Phenomenology and philosophy of technology in Hailar are over. The trip was fairly pleasant, and I still have to write up the conference record, headache and all… Before reviewing the various papers and itineraries, let me first add a few notes to my own article.
In the article, I originally used eyeglasses as an example to illustrate the reflective method of taking the medium as medium. When I reported it in Teacher Wu’s class, several people raised questions, so I added an example of a keyboard and a passage of explanation. The example I gave on the spot was the microphone at hand—when the microphone is put to use, it is something one passes through: I speak through the microphone, and the audience hears what I say without paying attention to the microphone; but when repairing the microphone, I do not speak through it, but regard it as an object. And the third form is this: I say “hello, hello, hello” into the microphone. At this time, on the one hand, I am speaking through the microphone; I am also paying attention to the sound I am producing; but the object I want to reflect upon is not the sound I am paying attention to, but the microphone through which this sound passes.
In the end, my teacher’s wife still pointed to the question of whether this third state can really be said to exist. Other teachers also raised questions on this point. For example, Liu Xiaoli said that there is a “time lag” here: in fact, one first notices the sound and only then notices the microphone; and another teacher wondered whether this activity is really a kind of reflection.
These questions have made me more aware of the importance of this case. The next time I rewrite the outline, I should start from this case and make clear that the reflective mode in this case probably involves many of my most central claims.
First of all, we must insist that this third state is a state different from the first two. The first two states can indeed be lumped together: both are everyday, non-reflective modes of dealing with things. One is speaking through the microphone; the other is repairing the microphone through the hand, the eye, or repair tools. These can be further divided into different layers. One layer is activity with an object that stands out to the eye. For instance, when repairing a microphone, the microphone as a medium is blocked; we no longer pass through it to speak, but instead place the microphone, as a damaged object, before our eyes and then attend to it through various media: we look with our eyes, prod with our hands, repair with tools… Through various media, whether explicit or implicit, we are all pointing toward the same object, namely the microphone. This is a practical activity in which the object stands out. The earlier state, by contrast, is one in which the object does not stand out. For example, when speaking through a microphone, what object are we facing? The sound spoken? The sound spoken is the medium of the sentence, and the sentence is the medium for expressing thought, or rather for re-presenting a situation—unless a sound is too harsh or too prominent, we will not take the sound as an object, but will hear the sentence through the sound; and unless the expression of the sentence is obstructed, we will not take the sentence as an object, but will use the sentence to bring forth the corresponding situation and semantic relations. For example, if I say through the microphone, “a hammer drives a nail,” then what exactly is the object we are pointing to? Is it the sound “a hammer drives a nail”? Or the words themselves? Or the hammer? Or the nail? … At this moment the “object” being conveyed is indistinct. This is precisely what is meant by media as message or media as environment: no matter what the object of communication is, the act of communication itself proceeds as message.
Both of these states are activities of one-way indication. We are always “through” a layer upon layer of transparent or semi-transparent media. In one case, one reaches some point of obstruction and stops, like an arrow with a destination; in the other, one encounters no obvious obstruction, and the gaze can keep passing through, yet grows increasingly blurred. It is like a ray that keeps fading away. It is not infinitely deep or far-reaching, but neither can one tell exactly where it lands.
What is called the “reflective” state, whether its layers are complex or not, is not such a structure of one-way indication. Rather, it contains a forward-backward retroactive direction. For example, while pointing through the microphone toward the sound, I simultaneously trace back from the emitted sound to the meaning of the microphone. This is the simple form of a reflective activity.
Of course, someone will probably ask why I emphasize this simultaneous tracing back, why I emphasize this “debugging activity” of suspending content—suspending the meaning of the content transmitted through the microphone and reducing it to “hello, hello, hello”? Isn’t real reflection something that happens afterward? For instance, I speak through the microphone, and after I finish speaking, I think about what the microphone means, then recall how the microphone amplified the sound. In that case, speaking through the microphone is one thing, and reflecting on the microphone is another; one either attends to speaking or attends to the microphone. There is no need to posit such a special state in which one attends to speaking in a suspended way while also attending to the microphone.
But such a so-called reflective mode presupposes too much. Reflective activity is taken for granted as recollective and conceptual. In fact, however, for such reflection to be possible, one must first reproduce, through concepts and memory, the scene in which I spoke through the microphone. I first speak through the microphone, then reproduce the scene of my speaking through the microphone through recollection, and finally grasp the meaning of the microphone in that reproduced scene.
The interval of recollection here, or the “time lag,” or the word-concepts used by conceptual reflection, are all other media as well. The intervention of these media gives reflective activity a more complex structure. But the most original point of this reflective activity still lies in the immediate grasp within direct practical activity; the other media merely lead people back to that “immediate point” in different ways. As for things like “time,” “recollection,” “concept,” and so on, we can also obtain their meaning as media. We likewise grasp the meaning of “time” in certain activities that occur at the immediate point, and this grasp enables us to understand time and to express our understanding through words and other media.
Of course, perhaps temporality or spatiality, or some more original thing, is a structure embedded within reflective activity or any activity whatsoever. If so, reflective activity must be temporal, and then saying that treating media as media always includes a “time lag” would indeed not be wrong. But this does not negate the fact that such reflective activity is “one” distinctive state, rather than a simple addition of two states plus a time lag. If two mutually independent things have a time lag between them, what does that mean? We must remember that media are both separation and connection. If a “time lag” separates two states, then in a certain sense it also links the two states together. The “time lag” in this reflective activity is just like the microphone in an act of speaking: only in further reflection or examination does it become something present-at-hand; the activity itself is first of all “one” activity. If one does not take this “one activity” as an object of reflection, the layered structure within it will not present itself to us either.
Even though such so-called reflection on media as media still has its layered structure, and though through further analysis we can split it into an “alternation” of two states and decompose elements such as “temporality,” the starting point of media ontology still lies in such reflective activity. As for things like “spatiality,” “temporality,” “inner time-consciousness,” and so forth, if we want to reveal them, understand them, and express them, we must also do so through certain mediational practices and reflections. It should be noted that I am not trying to construct a foundationalist or essentialist doctrine, nor am I trying to build theory by starting from some most primitive thing; rather, I am pushing thought forward from concrete cases. There is no most primitive thing; anything can be analyzed. Even if one finds something seemingly basic, like the “elementary particles” of modern physics, one can still use another particle to “smash” it; any medium can also be regarded through another medium, and under some mode of attending it will always be able to reveal a more complex structure. If there is some medium that is the most basic, then isn’t the medium through which we access it even more basic? Media ontology does not seek an absolute starting point; it simply begins thinking from the activity at hand.
This also leads to the question of Master Xianglong. At the venue, because the comments were followed immediately by a session of rapid-fire answers and questions, Teacher Zhang had no chance to speak. Later, however, at the dinner table, Teacher Zhang brought it up with me and encouraged me to go further and investigate invisible media, reminding me to pay attention to Heidegger’s “rupture” (Riss). I took this as a great lesson. Before this I had also read some related articles by Master Xianglong, and of course I was deeply inspired. But the difference between Teacher Zhang’s line of thought and mine seems to be that he always still wants to seek an ultimate root in some profound and mysterious place within consciousness. Whether it is inner time-consciousness, the rapids of the Dao, or associative genesis, although these break with the traditional subject-object dichotomy and conceptual, objectifying thinking, they are still in some sense essentialist in orientation. Thus, in another setting, Teacher Zhang argued with Wu and others that temporality is a more fundamental humanity, while Wu cited Stiegler’s use of technology to render temporality indeterminate; Teacher Zhang then retorted: isn’t this metaphysics of technology even stronger than the metaphysics of time? In my view, saying that structures like temporality, inner time-consciousness, or ālaya-vijñāna are “basic” can indeed be justified in a certain sense, just as one can say that electrons and atoms are the elementary units of the “external world” or nature, and that the “internal world” or the realm of consciousness may also have some elementary structures. But even if one says these are original structures that break down the distinction between inside and outside, in what sense are they understood as “basic”? And in what sense are they regarded as real?—We always have to reach them and reveal them through some route. We need physics training and equipment to reveal electrons and atoms, and we also need some kind of training and a certain environment to reveal “inner time-consciousness” or whatever else. Teacher Zhang also noticed this activity: revealing the deep structures of consciousness by some means of clearing and purifying the mind, through some contemplative introspection. But why say that some deep thing thus revealed is “basic”? In other words, why are certain specific modes of training the most distinctive? By pursuing things in some way, we may discover that inner time-consciousness is the elementary structure of all phenomena; yet others, through their own modes of inquiry, discover that force and energy are the elementary structures of all phenomena. So which is more basic? We always reveal some basic thing only through a particular way, and once such a basic thing is revealed, it certainly has corresponding explanatory power. But these are merely elementary structures found by pursuing the world “through some way.” We can still go on to analyze these “ways” further.
The anti-foundationalism of media ontology is not about opposing the search for foundations, but about revealing the foundation of foundations, the media through which the foundation presents itself as a foundation. The foundation of foundations is not some more “profound” thing; rather, it is something “superficial,” something “surface-like.” The question of the surface is precisely the question of the margin. And what is called the margin of the foundation of foundations, what is called “superficial,” is the “immediate concern” and the “mundane affairs” of everyday dealings with tangible media, namely bodily techniques and communicative media.
2010-08-15
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- A bit of an opinion
2010-08-15 19:41:56 Anonymous 10.8.0.2
I resolve this problem by distinguishing the potential and the actual.
“What we need to distinguish here are the actual spatial relations and the potential spatial relations. We are familiar with the road back home, but we are not familiar with the road to someone else’s home, nor could we possibly know the roads to everyone’s home. Actual, human, and individual spatial relations are relations established by existence, whereas potential spatial relations are infinitely many: there exist countless relations between one spatial point and another. But if they are not known by people, then they are only potential. Any thing in a room has infinitely many spatial relations with all other things, but these relations are not known to us. Each actual individual lives in a different space; everyone knows his own space well, knows where his things are placed, knows how far it is to go to a given place. For people living in urban space, it is impossible to know the locations of all streets, restaurants, bars, schools, and so on; one can only know places one has been to or places one has heard of. Even in those cities with which we are very familiar, there are certainly places whose names we do not know and which we have never visited. Although they exist, they do not exist ‘in terms of their actuality.’ Although they are part of the space around us, they have not become objects of our practice, and thus have not, once objectified, become the logic of our individual spatial thinking, nor are they the basis of our thinking.” - A bit of an opinion
2010-08-15 19:43:24 Anonymous 10.8.0.2
There are countless potential objects; the actualized objects are only the microphone or the eyeglasses.
- Gu Di
2010-08-15 21:06:16
I don’t know what problem you are claiming to have solved…
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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