At the opening conference of the recently launched research program KIM (Communication – ICT [Information and Communication Technology] – Media) at the
99 University of Bergen in May 2004, K. Ludwig Pfeiffer was one of the keynote speakers.
He suggested that with today’s noticeable “anti-hermeneutic media offensive,” the
hermeneutic intensity, indeed the fury of historical and literary interpretations, which characterized and perhaps dominated the later 19th and many periods of the 20th century […], might appear just as a series of highly transitory, partly humanist, partly ideological, and in any case historicist compromises and interludes. (Pfeiffer 2004)
Such a prospect might seem daunting to media theorists of whatever discipline, steeped as many – indeed, most? – of us are in hermeneutic traditions and “the privileging of the semantic dimension” (Pfeiffer 2004) above and at the expense of any material dimension.
However dramatic as such views may seem, these are not new and revolutionary thoughts in media studies. In a sense, they are merely recent echoes of what David Bordwell, among others, has been promoting for a while in film studies: “[I]n many, perhaps most, respects film studies is a hermeneutic discipline. By and large it is in the business of interpreting texts (mainly, films). For this reason, theories tend to be mined for their semantic ore.” (Bordwell 1989b) More recently, Andrew Darley has pointed to the importance of acknowledging that a shift has occurred, from aesthetic expressions heavily centered around questions of meaning, toward
an aesthetic that foregrounds the dimension of appearance, form, and sensation. And we must take this shift seriously at the aesthetic level.
This also means accepting that in the first instance rather than problems of ‘implicit or repressed meanings’ it is more likely to be questions of a sensuous and perceptual character that will produce most by way of aesthetic understanding. (Darley 2000: 6-7)
In my view, we must take this shift seriously not only – and not even primarily – at the aesthetic level, but also at a meta-theoretical/epistemological and philosophical level, as
100 such a shift pertains to so much more than aesthetic appreciation and hermeneutic interpretation.63
The recent, current and no doubt future development in digital technology has brought – and will continue to bring – to the fore a need for increased attention to material, sensuous, perceptual, aspects. The impact of the interface (broadly speaking – beyond that of the digital GUI) is by now impossible to ignore. What the emergence, convergence and divergence of digital media make evident, is that academic fields of media studies – both medium-specific, as well as trans-media – do not have, perhaps have never had, theoretical concepts to adequately deal with the material dimension of their medium of study. Partly, this might have something to do with the elusiveness and troublesome nature of the concept of medium, rendering it difficult to constitute a common ground and agree on the level on which to base any mediumistic definition (see section on "piecemeal theorizing" above, and Carroll 2003b; Carroll 2003e) – is the medium of literature language, letters, paper, or print? Is the medium of cinema the camera, the movie screen, or the strip of celluloid film? If, as I suspect many would claim, “film” is the medium of cinema, what then about “spectacles developed by means of computer cameras and delivered by satellite feeds – with no celluloid intermediaries […]” (Carroll 2003a: xxii)? Carroll points out more challenges relating to defining the medium of cinema: “How fine-grained we should be in individuating media may be problematic. Are nitrate and acetate both the same medium? Is the fish-eye lens a different medium than the so-called normal lens?” (Carroll 2003a: 7)
The same logic – and hence the same problem complexes – can easily be applied to digital hypermedia. Consider GUI narrative fictions: is their medium the digital computer, the software programs or Internet site required to access them, or perhaps the string of digital bits making up the code from which the narratives are displayed? There are, as one would quickly recognize, plenty of pitfalls or at least challenges to be
63 In his book Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (Gumbrecht 2004), Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht calls for a similar re-orientation in the humanities, from the uncontested centrality in the humanities of meaning effects and hence interpretation, towards an emphasis on what he calls “presence effects”, which appeal exclusively to the senses and is that about media representations and cultural artifacts which make them physically tangible for our bodies.
101 overcome if a firm and stable definition of any medium materiality is to be obtained, no matter what the – medium.
In addition, there is ample reason to believe that such conceptual and theoretical neglect of materiality in media studies at large, as well as in the separate media disciplines, mirrors a lack of scientific interest or also aesthetic appreciation of the materiality of the medium in question. Again, literary theory provides an illustrating example, where even the most form-conscious of theoretical approaches never really considered the impact of the materiality of the letters and words – and even less that of the paper or binding – beyond that of typographical experimentation. Furthermore, the extent to which such material dimensions mattered was mainly related to how it affected our interpretation of the meaning of the content – that is, the literary or aesthetic work.
Even now, when N. K. Hayles persistently advocates a media-specific analysis intent on addressing issues of materiality, the intention is still to see how material aspects are contributing to the work’s meaning – and, most often, a work’s aesthetic meaning. After a promising clarification of what she means by materiality (“the physical attributes constituting any artifact […]; in a digital computer, for example, they include the polymers used to fabricate the case, the rare earth elements used to make phosphors in the CRT screen, the palladium used for the power cord prongs, and so forth […]”), it turns out that focusing on these material aspects is still a part of an aesthetic – and even literary – interpretation: “From this infinite array [of physical attributes] a technotext will select a few to foreground and work into its thematic concerns. Materiality thus emerges from interactions between physical properties and a work’s artistic strategies.”
(Hayles 2002b: 32-33)
In her most recent book, My Mother Was a Computer, Hayles continues to be firmly entrenched in literary and aesthetic readings, focusing as she does on theory, technology, and thematics, and the intimate and dynamic interactions between these dimensions as seen in, for instance, the thematics of a number of literary works (see
"Prologue" in Hayles 2005b). Hence, Hayles’ consistent preoccupation with hermeneutic interpretation and aesthetics makes her works valuable more as a cultural commentary and as literary interpretations of works thematizing human-technology relations rather than as actually focusing on the (phenomenological; embodied) relation and experience itself. In part III I show in some more detail how such an orientation
102 elucidates the difference between Hayles’ works, and a phenomenological and/or cognitive approach such as mine, and why the latter is more relevant and significant when the explicit aim is to say something about the actual experience of human-technology relations and the closely related importance of materiality and embodiment.
In other words, and despite explicitly stated ambitions to the contrary, in the writings of one of the most prominent and prolific theorists in new media studies, disciplinary and aesthetic boundaries remain quite intact, as does the hegemony of aesthetic and literary interpretation.64 As much as Hayles accuses literary theory of being shot through with assumptions specific to print, the scope of her media-specific analysis remains shot through with assumptions specific to literary theory in particular, and to aesthetic theory in general.
I will claim that as long as we maintain issues of aesthetics and hermeneutics as distinguishing features laying the premises for any approaches to digital media, we will fail to grasp fundamental experiential – material – features of these media. Crucial aspects of the material impact of the technology on our experience will then be lost in more or less metaphorical readings of the content and (artistic, symbolic, literary) thematics displayed by the technologies in question.