Sean Cubitt | University of Waikato | Thursday December 1, 2005 | Download PDF

Set on ‘shuffle,’ my iPod plays ‘Se Acabo La Choricera’, a campesino song recorded in Havana around 1912, a period when field-hands were moving to the city in droves bringing with them the music that would, in a handful of years, become the roots of salsa. With a sudden jump, it is playing the Métaux section of Iannis Xenakis’ Pleïades, a piece for metal percussion that sounds like it has been beamed in from another age. Shuffle mode on the iPod suggests two orders of democracy: democracy of access, the achievement of the nineteenth century struggle for the public library, and the ideal of a democratised art, here underlined by the chance encounter with a composition which shares with Schönberg the idea that all notes are equal. In ‘Métaux’, the notes are subjected to a mathematical algorithm and entrusted with the task of producing massed overtones. The principle is extended, when the iPod shuffles its tracks, to a democracy between tracks and kinds of music – old hierarchies of genre dissolve and new dialogues between musics emerge. The material access to the contents of the world’s archives of recorded sound, like the formal aesthetic of equality, are the conditions for what Attali calls ‘composition,’ music “that creates its own code at the same time as the work” and which is “a herald of a new form of socialization.” ¹ New auditory forms like podcasting thus raise questions about the future, and insofar as the characteristics of composition are democratic, the specific question: what might democracy become in the twenty-first century?

I raise the questions from the standpoint of a discipline that does not yet exist, the history and philosophy of media. The adumbrations we have of this emergent discipline – the Canadians Innis and McLuhan, Mumford and Giedion in the United States, the strangely significant import of the Latin American connection through the work of Régis Debray, Armand Mattelart and Vilém Flusser ² – suggest that it must combine the work of history and of critical theory with the work of aesthetic analyses of media texts and technologies. Believing that mediation is the material form of societies, cultures, economies and polities, the ambition of the history and philosophy of media is no less than that of sociology: to understand what it is to be human.

Like every new discipline, this too wants not only to understand the world, but also to change it. Today we recognize that we live in a period of accelerated change, marked by the changing forms of mediation: globalizing, postmodernizing, technologizing processes surround us, and focusing the mind sharply on the question of periodization: is there anything definingly new about the present and the near future? Older and younger commentators like Hardt and Negri, Tiziana Terranova and Alex Galloway suggest that Foucault’s ‘biopower’ and Deleuze’s ‘societies of control’ describe a new order beyond classical sovereignty and modern discipline ³. Others, among them Nick Dyer-Witheford, Danny Butt, Christopher May, Mark Poster ⁴ and others, argue the case suggesting that modernity (and the capitalist mode of production) still defines the contemporary world. The problem of periodizing the ‘new’ in ‘new media’ is one which also implies an exploration of what future orientations inhabit contemporary media, their inter-relationships and uses, an inquiry which in turn demands reflection on the possibly irresolvable but nonetheless central debate between continuity and rupture in the immediate past.

The specific task of humanities scholarship in the study of new media is to work in these terrains, between historical, textual and technological hermeneutics on the one hand, and the ethics and politics implicit in new media on the other. Thus the title of this essay: humanities scholarship in general, and the history and philosophy of media in particular, are grounded in the material actuality of the mediation process and these materials are the actual materials in which democracy is realized. Old democracy (and earlier modes of rule) are characterized by older media: the speeches in parliaments, printed voting slips, direct mail, door-stepping, the lobby system and the press. New democracies will inevitably involve formally (as they already do informally), telephone polling, SMS, e-mail, internet and interactive television. There is then a new and an old media politics and there is an aesthetics capable of dealing with the materials they are made of. This essay is intended to indicate why they need to be articulated into a working whole and to suggest that the materials we work with in creation, and in critical work, are in some way bound up with the idea of a democratic project in an increasingly mediated world.

The proposal is utopian – and the word ‘utopian’ is fraught. The worst utopians can be dismissed as starry-eyed (or worse, as acts that colonize the future for some project rooted in the present), but the best are at once a satire on the present and a rebellious act of reaching for, if not the stars, then at least an attainably improved quality of life. This kind of utopianism is never far from the new media, though it is always important to guard against the false utopias that promise us an automatic spiritual enlightenment or political liberation through technology.

Network software in the forms which have most inspired network artists, activists and critics are examples of what they depict: the web itself; one-off purpose built applications like FloodNet; large-scale developments like p2p, Open Source, Creative Commons, blogging and wikis (the latter a return to the source concept of an interactive hypertext in Berners-Lee’s Amaya browser). In the years since 1993 when the first web browsers became publicly available, CSS and Flash have made significant inroads for a designer-led, rather than participant-based, net culture (sufficient to make my title of 1998, Digital Aesthetics, seem disingenuous: there are now obviously far more digital aesthetics). Both participatory and sender-model variants of network operations are open to Zizek’s critique of ‘interpassivity,’ ⁵ that is of fetishizing the apparent activity of networked, technologically-mediated communication at the expense of genuine action in public space. Participatory and centralized networks are likewise both open to the criticism that their sphere of action is limited by the discourses surrounding them and that as the information media par excellence of our era they are the heart of intellectual property regimes and thus the cores of global capitalism. Nonetheless, I want to argue that networked communications offer models, not just in relation to the media, for a genuinely utopian political discourse for their dispersal.

Utopianism comes in many flavours. Engels’ ⁶ critique concerns the kind which became characteristic of the European left in the 1970s and 1980s, idealistic, exclusively discursive, purist, universalist. Bloch ⁷ counters with a tradition which shadows both Bakhtin’s ⁸ carnival and Pissarro’s ⁹ anarchism, grounded in an available immanent utopia of rest, play and only as much work as necessary to support enjoyment. In the case of Unesco’s advocacy and implementation of open source computing for development in the Pacific for example, platform-independence, lack of reliance on high-end technology, access to a global pool of free expertise and openness to retro-engineering for local purposes, all derive from the utopian dimension of the open source movement. Reformist as it may be, Creative Commons re-opens the best aspects of enlightenment learning and science as the shared activity of a community.