premised on the colonial belief in the superiority of English to Indian languages. Colonial choices about imposing English as a medium of education in India were tied both to a civilizing mission and the objective of furthering imperial rule through social stratification. The English language has always been embroiled in a space of contestation, whether in pre-independence India, British-colonized India, postcolonial India or globalized India (Uma, Rani and Manohar, 2014). Class and caste privilege have been historically related to English-language usage and fluency and the English-speaking Indian elite have also been historically complicit in the denial of access to the language and its social worlds to the underprivileged. Today the ability to speak English is widely imagined and claimed, across lines of class and caste, as the magic key to access global futures.

“Without English, I feel naked”, says Madhav, the hero of a best-selling pulp novel, Half Girlfriend, by Chetan Bhagat (2014), one of India’s most popular novelists writing in English. Talking about his college admissions interview conducted in English by three professors, Madhav, portrayed as being petrified about his shaky English skills, adds, “I didn’t belong here—these English-speaking monsters would eat me alive” (Bhagat, 2014: 10). Such sentiments are commonly raised in popular culture and in everyday life since English has been historically linked to caste and class positions in the social life of India. Many share that same feeling of excruciating diffidence to be in the privileged spaces of English-speaking India. Students who come from under-privileged communities are distanced structurally and socially from access and exposure to the English language. For these students, the predominant motivation to learn English is to prepare for the future and be ready to navigate the digital and global workplace. Crossing the linguistic barrier is part of an aspirational trajectory that feeds into an industry devoted to teaching communication skills. This growing desire to learn English and become communication literate is linked to the fear of being on the brink of two colliding horizons that entangle the personal and public fields. The first that Appadurai (2004) astutely describes as the “brittle horizon of aspirations” (69), because, as he notes, the pathways of aspiration are more rigid, less supple and less strategically valuable. The second, discussed insightfully by Peters (1999) as “horizons of incommunicability” (2), captures the felt impasses that characterize the modern experience of communication.

The current politics of language and communication central to India’s developmental and global vision have to be contextualized within the liberalization of the economy, the explosion of the information technology industry in India and the exponential growth in the use of mobile media technologies across the country. The rapid expansion of the digital media environment and the growth of the Indian middle class has unleashed new desires, new imaginaries and possibilities of personhood (Baviskar and Ray, 2011; Upadhya, 2016). With the consumerist economy and digital culture making rapid inroads into the social fabric of the country, English is gaining renewed importance as the language of technology—the passport for prestige and upward mobility in the world of information technology. Next, there is a widespread discourse concerning the disconnect between education and employment which rehearses the complaint that students are ill prepared by educational institutes and is becoming a stock media story. The solution is to fast-track young Indians through courses in English and communication or English communication or soft skills, which is most often conflated with English language competence.  For example, the Vice President of India, Venkaiah Naidu in a recent inaugural address to the Indian Business Schools Leadership Conclave made a plea for socially relevant education and mentioned that only 54% of the country’s MBA graduates are deemed employable (Rajya Sabha TV, 2021). The Vice-President offered the predictable advice to increase interactions between academia and industry, in order to expose students to real life situations. In addition, he made it a point to stress the importance of enhancing soft skills of students. The ambiguity of the term soft skills is leveraged strategically and its definition and scope are flexed in accordance with the accompanying pedagogy and its tool kit. Soft skills training is a rubric that houses a variety of domains ranging from etiquette, professional conduct, teamwork, emotional intelligence, adaptability skills, non-verbal communication, even time management and resumé writing. English, communication and soft skills are being linked together as prerequisites to even consider the possibility of a job in a technologized economy. The technical and therapeutic vision that Peters describes (1999: 29) is conflated to serve different institutional agendas and produce a space for defining failure and promoting the remedy of language as self-development.

The singular fact that English separates worlds, social spheres and lifestyles in India has created an economic opportunity. Across diverse domains of Indian society and class lines, there is an increasing demand for English-language competence and communication skills. At the same time, corporate players and politicians alike bemoan the chronic shortage of ‘employable’ youth in the country who can communicate in English. A recent World Bank Group report (2018) declared that in order for India to transition as projected to higher and shared levels of prosperity by 2047—the centenary of its independence—it has to upgrade India’s human capital. Projections about the window of time India has available to skill this population and prepare them with skills for the workforce stirs up anxiety, but also presents an economic opportunity. A growing industry has emerged across India to meet this need for English language and communication training with the promise that the language fix will remake personalities and build confident communicators. Corporate recruiters often allege that young Indians are adequately qualified in their technical knowledge, but they lack proficiency in English necessary for being a professional in today’s world. These terms are used as if they are tethered to commonly understood universal requirements.

In the current environment in India, English is associated with a specific habitus attached to cultural and behavioral expectations of success in corporate environments. Particular ideologies of personhood are built into neoliberal calculations where English language skills are perceived as the prerequisite for polish. The knowledge of English is associated with a particular type of body and social comportment or possessing specific behavioral skills. This proliferation of English language and communication training centers started in the nineties after the explosive growth of the call center industry when India was regarded the back office of the world. Now the emphasis is on creating communicators at large, and communication and fluency in the English language have become synonymous. A neoliberal ethos of self-improvement is firmly entrenched within the systems of language pedagogy which abound in platitudes about confidence, assertiveness, adaptability, emotional intelligence and more. The new turn to soft skills offers communication makeovers which actively gloss over the materialities of class, caste and gender. Language coaching centers are business spaces where the national urgency for skilling becomes opportunities to innovate, to create content, capture a market and scale up operations. The entrepreneurial zest creates both the panic and readies the ground for branding the cure.

A series of judgements about success and failure both cultivate and sustain various types of expectations and serve as the operating rationale for the proliferation of a communication industry. Words like deficit, disconnect, gap, inadequacy or lack are commonly used in this industry to capture the situation of unemployable youth and identify them as being in dire need of a communication and language makeover. Individual traits, backgrounds, societal and regional cultural attributes are stereotypically named as the cause for communication failures. There is also a cascading pattern of scapegoating actors and institutions for the problem of unemployability including ill equipped colleges, untrained teachers, lack of digital infrastructures, a rural mindset or caste backgrounds. These naturalized understandings of failure and miscommunication are incorporated into the design of the communication pedagogy and the diagnosis of the problems to be overcome or rectified. As Peters writes, “miscommunication is the scandal that motivates the very concept of communication in the first place” (1999: 6).

Tool-kit or Shakespeare?

Communication coaching institutions routinely evoke the promise of English and the magic it can deliver in terms of both individual growth and economic enhancement. The belief that English language skills will democratize the playing field in terms of employment opportunities in the digital age is widely held in the public and increasingly being acted upon by educational institutions. The criticism about colleges not preparing students well for employment opportunities has made public academic institutions revisit their English departments and rework the curricular offerings to include service courses for all students in soft skills and applied courses such as English language teaching and business writing. In short, with the applied turn, the teaching of English is currently being demystified of its literary emphasis that produced a generation of elite, postcolonial Anglophone Indians. Instead, the communication training schools focus on context-specific needs and stripped-down vocabulary with the goal of preparing a communication savvy workforce.

Who needs Shakespeare? This memorable and rather dramatic phrase was repeated quite often to me in the course of conversations with English language and communication trainers in India. The bard has held an illustrious place in the history of Indian education. Students for long time have annotated, interpreted and wrestled with the works and words of Shakespeare, the centerpiece of English literary studies in India. In fact, the teaching of Shakespeare in schools and colleges began not in Britain but in India where the civilizing power of Shakespeare was one of the tools by which Indians were to be made quasi-English (Viswanathan, 1998; Marcus, 2017). Today in the rush to skill Indians for a global future and the global market, there is a curious reversal of the old logic. A professor who teaches business communication in a well-known business school in India told me that Shakespearean rhetoric is reinvented in his classroom and used to inspire persuasive business presentations. Scenes and characters from literary texts from a variety of authors are used in colleges as examples to frame discussion of assertiveness, confidence and politeness, all of which are seen as part of the tool kit of good communicators (Dhanavel, 2010). The neoliberal economy has successfully reinstated decontextualized language training in the postcolony as an important asset to building self-confidence for global careers.

Language and communication skills training has become a lucrative enterprise drawing a diverse range of actors and institutions together to what is represented by both the public and private sector as a social project to create and finesse India’s labor pool. In the context of the new literacies demanded by globalization, Deborah Cameron (2004) writes that “we are witnessing the consolidation of a new and powerful discourse on language and communication, which has significant implications both for language teaching and for discussions of its politics” (68). Skilling India’s youth in communication is also framed in economistic terms such as transforming them as employable assets. For example, one often hears phrases such as value-added benefits, maximizing returns, assessing outcomes, optimizing resources or reaping benefits when it comes to skill development. To the student dreaming of being employed and successful in the workplace, communication skills are packaged in the language of instant self-transformation. A carpenter in his sixties whom I met in Bangalore told me that when he was a young apprentice he learnt his trade and was trained to work with wood. Now, he added with irritation, his son who aspires to work in the information technology sector has to learn computers and also go to another school to ‘learn to speak stylishly’. In spite of the public demand, there remains the lingering skepticism whether this new therapeutic and, at the same time, technical discourse of linguistic solutionism will lead to such dramatic transformations of social conditions. Can style fix the system?

The skill sets and communication competencies promoted for the global economy are premised on building the capacity of individuals to adapt in modular fashion to cultural contexts which, in turn, are also defined in static, essentialist terms. These skills acquire an identity of their own and their effects are treated as tangible and measurable and hence useful to the project of self-making in the neoliberal economy. As Urciuoli (2008) writes, skills have become highly fetishized and “workers have come to be seen as personally responsible for skills acquisition, to the point of self-commodification” (212). In neoliberal terms, the self is an incomplete project that has to be constantly updated with newer versions and scripts. For optimum results which can be recorded as an assessment metric, the update has to be initiated and administered by the specialist. The likelihood of failure is worked into the project of self-management. As Ilana Gershon (2011) remarks “selves may intend to choose and risk well, but the potential for failure always haunts such projects. When failure occurs, the responsible self turns to an expert to learn how to choose more effectively” (542). Gershon adds that the expert serves only as an external corrective for unsuccessful self-management and individuals bear sole responsibility for their failures.

In the Indian context, the language soft skills training industry has given rise to a diverse slew of communication specialists. Professors of English literature are now required to teach communication, business writing or soft skills in revamped English departments or coaching centers. The majority of trainers (those who teach in institutes not affiliated with universities) are recruited from diverse backgrounds as long as they possess ‘good communication skills’. A popular recruitment website in India, naukari.com, lists a number of jobs in the categories of communication trainer, soft skills trainer, voice and accent trainer, English and communication trainer or communication coach and the qualifications for these positions are, at best, vague and generic. Most jobs for an English communication trainer state that the candidate should have a passion for teaching and technical knowledge of English communication, an analytical bent of mind and good communication and interpersonal skills. One of my favorite listings for a trainer to prepare students for an international English assessment test asks for “candidates from any specialization who are sound in the English language and possess excellent verbal and written communication skills along with the tact to rectify errors and convey the same in an attractive and engaging manner” (Naukari.com, 2021). There are also expert consultants who are invited by colleges and corporations to bridge the so-called disconnect between education and employment. Urciuoli (2008) argues that there is an inbuilt denotational vagueness about skills that is central to their strategic deployment and communication skills particularly are “fetishized as surefire techniques that can transform users and bring in the bucks (or pounds or euros)” (211). A cottage industry in communication and English training continues to grow and churn out ‘content’ that promises to be user friendly and guarantees results.

However, amidst all the new content, one colonial relic of a textbook continues to live and is a trusted source for all things grammatical in the subcontinent—Percival Christopher Wren and Henry Martin’s High School English Grammar and Composition written in 1935 for use by students in the Madras and Bombay Presidencies of British India. This book has had a long shelf-life even after India’s independence from colonial rule in 1947. It has since been considerably revised by Indian authors but still remains the trusted book for grammar and is recommended widely even by the new community of English trainers.

Flipping through the pages of the 31^st edition of the book reprinted in 1956, I stumbled on the references that were, no doubt, very strategically chosen to educate the Indian school children on the glories of the English language and the British Empire. Consider a few of the sentences used to teach specific principles in grammar. For the use of adjectives and degree of comparison is this sentence: “Shakespeare is greater than any other English poet” (Wren and Martin, 1956: 41); for the use of the definite article: “the immortal Shakespeare” (51); for the parsing of gerunds: “my friend boasted of having read the whole of Shakespeare” (158); special prepositions: “I speak of Shakespeare than whom there is none greater as a dramatist” (192). To fill in the blanks with conjunctions: “Our proudest title is not that we are the contemporaries of Darwin—but that we are the descendants of Shakespeare” (Wren and Martin, 1956: 224). Another version reappears as an example of a complex sentence: “Among the many reasons which make me glad to have been born in England, one of the first is that I read Shakespeare in my mother tongue” (Wren and Martin, 1956: 297). To illustrate the difference between the particularity of proper nouns and the collective nature of common nouns is the example: “Kalidas is often called the Shakespeare (=the greatest dramatist) of India” (Wren and Martin, 1956: 6). Although the grammar text was written in the waning days of Empire with a fair amount of references to Indian characters, Britishness was blatantly projected in the minds of Indian children. The grammar text now works its way back into the corporate communication toolkits.

Allure and Tyranny

For the last few years, I have been traveling in India talking to various groups of people who, in their words, are working in the English-communication space. This is not a new space, as I have tried to show in this essay, but one that has been revived in the context of the global economy and its attendant neoliberal ethos. On one level, the promise of English as opening doors does have its appeal but the templates being churned out and the rules of good communication take their cue from the ghosts of intercultural communication pasts where communities and nations were all collapsed into harmonious and homogenous collectivities with similar communicative predispositions. In the teaching of English, deep social differences are revived and reinserted into the discourse and practice.

As a student of English literature in India, copies of Wren and Martin’s grammar, single editions of Shakespeare’s plays and the Oxford Dictionary were arranged prominently as references on my desk. The colonial curriculum lingered on, unacknowledged and unmarked, even as postcolonial literature made its appearance in our academic reading lists. In my scholarly grandfather’s library, bookshelves with Sanskrit texts, Tamil literature and books on Indian music and politics were arranged separately from the bookshelves with leather-bound volumes of all of Shakespeare’s plays, the Lake Poets, library editions of Dickens and Swift along with his favorite Russian masters. English defined the lives of the Indian postcolonial elite and their place and outlook on the world but it was shelved alongside and with another life. From the early nineteenth century, the question of how to educate Indians was debated vigorously in both India and England. British statesmen like Thomas Macaulay, according to Rimi Chatterjee (2006), had, “somewhat naively, believed that exposure to ‘superior’ Western culture would convert ‘savage’ Indians into uncritical admirers of the West, but in practice each educated Indian came to terms with Western-ness” from their standpoint within Indian culture (6). Of course, this negotiation was not open to all but only for the elite educated in the medium of English. The allure and tyranny of English continues in a reworked register and with a new alliance with the idea of communication.

Returning to Speaking into the Air, Peters writes powerfully that communication is a registry of modern longings. Reading the unfolding story of linguistic infrastructure in India, one sees new longings and desires drawing on the fantasies and ambitions of distant temporalities and geographies but acquiring material forms in the present. The breakdown is a provocative place to start thinking about the layers of connection and networks of meaning enabled and disabled by the material, transnational politics and histories of linguistic choices. Or, in the memorable words of John Durham Peters, we have to pay attention to the unfolding “tragedy, comedy or absurdity of failed communication” (1999: 2) and its global travels and avatars.

References

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Appadurai, A. and Alexander, N. (2019) Failure. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Baviskar, A. and Ray, R. (2011) Elite and Everyman: The Cultural Politics of the Indian Middle Class. New Delhi: Routledge.

Bhagat, C. (2014) Half Girlfriend. New Delhi: Rupa Publications.

Cameron, D. (2004) ‘Globalization and the Teaching of “Communication Skills”’, in: D. Block and D. Cameron, eds., Globalization and Language Teaching. New York: Routledge, pp.67-82.

Chakrabarty, D. (2008) Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Chatterjee, R.B. (2006) Empires of the Mind: A History of the Oxford University Press in India under the Raj. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Dhanavel, S.P. (2010) English and Communication Skills. Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan.

Gershon, I. (2011) ‘Neoliberal Agency’, Current Anthropology 52(4): 537-55.

Hegde, R.S. (2006) ‘Globalizing Gender Studies in Communication’, in: B. Dow and J. Wood, eds., Handbook on Gender Studies in Communication. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, pp.433-449.

Marcus, L. (2017) How Shakespeare Became Colonial: Editorial Tradition and the British Empire. New York: Routledge.

Naukari.com (2021). IELTS Trainer. Available at: https://www.naukri.com/ielts-trainer-jobs-in-bangalore-bengaluru?expJD=true (Accessed: 29, June, 2021).

Peters, J.D. (1999) Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Pooley, J.D. (2018) ‘Wilbur Schramm and the Story of the Four Founding Fathers of the Communication Research Field in the United States of America’, Communications. Media. Design 2(4): 5-18.

Rajya Sabha TV (2021) ‘Vice President’s Address. Indian B-Schools’, Leadership Conclave 2021. 27 April. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xl-n3R82Bnw (Accessed 29 June, 2021).

Rajagopal, A. (2019) ‘A View on the History of Media Theory from the Global South’, Javnost –The Public 26(4): 407-419.

Rajagopal, A. (2020) ‘Communicationism: Cold War Humanism’, Critical Inquiry 46(2): 353-380.

Uma, A., Suneetha Rani, K. and Murali Manohar, D. (2014) ‘Introduction’, in: A. Uma, K. Suneetha Rani and D. Murali Manohar, eds., English in the Dalit Context. Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan, pp.1-9.

Upadhya, C. (2016) Reengineering India: Work, Capital and Class in an Offshore Economy.  Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Urciuoli, B. (2008) ‘Skills and Selves in the New Workplace’, American Ethnologist 35(2): 211-28.

Viswanathan, G. (1989) Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India. New York: Columbia University Press.

World Bank Group Report. (2018) India: Systematic Country Diagnostic. Realizing the Promise of Prosperity. Washington DC: World Bank Group.

Wren, C.P. and Martin, H. (1956) High School English Grammar and Composition. Bombay: K& J Cooper.

Notes

[1] For robust histories of the history of communication and media theory, see Pooley (2018); Rajagopal (2020).

Radha S. Hegde is Professor in the department of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University.

Email: radha.hegde@nyu.edu

Speaking into the Ear: Fecund Truth’s Virgin Medium

KARIM H. KARIM

Carleton University, CANADA

Abstract

Contrary to the widespread view of myth as falsehood, its hermeneutic interpretation has long been seen as providing insight for life’s conundrums. Peters’ (1999) juxtaposition of perfect angelic exchanges of meaning with flawed human discourse opens up fresh approaches for examining communication’s complexities. Religious thought has dealt intriguingly with the ‘media problem’ posed by angels and mortals’ incommensurable difference. Muslim philosophy posits a subtle faculty of the creative imagination / active intellect as a pristine mediator between them. This article explores reparative potential for disinformation’s chaos-inducing harm in our time through an intertextual study of old Jewish, Christian and Muslim narratives, in which speaking and hearing’s relationship with truth is a core value. Scriptural discourses about the discerning mode of the Virgin Mary and the Prophet Muhammad’s respective receptions of the Word offer understanding for engagement with our turbulent mediascape and underline the always current value of such symbolic narratives. 

Keywords

Speech, hearing, medium, myth, hermeneutics, truth

Version of record: http://journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt/article/view/152 

Introduction

Hearing was a primary sense for perceiving the world and a major source of knowledge construction for most of human history. However, its importance has been diminished in the last few centuries. Leigh Eric Schmidt notes that the Enlightenment reduced the aural sense’s epistemic status as it linked rationality more closely to vision: “Marked as a spiritual, emotional, and superstitious sense, the ear posed a potential danger to the clearsightedness of reason” (2000: 7). Suspicion of aurality forced a repositioning and disciplining of acoustic Christian devotions. This view seems to continue in our times and may explain why Sound Studies have remained ‘emerging’ for a long time (Sterne, 2012: 3) as Visual Studies have been rising in prominence. The present article considers orality and aurality to be of central significance and examines them in the contexts of myth and hermeneutics—sources of knowledge that have also been marginalized but which provide considerable perception into the human condition.

Myth is synonymous with falsehood in common parlance but its narratives, contrarily, tell profound truths about life. One of its primary functions is to be didactic, teaching by means of analogy. It relates society’s fundamental problems and conundrums in symbolic and dramatic fashion, inducing perceptions that are unreachable through rational thought. Manifested in literature, art and music, myth’s symbolic and metaphoric language constructs knowledge that is distinct from that of numbers, facts, and empirical observations. It is embedded deeply not only in the religious but also the secular mind (Ellul, 1965). Only a slender thread of scholarship on myth has run through the tapestry of communication research even though “myths about the struggle for Good, of the need for heroes to lead us forward […] [constitute] the narrative underpinnings of TV programmes, blockbuster movies, advertisements and commercials, and virtually anything that gets ‘media air time’” (Marcel Danesi, quoted in Berger, 2013: 2). John Durham Peters’ (1999) erudite examination of communication’s spiritualist tradition validates the study of myth and religion to understand better the endemic problem of miscommunication.

Hermeneutics, one of the oldest theoretical and methodological disciplines affiliated with communication, has been applied for millennia as a mode for interpretation and understanding. Initially limited to the exegesis of scripture, it has also been extended to other scholarly domains such as law and history and has given rise to areas of study like semiotics (Grondin, 1994). It serves to analyze the layers of meanings embedded in texts, images, and sounds. Philosophical debates on hermeneutics have raged for centuries and in more recent times have involved the likes of Dewey, Heidegger, Levinas, Derrida, Habermas, Gadamer, and Ricœur (Peters, 1999). This article leans towards what Kearney (1986) calls Ricœur’s “hermeneutics of affirmation”, which directs analysis towards human emancipation while being cognizant of the tendency to instrumentalize myth to maintain the status quo and assert domination (as expressed in Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx’s “hermeneutics of suspicion”).

Hermeneutics is concerned with the permanent spirit of language […] not as some decorative excess or effusion of subjectivity, but as the creative capacity of language to open up new worlds. Poetic and mythic symbols (for example) do not just express nostalgia for some forgotten world. They constitute a disclosure of unprecedented worlds, an opening on to other possible meanings which transcend the established limits of our actual world […] and (function as) a re-creation of language (Ricœur, quoted in Kearney, 1986: 117).

Even though myth is generally rooted in the past, it holds wisdom for the present. Hermeneutic analysis elicits meanings of symbols and makes available their import for contemporary thought.

This article studies myth with the purpose of gleaning temporally and culturally universal significance that speaks to two core, practical, and inter-related challenges of life: the quest for better communication and the engagement with truth. Symbolism about the relationship between speech, hearing and truth is examined in the Jewish Bible, the New Testament, the Protoevangelium of James, the Qur’an and other religio-cultural sources. Mustapha Akyol’s (2017) intertextual scrutiny of Christian and Muslim sources to approach the life of Jesus offers an instructive model for scrutinizing Abrahamic narratives. The scriptures overlap and complement each other in filling some of the gaps in narratives. Their intertextual readings yield a fuller picture, providing fresh perceptions into the symbolic discourses. The present work also takes a cue from Peters’ (1999) study of Christian theology and extends his ambit to draw from certain Muslim philosophers’ understandings of communication. Ibn Arabi’s concept of creative imagination (Corbin, 1969) opens up new ways to explore notions of the ideal medium and the undistorted passage of messages. Excavation of buried Christian ideas about the Virgin’s conception through the ear and its hermeneutic analysis by Nasir-i Khusraw (1949) stimulate novel ways of thinking about the transmission of truthful content, its disciplined reception, and its reparative potential for our troubled times.

Angels and Humans

Notwithstanding enormous technical advances, the unadulterated transmission of human thought remains an elusive goal. Language and media are crude bearers of meaning because they inexorably distort information. This “pathos of breakdown” (Peters, 1999: 1) frustrates interaction between people and leads to conflict. Philosophers have struggled with the problem for millennia and, to this day, much of “drama, art, cinema, and literature examines the impossibility of communication between people” (ibid: 2). Religion does, however, offer the ideal of perfect understanding; it has also contributed significantly to key communication concepts such as speech, truth-telling, interpretation, meaning, writing, the book, and medium.

St. Aquinas, the prominent thirteenth century Italian Scholastic philosopher also known as ‘Doctor Angelicus’, held that angels are able to comprehend each other’s meanings without material language (Peters, 1999). Some of the earliest ideas about such disembodied spiritual creatures had appeared in 6^th century BCE in the ancient Persian religion founded by Zoroaster (Barr, 1985). Other faiths with origins in the Middle East are also characterized by beliefs in similar beings. Several passages in the Jewish Bible describe interactions of people, usually prophets, with angels. Gabriel’s presence in Christianity and Islam is pivotal. Several categories of angels with specific functions were developed, but the most prominent task was delivering God’s messages.

Though traditions of angelology are diverse, both orthodox and esoteric, ranging across such traditions as Christian Gnosticism, Sufism, and Kabbalah, angels present a model of communication as it should be. They provide us a lasting vision of the ideal speech situation, one without distortion or interference. Angels—a term that comes from the Greek angelos, messenger—are unhindered by distance, are exempt from the supposed limitations of embodiment, and effortlessly couple the psychical and physical, the signified and the signifier, the divine and the human. They are pure bodies of meaning (Peters, 1999: 74-75).

These creatures came to be idealized as beings unburdened by the human corporeality that impedes the transmission and reception of thought.

Religious narratives tell of great occasions when heavenly beings engaged with humans. The imagined efficacy of some of these conversations provides a sharp relief to the foibles of people-to-people interactions. A receding grayscale image of the Annunciation by Rogier van der Weyden (see Wikimedia Commons, 2021) graces the inside title page of Peters’ Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (1999). The fifteenth-century European painting is a classic Middle Ages rendering of the archangel Gabriel (Jibril in the Qur’an) announcing to the Virgin Mary (Maryam) that she would conceive and become the mother of Jesus (Isa) (Luke 1:26; Qur’an, 19:19). Supernatural beings in various cultures’ myths pronounce powerful and fecund words that transform persons and things. However, the abiding significance of such speech usually does not lie in its wondrous manifestations but in what its symbolism teaches people about upholding goodness as they confront the human condition’s limitations (Campbell, 1972). In this, believers hold ancient scripture to bear symbolism that provides wisdom and guidance for daily life, even under the vastly changed conditions of the contemporary world. This has called for a hermeneutics addressing the mediation, reception and understanding of divine speech.

St. Augustine, a fourth-fifth century Church Father whom Peters considers to be “a fountainhead of the concept of communication and a key figure in the history of linguistic theory” (1999: 67), wrote about angelic speech prior to Aquinas. This North African philosopher’s ideas were shaped by a view of the outer and inner realities of words (Augustine, 1978). He held that divine messages have to possess the materiality of sound in order to be heard by mortals; however, this physicality of the communications obscures their inner truth. Religious thought views such truth as transcending space and time: it is the “real, essential Reality, in short, essence of being, the origin of origins, that beyond which nothing is thinkable” (Corbin, 1969: 167). The Church Father believed that although inner meanings bearing truth are not materially apparent, people are intuitively drawn to them because it speaks to their spirit (Augustine, 1978).

Creative Imagination / Active Intellect

The Abrahamic traditions of Jews, Christians and Muslims normatively conceptualize a transcendent God who is far beyond the sensory reach of worshippers. How then does communication between them take place? Augustine sees this as a “media problem” (Peters, 1999: 71) relating to the means of discourse between heaven and earth. Abrahamic and some other religious beliefs hold that humanity apprehends divinity through theophanies, epiphanies, and revelations.

Examining the work of medieval Sufi philosophers such as Ibn Arabi, Qaysari, and Suhrawardi, Corbin described their view of the faculty of creative imagination (quwwat al-khayal) as “an intermediary, a mediatrix” (Corbin, 1969: 217), through which interactions between the divine and the human occur. Muslim neoplatonists referred to it as active intelligence (aql mustafad) (Rahman, 1958). This is human consciousness’s subtle faculty that provides for the perfect mode of communication that is otherwise only possible for God and angels.

Here all the essential realities of being are manifested in real Images; when a thing manifested to senses or the intellect calls for a hermeneutics because it carried a meaning which transcends the simple datum and makes that thing a symbol, this symbolic truth implies a perception on the plane of the Creative Imagination. The wisdom which is concerned with such meanings, which makes things over as symbols and has as its field the intermediate world of subsisting Images, is a wisdom of light, typified in the person of Joseph, the exemplary interpreter of visions (Corbin, 1969: 190).

Joseph (Yusuf) son of Jacob (Yakub) (Genesis, 41:25-32; Qur’an, 12:46-49), is cited as an example par excellence of the hermeneutist with the wisdom and capability to interpret the profound meanings of the true symbols manifested in the creative imagination / active intelligence. The ‘imagination’ here is not the mental source of ordinary thought or that of illusions and fantasies. It is the spiritual faculty which enables the comprehension of the ‘real images’ bearing the absolute truth that, in the terrestrial world, suffers distortion and relativization.

Muslim scholars have engaged rigorously with this topic over time; however, the limited scope of this paper allows for only brief references to them. Sufi, Shia, and Neoplatonist discourses about the creative imagination / active intellect are not normatively shared by Sunni orthodoxy but, on the other hand, have been “transmitted through the Latin Middle Ages all the way into European [Western] modernity” (Bottici, 2014: 55). Although they are overshadowed by the positivist tenor of dominant Western philosophies, including those in the study of communication, their themes run in various areas of contemporary scholarship including Jungian psychology (Hillman, 1972) and the cultural analysis of politics (Bottici, 2014).

Speech’s Fecundity

Ancient concepts about the power of speech are residually extant in present-day secular society. Continual streams of fictional writing and media productions featuring magical incantations enchant mass audiences. Words spoken by those engaged in the supernatural are thought to bless and heal or, contrarily, to curse and kill. The religious believe prescribed phraseologies of communal prayers to have potency. They view saints, prophets and other holy figures performing miracles by reciting sacred phrases. “Words in such a context are words of power or dynamic forces” (Frye, 1990: 6). Scriptures are considered to hold God’s potent speech. Even though celestial beings do not actually have to talk and hear to be understood by each other, they are anthropomorphically characterized with these faculties. God and angels are often conceptualized as speaking to humans without actually speaking—imparting inner meanings without physical communication. Speech in this sense is a metaphor of non-verbal, spiritual conversation. Its means and medium is the creative imagination / active intellect, through which heavenly and earthly interlocutors interact, according to certain medieval Muslim philosophers (see Chittick, 1994; Corbin, 1995; Rahman, 1958).

The monotheist Abrahamic faiths view the Almighty as having supremely powerful speech. Genesis tells of God’s ability to create instantaneously and magisterially with a brief utterance: “And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light” (1:3). The Qur’an has omnipotent divinity create by merely saying one word: “be”:

He it is Who created the heavens and the earth in truth. In that day when He said: ‘Be!’ and it was. His word is the Truth […] (Qur’an, 6:73).

It is noteworthy that in presenting God as all-powerful Abrahamic scriptures specifically refer to speech as the means of creating. The succinct formulation “‘be!’ and it was” (kun fa yakun) appears eight different times in the Qur’an to refer to God’s unique mode of making. A vital characteristic of this supreme power, as stated in the above verse, is that “His word is the Truth”. The creative capacity of God’s utterance is characterized by its absolute verity.

Religious thought’s anthropomorphic attribution of speech to celestial beings also extends to the exhalation of breath in the act of speaking. “By the word of the Lord were the heavens made, their starry host by the breath of his mouth” (Psalms, 33:6). The first human (and by extension all of humanity) was also given life by God’s breath. Genesis’s symbolic account says, “the Lord formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being” (2:7) and the Qur’an says that Adam was given life when God “breathed into him of My Spirit” (15:29). The terms napesh and ruah in the Hebrew Bible and nafs and ruh in the Qur’an (as well as pneuma in Greek) relate variously to soul / spirit as well as to breath (Baert, 2011; Dastagir, 2018). There are many references in mythic narratives around the world about (usually male) deities creating and giving life with their breath, and some even fertilizing women by blowing air at them (Jones, 1974).

A heterosexual link is made between the mouth and procreation. The “very numerous ethnological and mythological instances which reveal the close psychological connection between tongue and penis and between speech and sexual power” (Flugel, 1925) appear to point to the mind’s deep-seated notions about such parallels. Saliva is transformed into semen in this symbolic framework. The “idea of spitting, in particular, is one of the commonest symbolisms in folk-lore for the male act (hence, for instance, the expression ‘the very spit of his father’)” (Jones, 1974: 273). This seems consonant with the dual definitions of the verb ‘ejaculate’: to eject semen and to utter vehemently. Meanings of other English words such as conversation and intercourse also straddle notions of communication and sex. Similar affiliations in terminology with respect to thought would include conception and to know someone. Whereas certain aspects of quotidian language in various cultures are allusions to eroticism, as Freud discussed, some religious narratives and symbols referencing sex point to spiritual interactions between humans and divinity (Sikes, 2019). This metaphoric / symbolic network of meanings becomes pertinent in the discussion below about the emission of the Word from Gabriel’s mouth and the Virgin’s reception and conception through the ear.

When Heaven Speaks to Earth

Religious and mythic lore narrate what are viewed as the wondrous occasions of theophany when deity is manifested in a form that is apprehendable by humans. These are great events that are often meant to provide learnings about believers’ duties. The privileged individuals whom scriptures describe as having received such communications are usually spiritually elevated persons such as prophets. However, it is extremely rare in the Abrahamic tradition that God speaks directly with persons. The Hebrew Bible mentions only two people to whom it happened: Adam (Genesis, 2:16) and Moses (Musa) (Exodus, 20:1-26). This act’s distinctness appears to be specifically referenced in Exodus and in the Qur’an; the latter states, “Allah spoke directly unto Moses” [emphasis inserted] (4:164). However, the theophany granted to Moses is only aural, not ocular. God tells him, “you cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live” (Exodus, 33:20).

Alternatively, God communicates through inspiration: “We inspire thee [Muhammad] as We inspired Noah (Nuh) and the prophets after him, as we inspired Abraham (Ibrahim) and Ishmael (Ismail) and Isaac (Ishaq) and Jacob and the tribes, and Jesus and Job (Ayyub) and Jonah (Yunus) and Aaron (Harun) and Solomon (Sulayman), and we imparted unto David (Dawood) the psalms” (Qur’an, 4:163). According to the New Testament, the Holy Spirit prophesied “through the mouth of David” (Acts, 1:16) and it spoke the truth through Isaiah (Acts, 1:25-27). The Qur’an mentions unnamed angels’ communications to Zechariah (3:39-41) and Mary (3:42). Gabriel is related as carrying God’s word to Daniel (Danyal) (Daniel, 8:16-26), Joseph (Matthew, 1:20-22), Zechariah (Luke, 1:11-19), and Mary (Luke, 1:26-38; Qur’an, 3:42-48). Muslims believe their holy book to comprise the verbatim revelations that the archangel delivered from God to Muhammad over a period of 22 years. It is noteworthy that the Qur’an uses the same word, wahy, for God’s commands to angels (8:12) as for Gabriel’s speech to Muhammad (53:4), indicating two similar series of communications.

Physical senses are not engaged as human and angel meet in the creative imagination’s in-between ‘imaginal world’ (mundus imaginalis / alam al-mithal): “a world as ontologically real as the world of the senses and the world of the intellect, a world that requires a faculty of perception belonging to it, a faculty that is a cognitive function, a noetic value, as fully real as the faculties of sensory perception or intellectual intuition” (italics in the original; Corbin, 1995: 9). In this view, the imaginal world is where the apprehension of true symbols occurs; it has a reality and (non-physical) tangibility that underpins true communication, of which fallible human to human interchange is only a shadow.

Islamic tradition holds that Muhammad first received revelation from Gabriel during a solitary retreat as he was immersed in meditation (Lings, 1983). The opening word was “iqra!” (Qur’an, 96:1), which has the dual meaning of recite and read (comparable to the Latin recito). The latter was startled and asked the angel for clarification. In eventually accepting the instruction, the prophet initiated the reception of revelation that lasted until his death (Lings, 1983). He verbalized the spiritual messages that he received. The imperative verb “iqra” has the same root as the noun “Qur’an” that translates as “Recitation”. Its 114 chapters are held as the linguistic manifestation of divine revelation to Muhammad.

Abrahamic tradition sees God’s Word (Logos / Kalima) as a metonym for language (Frye, 1990), a faculty that, in nature, is unique to humans. The Islamic revelation appears to indicate that God was the source of speech when “He taught Adam all the names” (Qur’an 2:31). Divine discourse was expressed in the Qur’an in the seventh century’s Arabic speech. The revelation’s linguistic signifiers are viewed as true symbols in being the Word of God that bears inner truth. Muhammad and his companions memorized and wrote down the series of revelations, which were compiled as a book following the prophet’s demise. Since “the great theophany of Islam is the Quran” (Schuon, 1976: 43), its phraseology is sacred and immutable for Muslims. They set great store in its precise articulation. Although the Qur’an has been rendered into numerous other languages, the original is considered to be untranslatable as no translation, no matter how rigorous, would replicate the specific ‘text’ received through divine inspiration (Pickthall, 1977)—the link with its divine source would be broken and the truth of the revelation’s inner meanings would be lost.

Muslim theologians have compared Muhammad’s recitation of the Qur’an to Mary’s delivery of Jesus.

The Word of God in Islam is the Quran: in Christianity it is Christ. The vehicle of the Divine Message in Christianity is the Virgin Mary; in Islam it is the soul of the Prophet (Nasr, 1966: 43).

Similar to the New Testament, the Qur’an calls Jesus “a Word [Kalima] from Allah” (3:39; also see 3:45 and 4:171). The stories of Mary and Muhammad in Christian and Muslim sources have structural and sequential similarities. Both persons engaged in intensive spiritual purification before being asked to receive the Word, both were surprised by the appearance of Gabriel and showed initial reluctance in receiving his offering, and both eventually accepted the respectively difficult mission as devotion to God. Mary and Muhammad mediated the Word in their distinct ways by communing in a discerning manner with the archangel. Discernment is viewed Christian and Islamic thought as a way to align with the truth as represented by Jesus (Kunz, 2011) and the Qur’an (Schuon, 1976); another name of the Qur’an is Al-Furqan, translated as the Discernment.

Conception through the Ear

A primary belief of Christianity is that the virginal Mary gave birth to Jesus Son of God. Virgin birth is not completely unusual in humanity’s mythological narratives (Campbell, 1972; Jones, 1974). However, the story of Mary has particular significance because the world’s two largest religious communities, Christians and Muslims, believe it to hold truth. The Word that passed from heaven to earth produced the Christ child, a key figure in Christian and Islamic historiography. (Whereas Muslims treat Jesus reverentially as a major prophet, they do not hold to Christian belief in his divinity.) Not only did the Immaculate Conception overcome human incapacity for perfect communication but it also surpassed ‘usual’ notions of angelic speech. God spoke to Mary through Gabriel and this conversation would have enormous material consequences.

In the story, God sent Gabriel with tidings of the Virgin’s coming pregnancy.

“How will this be”, Mary asked the angel, “since I am a virgin”.

The angel answered, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God” (Luke, 34-35).

Mary and her family appear prominently in the Islamic revelation, which also narrates the mysterious occurrence. The Qur’anic description of the Annunciation and related events (19:16-21; 21:19; 66:12) resonate with the apocryphal gospel called the Protoevangelium of James (Akyol, 2017); both have details that are not present in the New Testament.

Speech acts underlie the Annunciation’s symbolic structure. Gabriel, the messenger of God, brought news of the child to whom Mary would give birth. She was troubled both by the appearance of the stranger, who had “the likeness of a man” (Qur’an, 19:17), and his astonishing announcement. Gabriel persuaded her that she had “found favour with God” (Luke, 1:30) and she consented with discernment to receiving the Word (John, 1:14; Qur’an, 3:38). Unlike the endemic problem of misunderstanding in human dialogue, this angel-human exchange—even though it starts with fear on the part of Mary—led to perfect comprehension with majestic effect. Three communicative acts comprise this narrative: God’s command to Gabriel, the conversation between Gabriel and Mary, and Mary’s reception of the Word. The Annunciation was an invitation for Mary’s participation in the creative imagination / active intelligence (Corbin, 1969), upon which she became the human medium for “the Word made flesh” (John, 1:14). Unlike other worldly mediations, the Logos / Kalima did not undergo degradation in this perfect communication between heaven and earth.

Christian and Muslim theologians have discussed the Virgin Birth for centuries. How did the Holy Spirit enter Mary’s body? Was virginal conception possible? Vast Christological and Mariological literatures grapple with these questions. However, a thesis that is almost unknown in the present but was prevalent in Antiquity and the Middle Ages is the conceptio per aurem (conception through the ear). It states that divine essence entered Mary through the right ear. This is not the only instance in which religious narrative has offered such a story; for example, “the legend of Chigemouni, the Mongolian Saviour, […] chose the most perfect virgin on earth, Mahaenna or Maya, and impregnated her by penetrating into her right ear during sleep” (Jones, 1974: 272-273). However, medieval Christian and Muslim commentators have posited that Mary’s conceptio per aurem was not physical but spiritual (Salvador-Gonzalez, 2016; Khusraw; 1949).

In Luke, this act is described as “The Holy Spirit will come upon you” (1:35). The root of the Latin term spiritus (spirit) is related to breath. Putting a fine point on this sentence in the Gospel, two verses in different parts of the Qur’an say, “We breathed into her something of Our Spirit [ruh]” (21:91; 66:12). The relationship between breath, speech and creation has been discussed above. According to the conceptio per aurem thesis, God’s Word was breathed / spoken into Mary’s ear and it was upon hearing it that she conceived.

The idea of the Word is vital in the Annunciation. Scripture presents it as an essence of God: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John, 1:1). Mary finally says in her interaction with Gabriel, “Let it be done to me according to Your Word” (Luke, 1:38). The sixth-century Armenian Gospel of the Infancy relates:

Just [as] the Virgin pronounced these words with entire humility, the Word of God entered into her through the ear, and the intimate nature of her body, with all her senses, was sanctified and purified as the gold in the crucible. She was converted into a holy temple, immaculate, mansion of the divine Word. And at the same time the Virgin’s pregnancy began (Quoted in Salvador-Gonzalez, 2016: 114).

God’s potent, spiritual Word fecundated in the instant that Mary heard it. Upon entering her, the “Word became flesh […] full of grace and truth” (John, 1:14). Christ on earth was God’s embodied truth.

The first known reference to the idea of conceptio per aurem is that of the fourth-century saint, Ephrem the Syrian (Salvador-Gonzalez, 2016). Christian theologians after the sixth century adopted symbolic subtlety in referring to Mary’s ear not as a ‘reproductive duct’ but as the “acoustic channel by which the Virgin received in immaterial form the message (the Word) of God the Father” (ibid: 111). The prevalence of the conceptio per aurem thesis was demonstrated liturgically in the twelfth-century hymn Septem gaudia Mariae and in a series of European paintings in the late Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Salvador-Gonzalez, 2016; Baert, 2011). However, the sixteenth century Council of Trent banned further mention of the idea and it almost completely disappeared.

The Medium’s Purity

The Annunciation’s discourse underlines the link between communication and the personal status of the interlocutor. It makes a point about the worthiness of Mary to be the Word’s medium. Whereas the New Testament refers to this issue in a cursory manner, its scriptural elaboration seems to appear in the Protoevangelium of James and the Qur’an. Both provide a ‘pregospel’ that narrates Mary’s own birth and childhood. Her mother Anna (Hannah) was thankful for conceiving and she dedicated her child to God. The pregospel’s emphasis is on Mary’s unique purity. Anna, according to the Protoevangelium, “made a sanctuary in her bed-chamber, and allowed nothing common or unclean to pass through her [Mary]” (Akyol, 2017: 109). She also beseeched God to protect her child from Satan’s influence (Qur’an, 2:36).

Then, at the age of three, Mary is dedicated by her parents to “the Temple of the Lord”, to live and worship there as a kind of nun, and Zechariah [Zakariya, who later fathered Yahya i.e. John the Baptist] becomes her caretaker. But Mary has heavenly caretakers, too, who provide her with miraculous nourishment. The Protoevangelium notes […] : “Mary was in the temple of the Lord as if she were a dove that dwelt there, and she received food from the hand of an angel” (Akyol, 2017: 109).

These sources suggest that the Virgin had come under heavenly protection and care long before the Annunciation. The goal of the particular mode of her upbringing was to foster spiritual purity. According to the Qur’an, God made her grow in goodness (3:37) and she is called “truthful” (siddiqah) (5:75). Angels said to her: “Allah hath chosen thee and made thee pure, and hath preferred thee above (all) the women of creation” (3:42). All this suggested that she had been carefully prepared to be the perfect medium for the sacred Word. Only the completely immaculate person could have this unique status. The dominant interpretations of Mary’s virginity have been about its physical nature; however, what emerges is an emphasis on her spiritual chasteness. Discourses about the Virgin, in this context, are read within the above-discussed symbolic framework in which the sexual is a metaphor for the spiritual.

Chastity is linked directly to communicative (specifically, aural) purity in some Marian narratives. The eleventh century Ismaili Muslim philosopher Nasir-i Khusraw (1949) interpreted Mary’s virginity in terms of what she permitted herself to hear. Ismailis are a branch of Shia Islam that gives particular emphasis to esoteric hermeneutics (tawil) (Corbin, 1969; Karim, 2015). Whereas Muslims generally agree that Qur’anic verses have surface, exoteric (zahiri) and inner, esoteric (batini) meanings, the Shia and Sufis tend to hold the latter to be of greater significance. Anagogic interpretations of scripture are also conducted in other religious traditions, for example by Jewish Kabbalists and Christian Gnostics. Even Augustine, a Church Father, favoured hermeneutics that acknowledged that in “the interior lies the truth” (Peters, 1999: 71).

Writing within the thesis of aural conception, Khusraw offered a tawil of what he held to be the Annunciation’s inner meaning:

This is as God says (xxi, 91) in the story of Mary, peace be upon her! “The daughter of ‘Imran who guarded her sexual organs, and We breathed into her of Our Spirit”. This means that Maryam did not turn her ears to the devils (Iblisan) with their speeches. This is because the sexual organ is like the ear, […]  “She guarded her sexual organ” means that she did not turn her ear to those who only teach the zahir, formal side of the religion (zahir-sukhaniyan), disregarding the esoteric interpretation (ta’wil) (1949: 29).

Mary was virginal, in Khusraw’s reading, in the sense that her listening privileged the inner purity of truth. Sexual chastity is hermeneutically interpreted as a metaphor for spiritual chastity. Mary’s disciplined listening was not compromised by the din of exoteric distractions. For Sufis, she was ‘the woman unspoiled by worldly concern’ (Schimmel, 1975: 35): chaste upbringing and discerned devotion to truthfulness had made her “the pure receptacle of the divine spirit” (ibid).

Another communicative nuance appears in examining more closely the portrayal of Mary’s protection against improper speech. She is described in the Qur’an as being in a solitary spiritual retreat just prior to the Annunciation (19:16-17), as if unknowingly being in final preparation for the destined event. Having secluded herself from human contact and conversation, she was shaken at seeing and hearing a man. Declaring singular attention to God, she stated: “I seek refuge in the Beneficent One from thee” (19:18; also see Luke, 1:29). This moment is depicted in paintings such as the fourteenth century Simone Martini’s “Annunciation with St. Margaret and St. Ansanus” (Wikimedia Commons, 2020), which shows Mary turning away as if to protect herself from Gabriel. As is typical in most Christian paintings of her, she is portrayed here with the head draped by a garment that functions like a nun’s habit (and a Muslim hijab) in also covering the ears (Jones, 1974). This seems symbolic of the care that the Virgin took in discerning what penetrated these naturally exposed and open organs (unlike the eyes that can be closed) and in protecting their chastity. The fourth-century St. Zeno of Verona contrasted Mary’s disciplined listening with how “the devil caused the death when violating Eve by sliding down her ear through persuasion” (Salvador-Gonzalez, 2016: 106). The Virgin was devoted only to the greater truth, but the latter (in Jewish and Christian traditions) was careless in allowing herself to listen to information that ended her (and humanity’s) paradisiacal existence. Communication appears here as a weighty matter that can produce a magnificent outcome when treated with diligence; on the other hand, undisciplined use of the senses can cause devastation.

Conclusion

The story of the Immaculate Conception has captivated imaginations for generations. Close intertextual scrutiny of its accounts in ancient materials has the potential of uncovering their profound relevance to contemporary social, political, and philosophical struggles. This article’s hermeneutic analysis shows that the event’s symbolism imparts meanings that extend far beyond the narratives’ overt aspects. At least one universal element that is relevant to contemporary public life emerges, namely, the importance of protecting the verity of communication. In an age when many have turned from ostensibly valuing truth to embracing chaos-producing post-truth (Grossberg, 2018), some of humanity’s cardinal sources offer longstanding wisdom and fresh perspectives for repairing society. Illuminating realizations arise from myth’s dramatic play of absolutes that other epistemic modes and methods do not enable.

The conceptio per aurem thesis provides for a close study into the communicative aspects of the iconic story. Mary’s supreme aural discipline in safeguarding herself from corrupted discourse made her uniquely worthy to receive the supreme Word. This symbolic account serves to valorize speech and hearing as precious gifts and to highlight their proper function as vehicles for truth. It encourages us to consider two distinct notions in the link between orality, aurality and thought: 1) corrupted speech – undisciplined hearing – conception of flawed ideas and 2) truthful speech – listening with discernment – conception of sound ideas.

However, the endeavour to discipline the senses, which has a long history in human discourses, stands on contested ground. God commanded Adam and Eve not to taste the forbidden fruit. The father of young Gautama (Buddha) sought to prevent him from seeing the world’s harsh realities. Religious and secular authorities have legislated the covering of bodies to control the gaze. Censorship ratings regulate children’s exposure to media content.

The senses, their management and augmentation, became a crucial proving ground in the making of modernity, and the spiritual sensorium of Christianity was caught up in those perceptual projects, hearing especially. The new sensory disciplines, refinements, and pleasures cultivated during the Enlightenment and its aftermath were steeped in their own forms of sensuality and repression. Practices of listening revealed those conflicts with particular intensity: What were people allowed to hear? What ecstasies permitted, what voices denied, what sounds entertained, what diseases invented, what angels invoked or silenced? (Schmidt, 2000: viii).

Such questions have gained greater relevance in the context of our time’s vast, expanding, and cacophonous mediascape that, among other things, has produced intense mistrust about the reliability of information. Long promoted as a basic principle in religion, truth is similarly valued by secular modernity. But the politically driven denial of its very existence risks societal breakdown. It is not an onerous expectation in contemporary contexts that persons exercise discernment and discipline in speaking, listening, and thinking in order to ensure the effective functioning of social systems.

Peters (1999) favours approaches to communication that are pragmatic and simultaneously responsive to the wisdom of the ages. This brief article has largely dwelt on truth in an absolute sense to explore the revalorization of the concept’s essential core as a necessary basis and precursor for engaging practically with the human condition’s limits and relativism. Absolute truth remains humanly unattainable, but recognition of its vital importance serves to identify it as an ideal in the direction of which to strive. In a world where corruption and miscommunication are inescapable, the “hermeneutics of affirmation focus […] on the horizon of aspiration opened up by […] symbols” (Kearney, 1986: 116). Mortals do not possess the perfect speech of angels, but they should not desist from enriching their communications with the goodness of truth.

References

Akyol, M. (2017) The Islamic Jesus: How the King of the Jews Became a Prophet of the Muslims. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin.

Baert, B. (2011) ‘The Annunciation Revisited. Essay on the Concept of Wind and the Senses in Late Medieval and Early Modern Visual Culture’, Critica d’Arte 47: 57-68.

Barr, J. (1985) ‘The Question of Religious Influence: The Case of Zoroastrianism, Judaism, and Christianity’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 52(2): 201-235.

Berger, A. (2013) Media, Myth, and Society. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Bottici, C. (2014) Imaginal Politics: Images Beyond Imagination and the Imaginary. New York: Columbia University Press.

Campbell, J. (1972) The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Chittick, W. (1994) Imaginal Worlds: Ibn al-Arabi and the Problem of Religious Diversity. New York: State University of New York Press.

Corbin, H. (1969) Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi (trans. R. Mannheim). Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Corbin, H. (1995) Swedenborg and Esoteric Islam (trans. L. Fox). West Chester: Swedenborg Foundation.

Dastagir, G. (2018) ‘Nafs’, in: Z.R. Kassam, Y.K. Greenberg and J. Bagli, eds., Encyclopedia of Indian Religions: Islam, Judaism, and Zoroastrianism. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer.

Ellul, J. (1965). Propaganda (trans. K. Kellen). New York: Knopf.

Flugel, J. (1925) ‘A Note on the Phallic Significance of the Tongue and of Speech’, International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 6: 209-215.

Frye, N. (1990) The Great Code: The Bible & Literature. Toronto: Penguin Books.

Glorious Qur’an, The (trans. M. Pickthall). (1977) New York, NY: Muslim World League.

Grondin, J. (1994) Introduction to Philosophical Hermeneutics. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Grossberg, L. (2018) Under the Cover of Chaos: Trump and the Battle for the American Right. London: Pluto Press.

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Holy Bible: New International Version. (1973) Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.

Jones, E. (1974) Psycho-Myth, Psycho-History, vol. 2. New York: Hillstone.

Karim, K. (2015) ‘A Semiotics of Infinite Translucence: The Exoteric and Esoteric in Ismaili Muslim Hermeneutics’, Canadian Journal of Communication 40(1): 11-28.

Kearney, R. (1986) ‘Religion and Ideology: Paul Ricœur’s Hermeneutic Conflict’, The Irish Theological Quarterly 52(1-2):109-126.

Khusraw, N. (1949) Six Chapters or Shish Fasl, also Called Rawshana’i-nama (trans. W. Ivanow). Leiden, Holland: Brill.

Kunz, S. (2011) ‘Respecting the Boundaries of Knowledge: Teaching Christian Discernment with Humility and Dignity, a Response to Paul O. Ingram’, Buddhist-Christian Studies 31: 175-186.

Lings, M. (1983) Muhammad: His Life Based on the Earliest Sources. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions.

Nasr, S. (1966) Ideals and Realities of Islam. London: George Allen & Unwin.

Peters, J. (1999) Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Rahman, F. (1958) Prophecy in Islam. London: George Allen & Unwin.

Salvador-Gonzalez, J. (2016) ‘Per Aurem Intrat Christus in Mariam: An Iconographic Approach to the Conceptio per Aurem in Italian Trecento Painting from Patristic and Theological Sources’, De Medio Aevo 9(1): 83-122.

Schmidt, L. (2000). Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Schuon, F. (1976) Understanding Islam. London: Mandala.

Sikes, M. (2019) ‘Eroticism as a Metaphor for the Human-Divine Relationship in Attar’s Conference of the Birds, or Mantiqu’t-Tair’, Quidditas 40(6): 37-88.

Sterne, J. (2012) ‘Sonic Imaginations’, in J. Sterne, ed., The Sound Studies Reader. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, pp.1-17.

Wikimedia Commons. (2020) ‘File: Simone Martini – The Annunciation and Two Saints excerpt.JPG’. Available at: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/‌File:‌Simone_Martini_-_The_Annunciation_and_Two_Saints_excerpt.JPG

Wikimedia Commons (2021) ‘File: Rogier van der Wieden 008.jpg’. Available at: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rogier_van_der_Weyden_008.jpg.

Karim H. Karim is Chancellor’s Professor at Carleton University’s School of Journalism and Communication. He has published on media, inter-cultural communication, diaspora, and religion. His work has been translated in several languages and is cited extensively. He won the inaugural Robinson Book Prize for the critically acclaimed Islamic Peril: Media and Global Violence (2000; 2003) and his most widely-read article is the co-authored “Clash of Ignorance” (2012).  Karim is currently examining Indic-Islamic intersectionalities and the political erasure of inter-religious hybridity. Karim has been a visiting professor at Harvard, Simon Fraser, and Aga Khan universities and has delivered distinguished lectures in several countries.

Email: KarimKarim@Cunet.Carleton.Ca

Whispers of a Secret: From Non-reception to New Life in Existential Media Studies – Speaking into the Air in Sweden

AMANDA LAGERKVIST

Uppsala University, SWEDEN

Abstract

Upon arrival in Sweden, Speaking into the Air was not spoken about. Instead, it was whispered about—often with admiration, sometimes in perplexment. This article contextualizes the non-reception in light of three circumstances: the Swedish consensus culture in which dialogue is sacred, the role of media in the nation for disseminating the dialogical praxis and its results, and the Swedish model of media studies. The article shows how the book’s many open secrets (the stress on the simplicity of being there, human fragility, death and communication, embodiment and interruption) eventually provided the richest source of inspiration, as Speaking enjoyed new life in existential media studies. 

Keywords

memoir, existentialism, limits, Karl Jaspers, communicative breakdown, consensus culture, the Swedish model, history of media studies

Version of record: http://journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt/article/view/151 

The sense of shortcoming in communication is thus an origin of the breakthrough to Existenz, and of a philosophizing that tends to elucidate the breakthrough. As all philosophizing starts with wonder, and as mundane knowledge starts with doubt, the elucidation of Existenz starts with the experience of shortcoming in communication.

Karl Jaspers, Philosophy Vol II (1932/1970: 51)

Those who have ears to hear will hear.

John D. Peters, Speaking into the Air (1999: 63)

The untold tale of Speaking into the Air in Sweden is one of lapses and gaps, but also of a new beginning. It’s a story about interruptions and secrets and, perhaps, a tardily seized opportunity. In this essay I will set out in an unusually permissive manner. I will allow myself to rely on somewhat impressionistic memories of its reception from my PhD student days. I will also share the personal account of what Speaking came to mean in my own scholarship and intellectual growth. As I hope to show, the seeds sown in the book are enjoying a late and perhaps unexpected bloom in one corner of the media studies field and reaping its fruits have only begun.

Upon arrival in Sweden, most importantly, I recall that Speaking was a book not spoken about. It was one of those books that some professors whispered about, often with great admiration, sometimes in bewilderment. It was seen as brilliant and odd, fascinating but weird, gripping yet provocative, and for some, notably, too religious for their tastes.^[1] The book was to my knowledge not reviewed in key journals in the Nordic media context.^[2] It never became a staple reading of the curriculum in media history classes (if there were any): it was not elevated to the status of a key text in need of being engaged, discussed and critiqued in the PhD programs across the country, etc. Sweden is thus an aberration from the depiction of its impact in other parts of the world, as described in the call to this special issue:

Peters provocatively inverts these two communicative modes—dialogue, so readily assumed by the Western tradition to be a guarantor of democracy and community, and dissemination, usually denigrated as useless noise or mindless chatter— arguing that in fact “dialogue can be tyrannical and dissemination can be just” (1999: 34). The concision of this idea and its power to disrupt conventional thinking about communication has led to its ubiquitous presence in introductory undergraduate courses around the world. The book’s hospitality to creative and experimental approaches to questions of communication and media means it is a mainstay on Ph.D. comprehensive examination lists in the field.

Instead of becoming a mainstay, it has been briefly cited here and there in introductions to key concepts, or to the canonized texts and frameworks for students in Swedish.^[3] But to my mind, it seems to have been received mostly as a special case, an exotic and eccentric outlook on things, adding new aspects rather than stirring things up profoundly. For some it was clearly a book of revealing insight. Perhaps this was mostly the case for the individual scholar with humanistic passions who, we might conjecture, turned to it during isolated hours under the nightlight; an imperiled creature who was then, and is even more today, at risk. In broad daylight by contrast, it was whispered about and thus omitted from the powerful story that we tell about ourselves as a discipline through which students are taught the disciplining lessons about what matters, what trails to follow and who to cite. In any case, rather than agitating the field, it became an open secret.

Around the Millennium I was four years into the PhD program in MCS at Stockholm University. The whispers dominated my initial impressions. But what happens when you start whispering things around the PhD students is that some of them will get really interested. When I opened the book, I knew immediately that it was too late for me. In spite of being young and green, I was able to perceive that it contained a true shift of perspective. Indeed, it turned doxa on its head, suggesting that the chief ideal for communication in our culture, captured through the trope of dialogue could in fact be tyrannical and that dissemination could in some senses be more democratic. This seemed counterintuitive, scandalous and—yes, imperative. But the scope was so daunting that I decided that this was for another day. I had to finish my thesis. And yet as an aspiring media historian with a degree in intellectual history, theology, philosophy and gender studies, it was closer to my way of approaching the world of media than much that was published at that time.

My dissertation Imaginary America: Gender, Media and Visuality in Swedish Post-war Travelogues (Lagerkvist, 2005; see 2008)^[4] was a media phenomenological study at the intersection of intellectual history, media history, cultural studies, cultural geography, American Studies, feminist media theory and travel theory. Influenced by The New Cultural History and historians such as Lynn Hunt, Hayden White and Dominick LaCapra (see Hunt, 1989) and inspired by the Danish media scholar Kirsten Drotner, I advocated that we needed a cultural history of media that included a focus on visual culture. I also adamantly argued for pluralizing our media histories (Lagerkvist, 2003). A cultural history of media in Sweden in the postwar era, I argued, could not be separated from our relationship to ‘The Future’, that is, to the United States. Having identified the symbolically significant European journey to America, and more specifically the US (a central trope in both contexts) as key for my theorization, I examined the role of mediation for traveling and the roles of traveling cultures for media history. Studying how traveling Swedes on physical journeys to the USA made sense of their encounters with the mediated land in travelogues, I was also always at heart a media phenomenologist, trying to grasp how media, time, space, visuality and the imaginary intersect. Without jettisoning discourse and representation, I thus placed emphasis on real bodies and physical environments in relation to media and the imagination.

Hence, these historical, theoretical and philosophical interests made me a dormant ally of Speaking from the very onset, one in waiting for providence. To properly engage with the book in my research became possible only later. This was a journey that I seriously set out on exactly ten years ago when I started to think about ‘existentializing’ media theory. It was actually my encounters with Kierkegaard in the spring of 2010 that brought me back to Speaking. My own fuller reception could finally occur in the context of a project I headed called Existential Terrains: Memory and Meaning in Cultures of Connectivity (2014-2018) that focused specifically but not exclusively on death in digital existence.^[5] The book played an important role as I set out together with my group to argue that since we are today encountering and exploring the larger issues of meaning and meaninglessness, loneliness and sociality, the finite and the infinite on the internet, we need to study it from the vantage point of being, rather than reducing these phenomena to aspects of the political, cultural, social or economic dimensions of mediated human communication.

Existential media studies, in a nutshell then, revisits what it means to be human in the digital age. It remaps media, digital culture and automation in light of existential philosophy’s key themes, beginning with limits (finitude), vulnerability (thrownness, contingency), relationality (intersubjectivity), and responsibility (ethics) (Lagerkvist, 2016; 2019). Finally, it reconceives of media as an existential terrain that needs to be navigated and of the media user as a coexisting being, a coexister, who in shared vulnerability and through lifeline communication confirms being there for one another in and with the digital world (Lagerkvist and Andersson, 2017). Placing mourners, the coexisters, centrally in the slow field of existential media studies is also an act of rebellion, asking us to reflect on the norms of speed and quantification in both life and research. This is especially pregnant and important today as the world is in a civilizational limit situation: a moment of rupture and crisis, of global mourning and of grief. In the limit situation of loss, crisis and guilt, argued the German existentialist philosopher Karl Jaspers, there is an utter potentiality for “becoming ourselves”. As I will discuss further below, ours is in fact a digital limit situation (Lagerkvist, 2022) in which there are profound politico-ethical and existential stakes of digital media.

In this brief essay, I will first try to contextualize the non-response and then devote the remainder to how Speaking has both inspired and been given new life in existential media studies. I will suggest that there may have been particular reasons that its main mission and chief message fell under our radar. To approach why this was the case a familiar method will be used. As we so often reiterate in media and cultural studies, the bearings of texts always rely on contexts and achieve their meaning through them. This text arrived in a very specific setting, to which I now turn.

Swedish Models: Sacred Dialogue and Solemn Dissemination

I suggest that the non-reception of such a trailblazing text can be interpreted in light of three circumstances in which dialogue and dissemination are enacted and played out in specific ways. First, Speaking into the Air arrived in a context—late modern Sweden—wherein dialogue was and had been for a very long time, holy, because it sustained the entire social contract. As for the Swedes, one can even say that dialogue is our ‘middle name’. We are peaceable beings, inclined to avoid conflict or dissent and believing in consensus.^[6] This has an important history. The interwar era was marked by conflicts between workers and employers and there was social unrest in Swedish society, which called for solutions. Workers, academics, representatives from the Church of Sweden and employers were in accord that something had to be done. They began a decades-long dialogue from 1922 and then met annually on neutral ground at the Sigtuna Foundation near Stockholm. This laid the groundwork for the conference in 1928 when work peace was achieved (de Geer, 2008), which in turn paved the way for the codification of this in the agreement at Saltsjöbaden in 1938.

The price for the compromise for the unions was to do away with Marxism and class struggle and the employers had to commit themselves to continue the dialogue and to invest in the workers’ wellbeing. The result was a strong trust in Folkhemmet—the People’s Home—and in turn in a reinvestment in society’s institutions. At the heart of the The Swedish Model were the salary negotiations. It further implied a strong state and high taxes, universal allowances, universal and free childcare and healthcare, parental leave and free education. The famous Swedish model was thus the result of decades of compromise. It was founded on the pragmatic and urgent need to cooperate, compromise, to solve common problems, ensure stability and build a functioning society. It was never a radical or progressive model, but it was effective as a broadly shared vision of reality (Hedin, 2015). In communicative terms, following Peters, it was a making do for pragmatic results. It exemplified a unity around certain values, yet without complete unification. Hence, this comes close to what Speaking calls “a pragmatist mode of communication” for creating community, exemplifying communication as an act of making common an ideal and of forging a world.

Importantly this world had to be continuously re-forged. Unions and employers met every year for salary negotiations and these rituals reestablished the contract in physical space, in every organization or company across the country. But as James Carey has taught us, in our modern societies, media have played crucial roles precisely in such symbolic processes of maintaining and repairing reality. Could we infer that—and this is the second dimension I wish to call attention to—public service radio and later television broadcasted the result of this grand dialogic endeavor: ideas that corresponded to the social contract and upheld it? It seems not farfetched to suggest that dissemination of those central tenets of the Swedish model via broadcasting and the press, from the center to the broad general public and electorate, was a key feature of Swedish life for decades. These values were, in such a reading, thus solemnly articulated and distributed via media, which reproduced the ideology and the common goal—also of the dialogue itself. For example, Sweden was in journalistic discourse at the height of the powers of the Swedish model in the mid-50s, broadly depicted as a literal and metaphoric “bridge-building” society (Ekecrantz, 1997: 404).

The third dimension pertains to the research field of media studies and its local timbre. While worries about propaganda seem to be less manifest in Sweden in the conception of media studies than in other places (see Jakobsson and Stiernstedt, 2020) here—as elsewhere in modern societies—the concerns around American mass culture had been a major issue for intellectuals and elites at least from the interwar era and onwards, long before the Americanization debates of the 1960s and 70s (see Lagerkvist, 2005).^[7] Since the inception of mass communication research in the 1950s and 1960s—and during its formative phase in 1970s, but also later— ​the ways in which the mass media potentially influence the audience, with harmful effects, was thus a key mobiliser. But there are also other defining traits of the Swedish case. My impression, from my admittedly limited viewpoint and subjective memoirs, is that the focus was often on examining features of media pitted against how they contributed to or undermined, maintained or preserved the ideals and values of the welfare state. Perhaps it would be an exaggeration to speak of a dominance of such a perspective or to argue that the Swedish Model with its dialogic ideals was a master signifier within the discourse that constituted the often-acclaimed multidisciplinary field of Swedish media studies. To me it was nevertheless evident that certain core features of the Swedish Model—and the dialogic praxis behind it—were reflected in research interests of senior faculty during my PhD years in the 1990s, as they examined the history of the press or of television with critical and feminist edges (Ekecrantz, 1997; Kleberg, 1999).

Speaking into the Air arrived in an intellectual space steeped from the beginning in social sciences perspectives and prone to place journalism and political communication at the center. And yet, around the turn of the Millennium, many things had been, and were continuously, changing. The media context was itself transforming through a growing commercialization of the media system and through digitalization of society.^[8] Speaking also came to our shores, importantly, when cultural studies—focusing on meaning, culture, hegemony and resistance—was at a peak and had been making important inroads into this very field for more than a decade. MCS had since the 1980s undergone a “cultural turn” (von Feilitzen, 1994; Carlsson, 2007) and cultural studies brought its own humanistic, feminist, critical and culturalist stakes to the table, broadening the purview of both the object of study and the means for critically engaging media cultures (see Fornäs, 1995; Ganetz, 1997; 1998).

Part of the initiation in this era for PhD students was to learn how to navigate a rather polarized field, where the cultural studies strand stood for the humanistic focus on meaning, text, and context in the everyday, and the social scientific strand stood for a focus on institutions, sociological structures and power relations. Another key opposition concerned the coarsened dividing line between an appreciation for popular culture and a focus on the hardcore of the media field: journalism. There were in reality, of course, intermediaries and quite a number of humanistic and culturalist approaches to, for example, the history of journalism (see Åker, 1998; Widestedt, 2001), but the polarization was nevertheless felt. It seemed even at times to have produced tribes of culturalists versus structuralists.^[9] The former were often underdogs in their own self-perception. By contrast, Ulla Carlsson (2007) looks back and critically addresses a new hegemony for the culturalist approach in this phase, as an expression of both dissention and eclecticism, and traces a consensus culture to the field, at once:

The “cultural turn” has had a far stronger impact on media studies than on many other fields. The outcome, however, has not been greater unity of focus, but rather the opposite, and in retrospect we may ask: In an era when issues relating to the power and morality of media institutions were more urgently important than ever before, where were the social scientists—why were they so quiet? Was it because they were busy pursuing consensus in the field, or was it because of “marketisation”? Or, were they simply totally absorbed in the Zeitgeist? (Carlsson, 2007: 225-226).

So, at that point in time, according to Carlsson, humanistic perspectives had a strong authority, and they had even overtaken the initiative from other approaches during the field’s gestation. Yet, as much as the cultural turn was impactful, it never seemed for me to constitute such a dominant force. Still, in the late 90s, as I entered the field, cultural studies rather appeared as a newcomer with a fresh outlook, in the process of disembarking a solidly established center of knowledge production located in the tradition of the social sciences.^[10] By bringing into view popular cultural forms, cultural studies provided a problematization of the primacy of journalism for understanding why and how media matter.

At the time, and especially for those bogged down in the mud as it were, media studies thus seemed grounded in and constituted by oppositional trenches. A birds-eye view might however reveal a topography that actually quite successfully combined humanistic and social science perspectives (see Bolin and Forsman in Jakobsson and Stiernstedt, 2020). A multidisciplinary openness was also prized by pioneers such as professor Kjell Nowak, a ‘founding father’ of the discipline who was himself trained in economic behaviorism which informed his early effects research, but whose open-mindedness to new perspectives became key during the formative years of media and communication studies in Sweden. It was during Nowak’s time that I was invited aboard by feminist media historian Madeleine Kleberg.

Speaking did not neatly belong to any camp on this map. Yet it is also a very critical book, a reaction to a field that seems unable to grasp the profundities and complexities of what it means to be human, and by consequence what it could mean to be communicating with each other. Its core ideas had normative implications that cut across and beyond the debates so firmly in place. I believe all these circumstances may to some extent account for the non-reception of Speaking. At least they serve as a partial explanation.

Ultimate Matters: Existential Media Studies

I found myself ‘thrown’, to speak in Heideggerian terms, into media studies. Yet I cherished important perspectives offered in critical cultural theory, such as, for example, feminism and qualitative methods. From my horizon, and this dawned upon me progressively, other key humanistic treasures than those safeguarded by cultural studies, such as cultural history and certain strands of philosophy, were not sufficiently engaged with in media studies overall. I also gradually felt that something else was wanting. This way Speaking into the Air has been and remains an important source for those of us in media studies who feel that the field is sometimes sterile, removed from what really matters, and thus from ultimate issues. For me, the book is deeply existential and has offered a wealth of ideas fundamental to the project of existential media studies. From it I subsequently took several important cues for attempting to remedy what I have called the “existential deficit” in media studies (Lagerkvist, 2022). It opened up the richest source of inspiration as it combined a pragmatist and existential approach through a focus on embodiment and silence, as it placed stress on the simplicity of being there and through its emphasis on human fragility. And as we will see in the following, Peters’ discussions on death and communication were also pivotal for the work I subsequently set out to do on death in the digital age.

Existential media studies brings existential philosophy into a renewed conversation with media theory. Following Søren Kierkegaard, to be human is to be passionately involved in this life in the face of absurdities and risks (1843). Speaking, which discusses Kierkegaard at length, had a similar message. It thus gave me license to say: what if life, media life and media studies is a passionate drama that means something? Beginning like this in nineteenth century Copenhagen (rather than at, for example, Columbia University) allows for seeing human life also in the age of media as an irresolvable paradox, involving both freedom and necessity and containing inescapable tragedy. So, for this reader, Speaking was thus ultimately an existentialist intervention. Its historicizations made media and communication part of the human condition in deep time, allowing our field to take on grander missions (as Peters has also argued of late, 2015). It also offers a series of non-realized potentials, sending its reader (again, me) along alternative and potential trajectories for thinking about what media and communication are, and most importantly what they could mean. It’s almost as if it is threading through an underbelly of the discipline, in revaluing abject forms of strangeness and otherness, silence and embodiment in obscure terrains among canonized philosophers, iconic figures such as Socrates and Jesus, and other even more alien beings.

Speaking quite manifestly suggests, as the fourth of the five listed communication theories in its introduction, a distinctly existential mode of communicating. It here stresses the potential of communication as world disclosure, and with inspiration from Heidegger, as the hearing of otherness. It furthermore offers a germane existential concept of vulnerability that speaks to us all, a vision in which love and frailty are deeply connected (Peters, 1999: “Conclusion: A squeeze of the hand”). For the Existential Terrains project that was conceived already in 2011, but started in 2014, Chapter 4: “Phantasms of the living, dialogues with the dead”, was especially significant and became a source of inspiration for exploring death also in the digital age, existentially. Peters here identified that “[t]he two key existential facts about modern media are these: the ease with which the living may mingle with the communicable traces of the dead, and the difficulty of distinguishing communication at a distance from communication with the dead” (1999: 149). This set us on course to try to track down the key “existential facts” of our digital media culture—a grand venture still not completed (Lagerkvist, 2013).

Finally, but most importantly, the emphasis in Speaking on limits, failures and irreducibilities opened up a way to rethink authenticity as our condition of interruption and breakdown. This is much in line with Karl Jaspers, a key thinker of the classic tradition of existential philosophy whom I’m drawing on extensively in my book Existential Media: A Media Theory of the Limit Situation (Lagerkvist, 2022), which offers a reappreciation of Jaspers’ philosophy of communication for media studies, and a media theory of limit and the limit situation, as a corrective to an era of limitless connectivity and ideals for speed and immediacy. There is in fact confluence in the thinking of Jaspers and Peters. Peters stresses the sense in which communication must be conceived “never as the touching of consciousness, only as the interpretation of traces” (Peters 1999: 153). Communication thus understood is more than the result of limits, of gaps (Peters, 1994), but will inevitably in itself also produce new interruptions, new failures. Emphasizing the breakdown of communication, the impossibility of dialogue, Peters argues that Søren Kierkegaard saw “communication as a mode of revealing and concealing, not of information exchange” (Peters 1999: 129). To speak the unspeakable, Kierkegaard thus resorted to indirect communication.

Instead of offering such reflexively ironic maneuvers, Jaspers suggests there is an opportunity in the break itself: “The sense of shortcoming in communication is thus an origin of the breakthrough to Existenz, and of a philosophizing that tends to elucidate the breakthrough” (1932/1970: 51). Jaspers fully recognizes both limits and uncertainty, and how they are given exemplary form in speech. Speech is a risk, since it is fated to fail when the stakes are highest. In other words, for Jaspers the most important things human beings can say to one another, or share, cannot quite be said. Yet, precisely here in dysfluency is the starting point for another form of communication. Our failure constitutes the moment when we are called to act in order to ‘become ourselves’, in the limit situations of life, which requires our whole being. This is when we may enter into existential communication. There is thus a deep connection for Jaspers between truth and uncertainty, and between truth and communicative breakdown:

If, however, truth for us in every form remains a limit in the realization of communication, then the insurmountable incompleteness of the world and all worldly, knowable truth is final for immanence. Every form of truth must be shipwrecked in the world and none can substitute itself absolutely for the truth (Jaspers, 1935/1997: 98, italics added).

Hence, for both Peters and Jaspers the truth and communicative failure are fundamentally bracketed. In The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media, Peters moves his epicenter from such shipwrecks to ships (at sea) as a literal metaphor for survival. Surviving comes down to crafts and technē, that is, fundamental artificial techniques that bring environments and media into being: “The ship makes the sea into a medium” (2015: 111). This demonstrates the book’s chief argument, namely that infrastructure precedes both the medium (of communication/transportation) and the cargo onboard. Chiseling out an elemental philosophy of existential import, and continuing the broadening move made in Speaking (where he stretched the potential for communication beyond transmission of intended messages), media are here in turn broadly understood as “vessels and environments, containers of possibility that anchor our existence and make what we are doing possible. The idea that media are message-bearing institutions such as newspapers, radio, television, and the Internet is relatively recent in intellectual history” (Peters, 2015: 2). By intersecting philosophy, theology and media studies with approaches from the natural sciences, The Clouds contributes to neorealist, materialist and post-humanist currents in which the truth and the real return onto the scene to play powerful roles, yet in a humbling sense. Peters redefines media elementally as clouds, sea, earth and fire, while remaining in full awe of their marvels and mysteries. By opening up media to nature, Peters’ media ontology both retains the idea of an altogether mediated universe and situates elements and environmental media as operating in and on the world and thereby constituting a limit against “the corrosiveness of the hermeneutics of suspicion” (2020: 216-217). In addition to these pronounced post-humanist sympathies, I read The Clouds in alignment with the existential and pragmatist concerns in Speaking. Hence, it offers a philosophical anthropology inspired by Martin Heidegger’s foundational ontology (as well as by Marshall McLuhan, Friedrich Kittler and André Leroi-Gourhan), emphasizing the fact that media are world makers, and that the human condition is co-conditioned by media technologies as well as by other people, animals and things.

Existential media studies suggests here, again with inspiration from Jaspers’ philosophy, that media philosophy would do well to reconcile these ontological claims about originary human technicity with our originary human vulnerability (Lagerkvist, 2016). On reflection, inspiration in this endeavor can also be found in Speaking itself. In its final chapter, Peters offers a possible route toward conceiving technicity and vulnerability in conjunction by pointing to the ultimate limits of being. He suggests here, in discussing historical and contemporary attempts to technologically reproduce humanness, that “[t]he fleshy residuum of finitude escapes simulation. It is human frailty, rather than rationality, that machines have difficulty mimicking” (1999: 237). This constitutes one of those existential facts about modern media—and today of automation and ‘AI’—at the intersection of the limits of media and the limits of the human, that prompt us to rethink media existentially.

Existential media, I submit—that both are and co-constitute our current digital limit situation—have four properties. First, and as Peters argues in The Clouds, they are world makers and our infrastructures of being, sustaining us and enabling (yet setting limits for, I will stress) our movement and dwelling. Second, they throw us up in the air, that is into a particular yet uncertain world and this involves opening limits: features of indeterminacy, anticipation and ambivalence, as well as limits that may in turn be productive. They also, third, activate our shared vulnerability and embodied mortality and deep sense of dependence and relationality in particular ways. Finally, they are imperative and urgent; they demand responsive action, critique, ethical choice, even an either/or (Lagerkvist, 2022). Here the field posits the coexister as the key subject in the dawning project of existential media studies—a vulnerable, relational, technological, responsible, stumbling, hurting, mortal, embodied, situated, communicative yet often silent, self-aware yet clueless, singular yet plural, being who navigates the limit situations of life in the digital age: the existential terrains of connectivity and increased automation. Furthermore, the coexister is something other than or irreducible to savvy users, early adopters, media citizens, entrepreneurial selves, or dividuals of various factions of theorization. And hence also something different from the liberal humanist subject: the masculine, autonomous self, certain of his prowess, entitled to this world. Jaspers argues that existential self-being is, by contrast, actually lacking at core: “To come to myself as I perish is the phenomenon of self-being” (1932/1970: 44). And moreover, it is deeply relational: “With self-being thus a product of communication, neither I nor the other have a solid substance of being previous to our communication” (ibid: 64). In her embeddedness in relations this main inhabitant of the digital ecology in fact pushes beyond and reinvents ‘the Human’ after post-humanism. Yet, while existential media studies puts stress on experiences of exposure, this is not, nota bene, a reiteration of the lonely or the chaotic mass of the mass communication schools. Existential media studies is not detached social science, so it will stubbornly argue that we are all coexisters. And since vulnerability is, as Jaspers argued, a position of fecundity, the coexister is not any simple victim to the forces of late modernity.

Conclusion: Destabilizing the Media Studies Vessel

I once called John Durham Peters a “steadfast serial destabilizer” (Lagerkvist, 2015) for our field.^[11] If you indeed have ears to hear with, he stirs things up by in fact both revealing and concealing, by both speaking his mind and resting his case. Speaking calls for opening up the field to both philosophical reframings, historical perspectives and religious analogies. But it does so not by loudly touting its vision. Instead, it both reveals and conceals its own existentiality, by employing forms of Kierkegaardian indirect communication (see Peters 1999, Chapter 3). Perhaps it is whispering something itself? And when someone whispers you need to be listening very carefully, struggling to receive the intended messages while piecing together what was almost audible, lest you miss the points.

So, what can be concluded from all of this? Was the non-reception a lost opportunity for us to learn something new about communication or about ourselves as a nation and as a young discipline—as well as about the strengths and discontents of our statecraft? Would looking at Sweden, in turn, give media studies important insights about what communication can mean, not as an idea but as a practice for achieving a grander goal? Maybe so. I suggest that, in addition, a more profound engagement with the text in this context, would also make clear some of the dissatisfactions of the mythologized Swedish Model. The pandemic moment has for example illustrated the hazards of utilitarianism in a consensus culture of seemingly blind faith in authorities.

In retrospect, the whispers were perhaps a gift that allowed for the book to be given new lives in unexpected contexts. It is clear that it sowed and disseminated the seeds for a different media theoretical harvesting. Existential media studies, as I hope to have illustrated, is in deep debt to Speaking but also to JDP’s other works. I argue that we may continue to be prompted to try to hear its message and ask in curiosity: What can we say about what cannot be communicated? How do silences, limits, interruptions and gaps figure into how we must approach the “tyranny of communication” today in digital existence? How can we theorize originary vulnerability, embodiment and responsibility with media? The mission lives on, taking on new shapes in new areas. As we live in times awash with rampant myths of technological inevitability (Lagerkvist, 2020), through the forgings of seeming inexorable technological trajectories embraced by both industrial capital and philosophical minds, what could be more needed and welcome than JDP’s rocking of our boat again. And as our field seems now to be by leaps and bounds reaffirming the hegemony of the social sciences, pivoting around the merits of datafication—a turn that is boosted by Big Data Truths and dataism itself—existential media studies will here adamantly argue that at any point in time, when philosophy, science and cultural and intellectual frameworks capitulate to reductionist modes of objectification, philosophy must be existential philosophy. This also implies, moreover, that existentialism must be upgraded both to our moment of techno-existential saturation and to the ecological crisis (Mickey, 2016).

In light of this, and at a moment in time when the Earth itself is in fact screaming to us to develop an ethics of care, we may wonder if this is a time for whispers or hollers. Perhaps it is in fact an exceptional moment for communicating beings, prompted as we may be to “speak truth to power” (Parrhesia). And we may ponder the fates and prospects for both dialogue and dissemination in a world of increased datafication and automation and big tech non-accountability. Theorizing media, I argue, at the end times of ecological and technological crisis, will mean reconceiving of them as both environmental and momentous existential media. On these brinks we need to figure out how we can reclaim and recuperate both a sense of futurity and dignity. That is, how to live well and take ethical responsibility as humans embedded in more than human webs of nature, culture and technology (Zylinska, 2014; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017). I propose that we conduct existential media studies in the spirit of the following questions: What could reawakening ourselves (in all our diversity and common humanity) to our existential embodied persons and needs—as Karl Jaspers endeavored for us to do—mean in this ultimate moment? And what might be learned from those who are so often shunned by a culture obsessed with strength and speed, perfection and progress—those endangered coexisting beings cast at the limit—for the task of crafting an inclusive, sustainable and open future with elemental and existential media? In seizing the digital limit situation, despite it all and with nothing but hope, I suggest we may continue to be inspired by the works of John Durham Peters and to receive both Speaking and The Clouds in their own spirit of prudence. Hearing them out jointly allows for putting stress on many things, including interruption, embodied and communicative limits, and on environments as media and media as environments that our species are forged by, relate to and depend upon. This will allow shunting our media studies vessel onto new tracks, with a partially novel and no doubt formidable freight aboard, which will both enable and require a grounded rethinking of our responsibilities before the Earth, each other and before our earthbound technologized existence—before Being itself.

References

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Notes

[1] This reaction among some senior scholars is not surprising in a context often claimed to be the most secularized in the world. See for example the World Value Survey: https://www.worldvaluessurvey.‌org/WVSNewsShow.jsp?ID=428&ID=428. In academic life, the sentiment is often anti-religious, haughtily modern, rational and arguably free of superstition.

[2]  Searching through the databases Mediearkivet, Artikelsök, Svenska dagstidningar, Libris, and Regina rendered zero hits. But there are obviously other forms of reception. The invitation of JDP to Stockholm and The Department of Journalism, Media and Communication (JMK) as Bonnier Professor in March of 2001 was one way of receiving the work. Peters was hosted by Madeleine Kleberg and gave three lectures: “The Relevance of Raymond Williams”, “Five Problems of the Public Sphere”, and “Democracy and Numbers”. The year before the Bonnier lectures he also got the Swedish-American Bicentennial Fellowship which he used in June 2000 in Norrköping and Stockholm. It should also be pointed out when tracking down Swedish connections, that at this point in time JDP had been friends with Jan Ekecrantz since he met him in 1983 at Stanford, and his closest colleague in Sweden was Per-Anders Forstorp, whom he met at a conference in Piran, Slovenia in 1997.

[3] Here it seems Sweden is rather anomalous (although a colleague of mine in another Nordic country once told me that among her peers in MCS, the works of JDP are seen as so unique and done with such lucidity and brilliance, that everyone else is allowed to feel that they are off the hook, as it were). Anecdotal evidence may however suggest a different story. Professor Bo Reimer remembers that at The School of Arts and Communication, K3 at Malmö University, Speaking was included in the undergraduate curriculum for a number of semesters after its publication. There may be other such examples across the nation and I do not lay claims to a comprehensive mapping. For a recent example of a volume mainly targeting undergraduates, which includes a canonization of key names and texts without including Speaking into the tradition, see Medievetenskapens idétraditioner. The book is however mentioned in the introduction as an example of a work that provides a longer durée for a history of ideas of communication than the one offered by the collection itself (Bengtsson et al., 2020: 18). In the same volume JDP’s works are briefly referred to in relation to the media ecology school as represented by Neil Postman (Forsman, 2020: 324).

[4] It was published in Swedish as Amerikafantasier: Kön, medier och visualitet i svenska reseskildringar från USA 1945-63, in 2005, but a summary in English of its main analyses and conclusions can be found in Lagerkvist (2008).

[5] The project was funded by the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation within the Wallenberg Academy Fellows program, which is a career program in collaboration between the Swedish Academies and the Wallenberg Foundations. I was appointed fellow in 2013 and started the project in January of 2014.

[6] This specific cultural context, following Herbert Marcuse, could perhaps be called a “one-dimensional society”, in which consensus across capital, politics, state, civil society, the academic world, and journalism, was not only an ideal but a practiced reality. Indeed, for Susan Sontag, in her famous “Letter from Sweden” (1969), the consensus culture was depicted as a pathology. Swedes were nationalists and proud of their modern social experiment, but something profound was lacking. The consensus society, according to Sontag, forged a certain programmatic mindset: a square-mindedness which amounted to a deeply problematic emotional dissonance among its citizens. Nothing but a proper revolution could save us!

[7] A classic book illustrative of this is Sven Lindqvist’s Reklamen är livsfarlig. En stridsskift (Advertising is Futile. A Polemic), from 1955.

[8] At the same time, around the year 2000, critique had already been mounting of the hegemony of the Swedish model among liberals and conservatives for a couple of decades. The democratic myth of Folkhemmet had many critics. And roughly since the murder of Prime Minister Olof Palme in 1986, the country’s self-righteous self-image had been stained.

[9] These positions obliquely rehearsed the often-invoked opposition between quantitative versus qualitative methods and of the “administrative versus critical” schools that Todd Gitlin outlined in his classic renunciation of the “dominant paradigm” from 1978.

[10] For me, media studies was not impacted by the cultural turn, it constituted the turn (see Lagerkvist, 2003). As other disciplines awakened to its core themes—media, mediation, popular culture and communication—this brought about a culturalist turn within them. Hence beyond its ways of critically and inventively addressing the key roles of media in modernity, society, culture and history, its very existence as a relative newcomer within the humanities and social sciences, I suggest, impacted profoundly on the interests of other disciplines, such as comparative literature and the history of ideas. This has also been the case more lately as these disciplines set out to reinvent themselves as ‘media studies’ or ‘media history’ etc. But that’s another story for another time.

[11] On October 26, 2015—the year of the publication of The Clouds—JDP gave the opening keynote lecture “Life, Death and Time on the Digital Ship” at the DIGMEX Conference “Digital Existence: Memory, Meaning, Vulnerability”, a joint venture between the DIGMEX network and the Nordic Network for the Study of Media and Religion at the Sigtuna Foundation in Stockholm.

Amanda Lagerkvist is Professor of Media and Communication Studies in the Department of Informatics and Media at Uppsala University. As Wallenberg Academy Fellow (2014-2018) she founded the field of existential media studies. Her work covers digital memories, death online practices, biometrics in everyday lifeworlds and the datafication of the Earth. In her monograph, Existential Media: A Media Theory of the Limit Situation (OUP, 2022), she offers a reappreciation of Karl Jaspers’ existential philosophy of limit situations for media theory. By placing mourners centrally, the book provides a retheorization of media as media of limits, and introduces the key concerns and concepts of existential media studies, in dialogue with critical disability studies, the environmental humanities and the new materialism. Find out more: https://www.im.uu.se/research/hub-for-digtal-existence/

Email: amanda.lagerkvist@im.uu.se

Breakdown as Method: Screenshots for Dying Worlds

TAMARA KNEESE

University of San Francisco, USA

Abstract

Drawing on John Durham Peters’ theory of (mis)communication and other studies of precarious infrastructure (Hicks, 2020; Star, 1999; Pow, 2021; Tsing, 2015), in this article, I consider mortality or finitude as a site of communication breakdown, focusing on the problem of using digital platforms to achieve posterity. Providing an overview of my long-term ethnographic, historical, and web-based research on digital death care practices, I highlight some of the techniques that constitute breakdown as a method of scholarly inquiry. I present screenshots as mourning objects and breakdown research tools. The screenshot represents and captures a distinct point of view and provides material evidence for slippery, ephemeral communications even as the screenshot, as a media object, is subject to decay. Drawing on temporally-oriented or ethnographic approaches to studying dynamic social media cultures (Bonilla, 2015; Christin, 2020; Karpf, 2012; Seaver, 2017) in addition to the work of John Durham Peters, I position breakdown as a method befitting fragile digital social worlds. I argue that death, through the practice of screenshotting, provides a framework for grasping the transcendent capacities and material limits of technologies. 

Keywords

Mortality, death, infrastructure, platforms, methodology, temporality, screenshot

Version of record: http://journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt/article/view/150

My first job after graduating from college entailed digitizing Mesoamerican archaeological fieldnotes. For a year of my life, a scratched CD copy of 69 Love Songs by The Magnetic Fields was my only companion while I scanned thousands of documents. Encompassing dozens of excavation sites in Honduras and Guatemala over the course of thirty years, dirt-covered, handwritten papers about pottery shards and other artifacts were stuffed in filing cabinets. Along with flattening out and scanning crumpled pages before organizing the digital versions of this paper-based data, my job also involved transferring old files from Lotus into Excel. To my horror, some files were located on an early 1990s Apple PowerBook. The logic behind my repetitive, often boring labor was that cleaned up digital versions of these materials would be more useful to future students. In our minds, digitization was equivalent to preservation. Many of the archaeological sites no longer existed in the physical world. The stolen land the sites were on had been sold and developed, and researchers’ fieldnotes and other material traces were all that remained of them. The problem was that maintaining the digital records of these past research trips turned out to be an arduous task. Files had to be constantly updated to remain the same, and someone had to do that updating. As Wendy Hui Kyong Chun puts it, digital media are contingent on an “enduring ephemeral, creating unforeseen degenerative links between humans and machines” (2008: 150). Archaeologists’ study of deep human history collided with the planned obsolescence of networked technologies.

Unlike archaeologists, digital media scholars are trained to focus on ‘new’ technologies and emergent cultural practices. This forever nowness becomes even trickier as the internet ages; the web of 1994 looks almost nothing like the web of 2004, let alone 2021 (Karpf, 2020). Even a singular digital object like a Facebook profile looks different over time, depending on interface changes, added features, and collected interactions over the years. The ‘digital’ collapses so many different technologies, genres, and time periods. However imprecisely, web periodization is often narrativized as a shift from Web 1.0 to the interactivity of Web 2.0 and platformization, as connection-as-data became of greater financial value to advertisers and corporations (van Dijck, 2013; Helmond, 2015). Early electronic communities and social network sites yielded ground to platforms, just as younger generations have shifted from LiveJournal, MySpace, and Facebook to TikTok and Snapchat. In an ethnographic study of the relentless digital now, fieldsites seem to disappear almost as quickly as they are formed. Real-time communications speed past in a monstrously endless flow (Lovink, 2010). Individual posts may be deleted or URLs changed, while entire platforms might disappear. As opposed to archaeological sites, which are at least in theory static at the time of excavation, studying living humans and their things means pinning down something constantly in motion and, when it comes to social worlds connected to digital technologies, always on the precipice of obsolescence. For researchers, the endless flow creates a practical problem. How do you preserve the sensuous experience of real-time communications? But there is something to be said for imperfectly capturing something you know is bound to end.

Here, I consider mortality or finitude as a site of communication breakdown, focusing on the problem of using commercial platforms to achieve posterity. The mythology of the ‘digital’ is imbued with a sense of the sublime (Mosco, 2004); gesturing toward the eternal, at the same time the digital lifeworld is a point of existential vulnerability (Lagerkvist, 2017). There is a cultural fantasy that, through data, bodies can be disentangled from minds, perhaps allowing people to be uploaded and kept alive forever through computers (Hayles, 1999). Like electronic media forms in the nineteenth century, the separation of communication from physical presence makes communion with the spiritual realm appear plausible (Peters, 1999). But like the telegraph before it, the internet is contingent upon material infrastructures and earthly bodies; the Spiritual Telegraph, after all, relied on women to act as spirit mediums and created new spaces for understanding race, gender, sexuality, and the public sphere (Braude, 1989; McGarry, 2008; Sconce, 2000). Similarly, as early cyber-feminists showed, embodied identity and physical media, e.g. circuit boards, were never removed from virtual experiences (Nakamura, 1995; Plant, 1997; Senft, 1996).

The screenshot is a device for preserving the materiality of passing digital experiences, slowing down and momentarily capturing real-time flow while pointing to the existential fragility of humans and their technologies. Through an overview of my long-term ethnographic, historical, and web-based research on digital death care practices, I highlight some of the techniques that inform breakdown as a method of scholarly inquiry. While conducting research on digital posterity—including websites that promised to maintain people’s digital belongings for eternity—many of the platforms, startup companies, and links that constituted my research sites are now gone. In some cases, all that is left of them are my haphazard screenshots and scattered captures from the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. Rather than posing a methodological problem, breakdown is a productive starting point for approaching unstable online worlds and related changing social norms. I present the screenshot as, simultaneously, both a mourning object and a research tool.

Screenshots are imperfect vessels for preservation and thus contain a close relationship to other digital afterlives. Like other research materials, such as recorded interviews or published fieldnotes, screenshots can haunt subjects after the fact and resurface in other contexts. But screenshots also break down, calling attention to how platform capitalism’s promises of computational immortality are largely a ruse: nothing lasts forever, even the practices and infrastructures associated with digital posterity.

As John Durham Peters famously argued in Speaking into the Air, communication is defined by its failures: “Miscommunication is the scandal that motivates the very concept of communication in the first place” (1999: 9). Failed communication is a running joke when it comes to digital afterlives; the ephemeral commercial web is hardly the right setting for eternity. People’s intimate memories and hopes for technologically extended lifespans are tied to disappointingly fragile and finite technologies, some of which disappear at a rapid clip. Secular transcendence, with its ambitions of soul-to-soul communication through an alchemy of science and technology, spirituality, religion, and platform infrastructures, reflects how breakdown—of humans, objects, and their fragile relationships—will always get in the way of perfect communion. Death provides a framework for grasping the capacities and limits of material technologies and screenshots are a way of acknowledging this tendency toward decay.

First, I present a theory of breakdown as method, building on work by John Durham Peters, putting his theory of imperfect communication into conversation with feminist scholars of infrastructural breakdown (Hicks, 2020; Star, 1999; Pow, 2021; Tsing, 2015). Peters’ theory of (mis)communication is intimately related to death itself. His embrace of mortality and the fundamentally physical attributes of ghostly communication is what makes even his early work foundational to studies of infrastructure. Then, I present screenshots as mourning objects and research tools. The screenshot represents and captures a distinct point of view and provides material evidence for slippery, ephemeral communications. Finally, I highlight some instances of breakdown and death in my own research, as newness and real-time flows become historical artifacts laden with pathos and nostalgia. What I call platform temporality impacts not only lived experiences of social media, but has repercussions on how network cultures can be ethically studied, archived, and analyzed. Drawing on temporally-oriented or ethnographic approaches to studying dynamic social media cultures (Bonilla, 2015; Christin, 2020; Karpf, 2012, 2020; Seaver, 2017), I position breakdown as a method that helps mitigate against extractive approaches to qualitative studies of social media cultures. By following Peters and embracing what exceeds capture and what falls apart, digital field sites, including gathered screenshots, are meant to break down and disappear.

The End of Things: From Dead Letters to E-Waste

In this section, I consider breakdown as a starting point for approaching media, whether digital or not, and the material remains of the most apparently cloud-based information technologies. Breakdown makes infrastructures visible (Star, 1999). Moments of crisis, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, can make quietly humming infrastructures more obvious. The vast network of the United States Postal Service, which seamlessly delivers through snow and rain, was made discernible through its lags, thanks to the dual hit of the Trump Administration’s anti-democratic scheming and supply chain snags. Upon systemic breakdown, mundane mail became a sudden topic of conversation, or even a political rallying cry against fascism. Meanwhile, in a related example of breakdown, state unemployment agencies blamed their errors on their systems’ reliance on COBOL, a supposedly obsolete 1950s programming language (Hicks, 2020). In fact, COBOL was built to last, whereas the glitches were a product of the website, which was written in Java, a much newer programming language (Hicks, 2020). But the crisis made COBOL visible and called attention to the need for maintenance and care when it comes to computing technologies. Like other kinds of infrastructures and defunct media forms, digital networks don’t exactly disappear without a trace. Rather, the work they do becomes most visible precisely through glitches and 404 error messages. For this reason, Whit Pow (2021) calls for centering the ephemeral, glitchy aspects of trans computing and gaming history: “The glitch itself poses a momentary experience of undoing, unmending: the artifacts that appear on-screen show us the breakdown of these systems and a fleeting awareness of the way we are imbricated, or unable to be imbricated, within its systems and structures” (203). How do you write a history of who or what hasn’t been saved? Glitches gesture toward this problem with the media archaeological record.

Death is a particularly useful analytic for thinking about glitches or infrastructural breakdown, the shadowy traces of relationships, people, or objects that once were. In Speaking into the Air, John Durham Peters showcases failures to send and material surpluses, or refuse, in apparently seamless modes of communication. He describes the strange scene of the nineteenth century Dead Letter Office of the United States Postal Service, which handled letters that could not be delivered, either because the address was invalid or the addressee was unreachable (or dead). Postal workers mined undeliverable envelopes for valuables, but a lock of hair—a Victorian symbol of mourning—was not considered important enough to return to the original sender. His attention to the hair as leftover or symbol of failed communication is evocative. In Peters’ theory of communication, whether that entails communication with the dead or the living, there is a physical surplus: “The Dead Letter Office serves as a vast crematorium of the dead and their personal effects” and, as he goes on to argue, “deals with the materiality of communication, not its supposed spirituality. It is the dump for everything that misfires. The need for it to exist at all is an everlasting monument to the fact that communication cannot escape embodiment and there is no such thing as a pure sign on the model of angel” (Peters, 1999: 9). The Dead Letter Office, as a representation of infrastructural failure and bodily decay, embodies communication itself.

Rather than fetishizing materiality over angels, however, Peters delicately shows how notions of value, agency, and memory are assigned to the material aspects of communication. Within the context of media, including writing, telegraphy, photography, and recorded sound, there is a ghostly element because of media’s “common ability to spirit voice, image, and word across vast distances without death or decay” (Peters, 1999: 75). Media jumble together communication at a distance and communication with the dead (Peters, 1999: 249). Possessions of the dead and the living become intermixed, all of which work together to make death seem less final. But with the dream of perfect communion through new media forms, there are also new mishaps. Sometimes wires go down, messages are indecipherable, and letters, whether paper-based or electronic, never reach their intended recipient (Peters, 1999: 108).

Bodies are both an impediment to perfect communion and constitutive of that very same connection. As Peters argues, “the body is not a vehicle to be cast off, it is in part the homeland to which we are traveling” (1999: 65). Building upon the new medium of telegraphy and its ability to instantaneously transmit messages across a great distance, the Spiritual Telegraph required the bodies of women to act as mediums, and notions of disembodied communication with the dead intersected with Victorian theories of gynecology; women spirit mediums secreted the material surplus of their ghostly interlocutors as ectoplasm (Peters, 1999: 98-99). Spirit photographs were not just for spiritualist believers, but were physical commodities that non-believers also circulated as spectacles. They blurred the lines between fact and fiction, science and religion, providing physical evidence of ongoing yet otherwise invisible bonds with the dead (Natale, 2012). In the Victorian age, mourning entailed a connection to the materiality of the corpse through spirit and postmortem photographs—which were worn in lockets close to the body, displayed in homes, and circulated among loved ones—as well as mourning jewelry that affixed a braid of hair or photograph of the deceased person to the mourner. The mourner and the dead were conjoined physically, not just spiritually (Batchen, 2004). Finitude, breakdown, and mortality are central in Peters’ theory of communication, as is the importance of haptics, of touch and sensory experience. Given our own individual mortality, and the fact that there is a limit to touch and intimacy, “presence becomes the closest thing there is to a guarantee of a bridge across the chasm. In this we directly face the holiness and wretchedness of our finitude” (Peters, 1999: 271). Peters refers to Victorian mourning practices that embraced interactions with corpses as well as spirits, acknowledging the realities of death and decay. In many respects, his argument is a rebuttal to the denial and sequestering of contemporary death, or the death denial and hubris exhibited in techno-futurist dreams of computational immortality.

Through his emphasis on the material culture of mourning, Peters’ Dead Letter Office example gets not only at the fundamental relationship between human mortality and mediation, but also the mortality and afterlives (or alterlives) of objects in the world. Objects gain or lose value as they are circulated. Some are forgotten or castoff, while others are refurbished, repurposed, or become heirlooms. Planned obsolescence means that what is left behind by decaying media formats is junk, trash, and e-waste, forms of residual media (Acland, 2006), and, relatedly, in his later work, Peters explicitly examines the elemental origins of cloud-based technologies; media themselves are infrastructures that resist permanence and immutability (Peters, 2015). Anticolonial scholar Max Liboiron (2021) reminds us that pollution and plastics are situated in ongoing maintenance relationships to both colonial and anticolonial Land relations (19). Media refuse cannot be disentangled from larger environmental, elemental, and social relationships.

Aside from obvious ecological, colonialist ramifications of capitalist production, particularly in the Global South, the remains left behind by dead hardware are also a problem for people who inherit them. This is the subject of much of my own research. The maintenance labor required by networked systems is a major theme of my work on digital death care practices, from managing a digital estate after gathering passwords and account information to navigating a slowly decaying inherited smart home. Content creators depend on the backend labor of digital caregivers and a network of human and non-human entities, from specific operating systems and devices to server farms, to keep digital heirlooms alive across generations. Updating formats, and keeping those electronic records searchable, usable, and accessible, requires a massive amount of labor, energy, and time. This is a problem for archivists and institutions, but also for individuals who might want to preserve the digital belongings of their dead kin.

There is a tension within the digital format, which continues in this vein of disembodied spiritual communication and, at the same time, is ephemeral because of its own material nature. Through the years, I have encountered many chatbot companies that promise to emulate you or a loved one after physiological death. Peters refers to a kind of Turing test that nineteenth century spiritualists performed when the dead spoke through them: Who is the real human and who is the ghost? Who or what is really speaking? (Peters, 1999: 194). The same question can be asked of algorithm-controlled memorial ‘AI’, which attempt to simulate a human personality, using past data and behaviors to speculate on a future postmortem existence. One such company, Life Naut, which is backed by the transhumanist organization Terasem, will purportedly upload your mind file into a bio file once technology makes it possible to do so. On their website’s main page, their chatbot prototype doesn’t quite hack it as a human being [See Figure 1]. Its conversation style is lacking and the site itself relies on outmoded Flash software. According to Peters, finitude itself contains its own fleshly excess that “escapes simulation. It is human frailty, rather than rationality, that machines have difficulty mimicking” (Peters, 1999: 137).

Figure 1: Life Naut, a transhumanist digital afterlife startup. Notice the odd chat conversation on the left-hand side and the Flash Player error, which made the avatar not function properly. Screenshot by author.

But devices, formats, and websites also die, just as we frail humans do. Despite the fantasy of an automated home that can run itself in perpetuity or a website that can survive for centuries, planned obsolescence means these systems will most certainly decay and die. As I found through my own conversations with people tasked with maintaining the digital belongings of dead loved ones, there is a stark difference between what people think they want, or what they expect others to do, and the reality of what it means to help technologies persist over time. The mortality of both people and technology means that these systems will ultimately stop working. A smart home, once inherited, might leave you sitting alone in the dark with a pesky alarm that can’t be turned off, making you feel as if your dead father is haunting you through his smart system protocols. Infrastructures are invisible until a moment of acute breakdown: “the server is down, the bridge washes out, there is a power blackout” (Star, 1999: 382). Death exposes the networks of people and things behind singular social media presences, such as the Twitter account of a public figure that continues to tweet long after his death, thanks to the labor of social media teams and kin members. Because they quietly support other tasks, focusing on infrastructures helps sort out whose contributions are valued and whose labor is overlooked.

Taking up many of the same themes as Peters, and publishing in the same year, Susan Leigh Star offers a more methodological mode of inquiry: How should researchers go about performing an ethnography of infrastructure, particularly when it comes to digital communications? She calls for an attention to boring, invisible, or undervalued forms of work, such as nursing and other forms of care. Digital records present a treasure trove of mundane information, ready-made accounts of other people’s conversations and lives. Star compares online texts to ethnographic fieldnotes: “It is an ironic and tempting moment—we have the promise of a complete transcript of interactions, almost ready-made ‘fieldnotes’ in the form of transaction log and archives of e-mail discussions” (Star, 1999: 374). Yet, as she observes, this amount of information can be overwhelming and difficult to analyze. Star also raises the ethical issues behind studying human action at a distance online, or the actions of people you never meet. Reproducing tweets or other textual elements from one online context and amplifying them, or circulating them to readerships outside of their intended category—such as when journalists use uncontextualized tweets in their reporting (Clark, 2020) or when academics use Instagram hashtags or posts in their textual analysis—can pose an ethical problem as well, attracting unwanted attention to people who were posting for other purposes and audiences. Online transcripts or collected interactions are also only one part of a larger story; often, digital ethnographers combine some degree of on-site visits, interviews, or other qualitative methods alongside their immersive online experiences.

In an example of infrastructural breakdown ethnography, anthropologist Anna Tsing examines matsutake mushrooms as a form of scavenge accumulation, an asset for the end of the world under late capitalism and ongoing colonialist ecological destruction. For Tsing, precarity, the indeterminacy of breakdown and survival, offers a way forward. She takes precarity itself as her starting point (Tsing, 2015: 20). In studying quickly decaying digital platforms and passing communications, attention to precarity is even more vital. Rather than framing online behaviors and social norms as static or permanent, it helps to situate them within the particular time and place in which they were produced. Ethnographic interviews and observations can turn into oral histories and historical records as interlocutors die and platforms or particular cultural practices associated with platforms disappear. Research the present with an eye toward both precarity and posterity. In the next section, I argue that the screenshot is a suitable media object and tool for such precarious research.

Securing the Shadow: Screenshots as Memory

“Secure the Shadow, ‘Ere the Substance Fade
Let Nature imitate what Nature made”
—19^th century daguerreotype advertisement

As a methodological tool of precarious worlds, screenshotting marks a larger shift from transmission to recording as a means of overcoming distance to a means of overcoming death itself (Peters, 1999: 144). Photography, telegraphy and especially phonography allowed the dead to speak to the living (Peters, 1999: 138). As Peters puts it, “Media of transmission allow crosscuts through space, but recording media allow jump cuts through time. The sentence of death for sound, image, and experience had been commuted. Speech and action could live beyond their human origins. In short, recording media made the afterlife of the dead possible in a new way” (1999: 144). Similarly, capturing a fleeting webpage in a screenshot, like many other recording media technologies, gives its creator the feeling of having overcome death in a digital environment. The screenshot is part of the same lineage as spirit photography, a way of capturing the excess of existence, the remains of something that is gone almost as soon as it materializes; it is a record of a ghostly presence.

Within the context of capturing real-time experiences of digital media, screenshots can become mourning objects. Like the photograph and its uncanny ability to capture life-in-death, existing as an emulation of the referent and proclaiming ‘that-has-been’, the screenshot contains its own internal melancholy, which can trigger the observer through what Barthes famously called punctum (Barthes, 1981). Through capture, the subject becomes an object. A screenshot is the user’s attempt to capture a passing interaction, knowing full well that the context and original hyperlinks may disappear after a short time. A screenshot takes on new meaning after a person or platform dies, or even when its aesthetics are jarringly out of time, like screenshots from earlier versions of frequently visited websites. In this section, I account for different theories of the screenshot in relation to the screenshot’s utility as a methodological tool. Screenshots are part of the broader media history of containment, preservation, and communication with the dead, as theorized by John Durham Peters. They act as material traces of unretrievable moments.

As Peters argues, a medium is not merely the connections it creates: a medium also creates the potential for new forms of breakdown. What forms of breakdown, failure, glitch, misdirection, or loss does the screenshot, as a specific way of framing the world, make possible? What is lost, or left out of the frame, when the screenshot is taken? What kinds of ambient, embodied labor go into the taking, storing, and collation of screenshots?

After death, everyday practical objects can become transformed through mourning work. For instance, a simple wooden spoon can take on new significance after a grandmother’s death, shifting from practical kitchen utensil to mourning object (Hallam and Hockey, 2001). Media accounting is not a new practice and items like scrapbooks and diaries have long persisted after people’s deaths, becoming shared records of their lives (Humphreys, 2018). But increasingly, corporate platforms intervene in people’s everyday communications, so that their personal digital archives are dependent on the policy decisions and terms and conditions of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and other platforms. Facebook is a center for personal digital archiving, especially for the dead (Acker and Brubaker, 2013: 7). At the end of 2020, Twitter announced that it would delete inactive accounts, causing a great upset because of the many dead users who were memorialized through the platform. Because of the untrustworthiness of digital platforms, there have been some attempts at turning digital memory objects into physical heirlooms, for example printing digital photographs and pasting them into a scrapbook. Screenshots can provide a similar material remnant of communicative flow. Like the scattered objects of the Dead Letter Office, they reflect lived, embodied experiences and can become memorials to sites, virtual worlds, digital practices, and people that no longer exist.

Screenshots are not exactly stable, either. They also decay over time through generation loss. Images lose quality when they are shared. In a 2015 project titled “I Am Sitting In Stagram”, artist Pete Ashton posted a photograph to Instagram, snapped a screenshot of it, and then reposted the screenshot to Instagram once more. He performed this action 90 times in a row. By the end, the image degraded and turned into unrecognizable noise.^[1] Screenshots speak to the transcendent capacities of media at the same time they are defined by precarity. Compression glitches and other moments of discorrelation point to the materiality, and thus the precarity, of file formats (Denson, 2020: 156). Screenshots degrade over time and even at their best, capture only partial information. They are messy, incomplete, and contain various kinds of noise, e.g. information outside of the intended frame. They must be catalogued, renamed, and archived in order to be of future use, or else they become clutter on a computer desktop.

Media theorist Paul Frosh presents screenshots as a form of poetic witnessing, connecting their technical and communicative uses to the work of John Durham Peters; to take a screenshot requires embodied labor through the act of “grabbing” (Frosh, 2019: 216). Frosh describes the screenshot as a form of documentation, lending fixity to something that is mutable, and turning digital ephemera into a “solid artifact” that can be handled (Frosh, 2019: 205). In reference to Peters, Frosh positions screenshotting as a form of embodied witnessing that transforms “experience into discourse for others who were not present either in space or time at an event” (2019: 229), giving the sense of a shared time and space. Absence—because of distance, death, or loss—is essential for this witnessing to take place:

Witnessing, then, makes non-identity an ontological constant of the witnessed world, a fundamental structure of being shared and potentially recognized by all who inhabit that world. Such witnessable worlds thereby resemble the temporal and spatial structures of physical existence. It is because of this non-identity that witnessing works as a communicative practice linking, imperfectly and partially, diverse positions within it (Frosh, 2019: 229-230).

As an example of screenshotting as witnessing, Frosh presents a screenshot of the final WhatsApp message of a dead Israeli soldier killed in action, which was later reproduced in the Israeli press. Like a photograph, the screenshot takes on different significance, and carries different political messages, after a referent’s death.

In this way, despite their own precarity, screenshots are one tool that digital ethnographers can use as a form of fieldnote. They capture not only the action happening on screen, preserving some information for future use, but they also preserve the ethnographer’s own point of view. You, the observer, are the one determining which tweets or images are worthy of preservation, and which might require a moment of later reflection and analysis.

Screenshots capture life on screen as it happens, reflecting the aesthetic and sensual dimensions of computing cultures. Jacob Gaboury traces the practice back to the 1960s. Moving away from the computer hardware or camera/printer itself, the screenshot has become a software operation and habitual action, a taken for granted aspect of life online. Mobile screenshots “allow for the capture and circulation of the intimate ways we use and are used by our computational devices” (Gaboury, 2019). Screenshots can be used as evidence or an indexical marker. A person can be haunted by screenshots long after deleting an original post, and screenshots can in that way constitute a more autonomous archive. Your personal screenshot can outlive the post, which may be deleted, or even the platform on which it lived. But screenshots also carry the mark of their creator. They preserve our own attention to particular moments in time and communicate our experiences to others when we share them. Screenshots constitute fragments of life that might be valuable at a later point; they capture a moment in real-time but are also speculative, much like photographs, in that they hint at an inevitable future death.

Screenshots, in offering a window into the taker’s point of view, are personal and subjective. Screenshots are also removed from an image’s original metadata and thus are not always attributed to a particular author. The act of screenshotting, and then naming the new file, places an image or text into a new context altogether. As DIY objects, screenshots are also messy, often low resolution and imperfect around the edges (Pendergrast, 2021). Sometimes they contain traces of other elements and are slightly off-center. After websites or posts disappear or change, screenshots might be the only material trace of them left, but they are often too gritty to be printed in journals and books (Pendergrast, 2021). Keeping track of screenshots as they proliferate requires a great deal of organizing labor on the part of the screenshot taker. Files must be properly named and screenshots transferred from cluttered desktops to other files or, eventually, other devices or cloud-based storage. It is hard to know which, if any, screenshots will be of value down the road.

Web ephemerality heightens the stakes of DIY screenshots. In one sense, screenshots do the work of preservation that many platforms and systems fail to do. Screenshots reflect a point of view: they contain telling elements, like showing someone’s phone battery at 2%, a person’s signal bars, or the phone’s clock (McNeil, 2014). As the web has changed, in terms of its affordances and aesthetics, screenshots might have provided a window into past web experiences that are now gone. The early web was intentionally ephemeral, whereas platformization has created a sense that life online should be preserved, even if it rarely is fully preserved (McNeil, 2014). There are often tensions between ephemerality and posterity when it comes to digital platforms. Despite Snapchat’s entire concept being built upon the notion of ephemerality, Snapchat users pushed back against the company’s policies so they could maintain more robust records of their Snaps, particularly when they became memorials to dead users (Humphreys, 2018). Meanwhile, Instagram and Twitter have released options like Stories and Fleets that provide a more ephemeral form of communication. In Vanish Mode, Facebook messages are now also capable of disappearing after a set amount of time. Given their general instability, screenshots can provide more reliable record of these communications. Screenshots are a means of accessing and making material something that is fleeting.

For these reasons, some scholars have discussed the ways that screenshots can be used as a methodological tool in digital research contexts. Media and journalism scholar Meredith Clark writes about the screenshot in the digital humanities, positioning screenshots against APIs or other default methods that many digital researchers use to glean information about users and their behaviors. Screenshots provide a kind of positionality, not only of the researcher, but of the textual quote or image at hand. They contain other symbols that provide deeper context, going beyond a singular hashtag or data point. Screenshots allow researchers to provide evidence for their theoretical claims: “In Black and queer digital cultures, screenshots are essential to ‘showing the receipts’—the proof of action that can be called up at will to substantiate claims or demand accountability” (Clark, 2020: 205). Screenshots provide concrete evidence without necessarily attributing specific words or images to research subjects. This is crucial, as published academic and journalistic research can make subjects into targets if their words or images reach the wrong people. The screenshot provides evidence, and constitutes the researcher’s own personal archive, without necessarily outing anyone.

As a methodological tool, screenshots can supplement ethnographic fieldnotes. Ethnography is difficult to disentangle from colonialism; salvage ethnography was predicated on the racist assumption that anthropologists were documenting the last glimmers of dying civilizations and languages. Colonialist ethnographers viewed their research subjects as static relics from another era. But in fact, through their fieldnotes and observations about the Other, ethnographers also told on themselves. Through images, words, and storytelling, and by capturing lived experience, anthropology contains a transformative potential. As anthropologist Anand Pandian puts it, “An ethnography is magical by nature, founded on the power of words to arrest and remake, to reach across daunting gulfs of physical and mental being, to rob the proud of their surety and amplify voices otherwise inaudible” (2019: 7). Classic ethnographers revealed a great deal about themselves and their own cultures through their accounting of others. There is also a tendency within anthropology to fetishize the ethnographic vignette, the affective entanglement that is the preamble to an interview, or the high-stakes, visceral encounter, which can make remote or digital ethnography feel somewhat lacking. Screenshots might capture snippets of a vibrant social world, but they are not the entire story. Rather, they document the perception of the observer. They become a de facto form of fieldnote. Not a sign of some kind of objective truth, but a subjective positionality.

In the next section, I will outline some ways that screenshots can be applied to digital research contexts as a way of working with and through digital ephemerality. Along with interviews, field visits, and other ethnographic methods, screenshots provide a material record of a researcher’s experiences over time and help form an autonomous archive separate from precarious platforms. Not only are they a form of tactile document and a form of witnessing, or a way of fostering communication between the living and the dead, but screenshots are also a ghostly way of capturing the fleeting real-time flows of online experience.

Platform Temporality: Screenshots for Uncertain Times

My first year as a PhD student, I spent an awkward elevator ride with a notoriously irascible anthropologist in my department. Another faculty member had suggested that I speak to him about my research. When I told him of my plan to study digital afterlife companies, or startups that promise to maintain people’s digital belongings after they die, he quipped, “Good luck, that stuff won’t last”. But even then, I had a hunch that was the point. How do people attempt to hold on to the most transient of their belongings, and what fantasies and sorrows are embedded in the failed promises of startups that peddle eternity?

In 2009, I started my doctoral work by examining a bevy of brand-new startup companies that promised to preserve people’s digital possessions forever. During the Web 2.0 heyday of the early aughts, people grew more attached to their social media profiles and the interactions contained within their email accounts and blogs. There was a growing cultural awareness that such materials might be of future sentimental value. Data was not only valuable for companies, advertisers, and governments, which could use them for purposes of extraction and surveillance, but data was also potentially sacred. In a few short years, Facebook went from being a social connector for elite college students to a space for memorialization. With personal photos and writings increasingly attached to corporate platforms and quickly obsolete mobile devices, how would this important memory-making be preserved and passed on to later generations?

Over the course of my research on digital death and posterity, most of my fieldsites have disappeared. I’m left with an archive of false starts, shot through with dead links. From the perspective of the startup company founders I interviewed, it is an archive of broken dreams. Startup culture privileges short-term gain, fast prototypes, and speculative investments based on vaporware; startup technology is not really built to last forever. Platform temporality is my attempt at capturing the awkward juxtaposition of ephemeral, real-time communications that are at the same time enfolded into mourning rituals and posterity, and even captured and maintained as postmortem legacies.

What started out as an ethnography of digital afterlife companies—through interviews with the founders of such companies and with users who were engaged with digital memorialization, including mourners who were charged with maintaining the social media profiles and blogs of dead loved ones, and site visits to key institutions working towards digital immortality—eventually became a history of failed attempts at digital posterity [See Figure 2]. I tracked various aesthetic and sociotechnical iterations of digital estate planning companies over time, from small Hong Kong-based startups that used cute grim reaper images to British companies that attempted to mimic the boring vibe of traditional life insurance company websites. The majority of those companies, along with a number of popular social media platforms, disappeared over the course of my research. I took detailed screenshots of my own experiences with the companies, including the email notifications I received about their eventual demise.

Figure 2: Dead Man’s Switch. This is an error message I received when attempting to access one of my digital estate planning accounts. Screenshot of a 2014 screenshot from the author’s dissertation.

My work, conducted over the span of more than ten years, also became a record of methodological and theoretical approaches to digital media. I began writing when the media world was flush with arguments about the democratic powers of Web 2.0 and the perils of users’ free labor. In 2010, Geert Lovink wrote about the co-option of real-time. Rather than an archive, social media temporality is a flow or a river. And yet, individual moments are lost in the stream. Lovink asks, “Who responds to yesterday’s references? History is something to get rid of” (Lovink, 2010). His words seem all the more relevant now, especially as mobile technologies, the gig economy, and the Internet of Things have become more or less ubiquitous since then. For many people, the experience of embodied life, and of temporality itself, is tied to information technologies.

From the vantage point of 2021, this work now captures a moment in web history that has since passed me by. While digital fieldsites—including platforms, algorithms, and their associated digital cultures—might move fast, sound scholarship is notoriously slow. The process from proposal to grant application to research funding to field study to writeup can take years, if not decades.

In the recent past, Friendster and MySpace were go-to websites for memorialization and memory-making. Now, both companies are defunct and users had to take care to preserve their own data before it disappeared. Platform ephemerality has ramifications in contexts outside of death, such as Tumblr’s removal of adult content: anything you produce and cherish may perish if it relies on a corporate platform. Users have come to expect their smartphones to die after a couple of years, so they upload their family photos and other documents to paid services controlled by Google, Apple, or Amazon. But putting data ‘in the cloud’ is not a guarantee if payments stop or services are suspended. One form of uncertain data management is traded for another. The speed and the inherent ephemerality of digital media also affects research of these technologies, although for the most part ‘nowness’ is a taken for granted starting point for digital studies. What would it mean to instead take death, the precarity of digital media worlds, as a methodological starting point? As John Durham Peters observed, “Distance and death have always been the two great obstacles to love and the two great stimulants of desire” (1999: 137). Rather than posing a problem to be solved, death generates meaning and the desire for connection.

Reflecting this pathos, the screenshot itself fails to capture everything. Like other capture methods, it is incomplete, even as it materializes the affective flow of social media. David Karpf points to the importance of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine as a research tool, but he notes that it has a passive “lobster trap” configuration. The Wayback Machine does not capture every aspect of every website, and it cannot capture the details that future researchers might rely upon to get a sense of sensuousness of platforms. Some sites are hardly ever updated whereas others are regularly maintained (Karpf, 2012: 648). Like the Wayback Machine, screenshots of lost internet worlds do not present a full picture. They are imperfect mechanisms for capturing phenomenological experience.

Within the context of internet time, how can ethnographers, who are trained to conduct immersive, intensive studies of cultures over a long period of time, cover unfolding events as they happen? Yarimar Bonilla set about researching the Black Lives Matter protests in Ferguson, Missouri after police murdered Michael Brown. For Bonilla and other researchers, it was difficult to keep pace with the news cycle and quickly changing hashtags while “still retaining the contextualization, historical perspective, and attention to individual experiences characteristic of a fieldworker” (Bonilla, 2015). According to Bonilla, tweets, memes, and hashtags are important cultural artifacts and thus worthy of critical analysis by ethnographers, who might combine digital and on-the-ground methods. This kind of mixed methods approach is especially relevant amid the COVID-19 pandemic, which has disrupted traditional ethnographic fieldwork that required long-term participant observation and travel.

Other ethnographers have suggested novel approaches to technologies like algorithms, which tend to be discussed as “black boxes” by critical researchers, instead looking at how human individuals and institutions interact with algorithms (Christin, 2020) or algorithms’ existence “in the wild” (Seaver, 2017). Algorithms themselves, like screenshots, are not stable and are used differently over time and in different contexts. Relying on the insider’s or ‘emic’ view, in anthropological terms, is therefore insufficient. Because of barriers to access, Seaver argues, researchers must become scavengers, examining how algorithms play out in ordinary life through habitual and institutional use. While they do not advocate for the study or unpacking of algorithms themselves, both Seaver and Christin examine algorithms’ relationships with people in the social world.

The need for attaching social practices to the aesthetics and technical workings of platforms becomes especially apparent in internet histories. Over the past several years, nostalgia for the web of the past has been taken up in popular culture. There are now resurrected versions of defunct platforms like GeoCities that mimic their aesthetics and affordances, supposedly harking back to a simpler, more innocent internet. Or, in the case of MySpace, a time when platforms provided users with opportunities to hone their coding skills (Miltner and Gerrard, 2021). Dial-up Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) persist and there are subcommunities of BBS enthusiasts; older internets are still very much alive.^[2] Because of the web’s fast-paced ephemerality—the way a Facebook profile from 2004 is almost unrecognizable, missing so many of the features and affordances of the 2021 profile—users might feel nostalgic for a web of the recent past. Nostalgia for earlier web experiences has even yielded a new television series. On Means TV, a self-described anti-capitalist channel, the series Preserving Worlds relishes in the aesthetics and politics of earlier online experiences, from games like Doom and Myst to WorldsChat and SecondLife. In particular, the series showcases people’s experiences of lost digital worlds:

Join us as we explore dated chat environments, appreciate player-created art, and meet people working against obsolescence to keep the communities they care about alive and accessible.

Virtual worlds are delicate things, and they can vanish with hardly a trace. Under Capitalism, preservation is often the last priority.

But even if you manage to archive the offline software, a dead world can only tell you so much. It’s just as important to document how people spent their time within it.^[3]

This kind of documentation is what social media ethnographers strive to do, working against a clock that could run out at any time. Platforms do not usually disappear without warning. There are often red flags, such as the “white flight” shift from MySpace to Facebook documented by danah boyd (2012). Even when platforms are relatively stable, however, their affordances and interfaces still fluctuate over time. Internet researchers who linked to Trump’s tweets in their published work now leave a trail of dead links to tweets that are no longer online. This is why screenshots, in tandem with interview materials and other careful documentation, can provide a researcher with a more foolproof archive. Screenshots constitute one form of documentation and can help capture the sensuous, visceral experience of a specific online time and place.

But even screenshots are potentially fragile and fail to capture everything. They gesture toward posterity and help frame experience. Ultimately, though, screenshots are also imperfect vessels for immortality. How does it change an ethnographer’s approach when disintegration is inevitable? It might mean going into the field with the understanding that your screenshots and personal archiving of context might be the only part of the field that survives in the end. Relying on platforms and even on institutions like the Internet Archive will only get you so far.

While official internet histories and the sporadic captures of the Internet Archive will tell one story about the lived experiences of the web, DIY screenshots can reveal a more prosaic history. Going beyond platform owners, content producers, and influencers, what are the subcultural interpretations and riffs on technology that are evident through gathered screenshots over time? If from the start you know that your field site will disappear, and that it never exists in a singular physical space to begin with, how does that change your strategy? What does starting from the vantage point of death do to studies of the digital?

The digital format provides the scaffolding for afterlife imaginaries and communication with the spiritual realm. There is at least the potential for an eternal life through bits. This is taken to an extreme in certain transhumanist and techno-utopian circles. But at the same time, the digital format is defined by its very obsolescence. There is the possibility of file degradation as well as link rot, server failures, and dead devices. There is also a social form of precarity, in that the race for the new and fetishization of the latest gadgets ensures that maintenance techniques are overlooked and underappreciated. A great deal of grunt work goes into digital preservation. Screenshots, to an extent, do make that personalized labor more obvious because the user’s perspective and own metadata are captured in the process.

There are many ethical quandaries within the context of digital ethnography. Increasingly, I find myself turning away from formally quoting or even analyzing other people’s intimate mourning moments, whether that information comes to me through digital fieldsites or through interviews with interlocutors. But as a researcher, you need some way of documenting what you are seeing, even if no one else sees it but you. There is a case to be made for a separation between a researcher’s personal archive, or collected fieldnotes, and the quotes or images that are published and recirculated in new contexts. Rather than mining other people’s pain, or documenting their grief through their interactions with digital platforms, I approach death from an infrastructural perspective. What are the platform infrastructures that create the scaffolding for digital afterlives, and what does it take to actually maintain these kinds of mourning objects?

Peters is clear that communication with the distant or dead does not have to be effective; the communication itself is valuable even if it ultimately fails (1999: 152). In fact, imperfect communication is a blessing, not a curse: “To ‘fix’ the gaps with ‘better’ communication might be to drain solidarity and love of all their juice” (Peters, 1999: 59). In a sea of dead devices and defunct websites, screenshots are a way of rematerializing transient digital cultures. Screenshots are one strategy for working with and through platform temporality, rather than trying to fight against breakdown. Following Peters and other critical scholars of infrastructure, finitude is not a problem to be solved, but an imperfection to be embraced.

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Notes

[1] https://petapixel.com/2015/02/11/experiment-shows-happens-repost-photo-instagram-90-times/

[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/11/the-lost-civilization-of-dial-up-bulletin-board-systems/506465/

[3] https://means.tv/programs/preservingworlds?cid=1699448

Tamara Kneese is Director of Developer Engagement at Intel, where she researches open-source communities and sustainability. Before that, she was an Assistant Professor of Media Studies and Director of Gender and Sexualities Studies at the University of San Francisco. Her first book on digital death care practices, Death Glitch, is forthcoming with Yale University Press. She is also the co-editor, along with Shannon Lee Dawdy, of The New Death (2022, School for Advanced Research/University of New Mexico Press).

Email: kneeset@gmail.com