That-which-new media studies-will-become
Phillip Roe
Central Queensland University
The terms new media, new media studies and new media research are
being taken up in a number of ways with different traditions, methodologies,
and ways of constituting object(s) of study. In an article entitled
'What is New Media Research?' (2001), Chris Chesher has considered
what distinguishes the research on new media amongst this proliferation
of approaches and methodologies. He notes that many in these traditions
just get on with producing new media without engaging with the question
of how these media are new. Yet his concern is with a more critical
and theoretical New Media Studies, and he has continued to articulate
and advocate the kind (brand) of new media studies and new media
research paradigm that he would identify with.
It is also this kind of new media studies that I identify with.
Chesher's intervention opens up the question of the research paradigm
of new media studies/research. He notes that 'new media are nothing
new', and advocates the use of the term new media against
the problematic use of medium specific terms which date quickly
(Chesher, 2001:229). Configuring a research paradigm in this context
suggests that what must be engaged with is precisely how new media
can be thought as "new". In thinking the "new" of new media, the
question firstly turns to, not what are new media (as particular
media technologies), but rather what is new media studies/new
media research.
In this paper, I will pick up some of the threads of the arguments
and ideas Chesher presents, and also add some thoughts on precisely
how such a new media studies can be thought as a productive engagement
with culture and (new media) technologies. There are two related
aspects of his paper that I want to address. Firstly, that new media
research is not defined by its object of study, and secondly, the
question of the "new" of new media. The question, Chesher says,
is not 'how to build a new discipline with clear parameters and
boundaries, but how to sustain and foster more research of this
kind without deciding in advance what it should actually do' (Chesher,
2001: 228).
Deciding in advance involves all of the potential problematics
of a colonising theoretical paradigm, which ultimately returns the
object to known forms, or to the terms of known forms with the attendant
likelihood of homogenising any radical otherness. Of course, new
forms or objects of study arise out of cultural activities (social,
political, economic, etc.) rather than out of a vacuum and such
continuities need accounting for, as for example we can find in
the 'remediation' argument from Bolter and Grusin (Bolter and Grusin,
1999). Remediation is the name Bolter and Grusin give to 'the representation
of one medium in another', and they argue that 'remediation is a
defining characteristic of the new digital media' (Bolter and Grusin,
1999: 45). This argument asserts that historically new media have
always "borrowed", "repurposed", "reused", "reappropriated", and
essentially "re-mediated" older media forms.
Deciding in advance and all that implies turns us away from all
that is radically imbricated in the "new" of new media. If "new"
is taken instrumentally and technocentrically, in a linear progression
of emerging/evolving technologies, it implies little more than a
technologically determinist world whose forms and events are primarily
designed by software and other technology corporations. Here, "new"
must not be thought in terms of technologies, as discrete
media forms that follow after each other in a progressive series.
To think the "new" radically, the question becomes one of value
and meaning, and hence of an ethics and politics of the "new" in
this context. If we think the meaning of the term in this more radical
context, technologies come towards us from the present we have projected
them from, and are already imbricated with culture. The question
becomes how we can think this orientation towards the future without
becoming mired in either a predictive structure or the progression
of a technological determinism where we simply react to "new" (media)
technologies.
I suggest that this would need to be based in how we think of the
"arrival" of new (media) technologies, and of the eventness of this
arrival. [1] That
is, how we culturally generate and return technology to ourselves,
as if for the first time. Rather than defining the field of study
in terms of an apparent object I suggest that what distinguishes
the new media field, and what allows us to engage the question of
the "new", is that it is marked by a change in orientation to its
task (somewhat akin to what Derrida would term a change in tone).
[2]
The key to understanding this question of the "new" in new media
in this orientation is through three closely allied concepts from
Derrida, Deleuze and Heidegger: the "future-to-come" (spectrality)
from Derrida; the "yet-to-come" (virtuality) from Deleuze (via Bergson);
and "projection" from Heidegger. For Heidegger, projection belongs
to Dasein (being-in-the-world, a being of the same ontological sort
as ourselves). [3] The
word Heidegger uses for projection is Entwurf, the basic
meaning of which his translator tells us 'is that of “throwing”
something “off” or “away” from one' (Heidegger, 1973: 185, n1).
In relation to Dasein, then, it is a pro-jecting, a throwing of
existence ahead of itself. It has nothing to do with 'comporting
oneself towards a plan that has been thought out' but, on the contrary,
Heidegger says 'any Dasein has, as Dasein, already projected itself;
and as long as it is, it is projecting' (Heidegger, 1973: 185).
This connects to the structure of understanding as projection, understanding
throws possibilities ahead of itself, and 'in throwing, throws before
itself the possibility as possibility, and lets it be as
such' (Heidegger, 1973: 185). Deleuze's "virtual" has a similar
structure, and it is not to be confused with the "virtual" that
appears in the popular notion of "virtual reality". In the first
instance, the virtual can be approximated to Massumi's concise designation
of Deleuze's "virtual" as 'the future past of the present: a thing's
destiny and condition of existence' (Massumi, 1993: 37). This concept
of the virtual demonstrates how can we speak of the future, how
can we speak of it and with it when it is not yet, when it
has not yet arrived.
What we would need in order to demonstrate this and to address
its implications is a particular instance, and photography provides
us with such an instance. This instance shows us two distinctive
things: firstly, it illustrates the power of the concept of the
virtual. Second, photography provides an instance which demonstrates
the very thesis of this essay: that what will be shown as a precursory
instance of a new medium in advance of itself demonstrates how we
can begin to think the to-come of the present – the virtuality of
our time.
Although photography involves the emergence of a particular technology,
similar things could be said of any technology, or more broadly,
of any cultural form. Geoffrey Batchen's work on photography is
especially illustrative in this regard. In Desiring Production
Itself: Notes on the Invention of Photography, Batchen begins
by pointing to conventional histories of photography and their emphasis
on the invention of photography by Daguerre and Talbot in 1839 (Batchen,
1991). He argues that this emphasis on 1839 obscures the wider significance
of photography's emergence in culture.
Batchen pursues a Foucauldian archaeology which, rather than searching
for inventions, attempts 'to uncover the regularity of a discursive
practice' (Foucault in Batchen, 1991: 15). Batchen shifts the emphasis
from 1839 to what occurs prior to that date, where what he seeks
is the 'appearance of a regular discursive practice for which photography
is the desired object'. His question, then, is not who invented
photography and when, but rather 'at what moment in history did
the discursive desire to photograph emerge and begin to insistently
manifest itself?' (Batchen, 1991: 15).
In the last two decades of the eighteenth century, Batchen finds
increasing evidence of a desire that might be called photographic,
a desire that is 'figured in the fields of literature, philosophy,
and aesthetic criticism'. In particular, he locates this in the
period from 1790 to 1839, prior to the existence of the actual technology
of photography (Batchen, 1991: 16-17). This desire is the imperative
that produces, or rather actualises, the technology of photography.
It is this period that we would in the first instance call photography's
"virtual". It is real yet not actual: it is virtual.
Batchen has been able to perform this Foucauldian archaeology on
photography in order to locate this discursive desire because he
already knows what the object is: this is the object called "photography".
Prior to 1839, however, it could not be called photography: prior
to 1839 we could not refer to an object called photography, we could
only call it, as Batchen does, from our position post-1839, "that-which-would-become
photography". What is at stake during the period 1790-1839, then,
is photography's coming-to-presence.
And this coming to presence was by no means a certain matter. If
we were to be placed in that period, struggling to manifest this
desire to photograph without yet knowing what that object would
be, this desire would be oriented towards something that would be
yet to come; something that causes us to reach or project ahead
of ourselves, projecting towards (yet without reaching) that particular
future which would become photography. For photography, in the present
of the period from 1790-1839, the essence of photography would be
the future-past of this present: that is, not quite the future as
such but preceding it and yet still being ahead of the present.
The region that this describes is between the present
and the particular future that will become photography. This,
following Deleuze's virtual, accords with Massumi's definition of
the virtual as the 'future-past of the present: a thing's destiny
and condition of existence'.
The virtuality that belongs to photography can be seen here as
that which generates its actuality – the particular instances of
its technical apparatus and attendant practices. This is the sense
in which photography can be seen to precede itself – an exemplary
instance of the thesis of this paper, a new medium in advance of
itself. However, the determination of the technics of photography
emerges through something (the virtual) that initially appears to
be indeterminate. To see how this is not so, we will need to draw
out a more sophisticated sense of Deleuze's virtual than this preliminary
determination, via Massumi, allows.
Deleuze's concept of the virtual has been developed primarily from
readings of Bergson, and is elaborated primarily in Deleuze's Bergsonism
(Deleuze, 1991) and in Difference and Repetition (Deleuze,
1994). In Difference and Repetition we find that Deleuze
is aware of the confusion that is generated around the concept of
the virtual. This confusion precedes, if not computing itself, at
least the discourses around computing and notions of virtual reality
in the cyber-literature: the original French edition of Difference
and Repetition (Differénce et Repetition) was published
by Presses Universitaires de France in 1968. Deleuze points directly
towards this confusion: he writes 'We have ceaselessly invoked the
virtual. In so doing, have we not fallen into the vagueness of a
notion closer to the undetermined than to the determinations of
difference?' (Deleuze, 1994: 208).
It is precisely this vagueness, however, that Deleuze wished to
avoid in relation to the virtual. To this point in his discourse,
he says, 'We opposed the virtual and the real', and he has done
this, he says, because he could not have been more precise beforehand.
At this point he states that this terminology "must be corrected".
He is now explicit in his determination of the virtual: 'The virtual
is opposed not to the real but to the actual. The virtual is
fully real in so far as it is virtual' (Deleuze, 1994: 208).
But of what does this reality of the virtual consist? For Deleuze,
the reality of the virtual 'must be defined as strictly part of
the real object – as though the object had one part of itself in
the virtual into which it plunged as though into an objective dimension'
(Deleuze, 1994: 209). And this reality of the virtual consists
of the differential elements and relations along with the singular
points which correspond to them. The reality of the virtual is
structure. We must avoid giving the elements and relations which
form a structure an actuality which they do not have, and withdrawing
from them a reality which they have. We have seen that a double
process of reciprocal determination and complete determination
defined that reality: far from being undetermined, the virtual
is completely determined. (Deleuze, 1994: 209)
For Deleuze, we must note that there are two parts to difference
so that when the virtual content of an Idea (such as "that-which-would-become
photography") is actualised, there are in fact two determinations.
The determination of the virtual content of an Idea ("that-which-would-become
photography") he calls "differentiation"; while the actualisation
of that virtuality into "species and distinguished parts" (technologies,
discourses etc.) is called "differenciation" (Deleuze, 1994:
207). Differenciation of species or parts is always carried out
in relation to a differentiated problem (or the differentiated
conditions of a problem). (This double movement is found in later
Deleuze in the operation of the abstract machine.) For Deleuze,
the aspect of difference that is differenciation equates to actualisation.
Differenciation is not the inverse of differentiation but, rather,
is an original process: 'differenciation expresses the actualisation
of this virtual'. Deleuze designates differenciation as the second
part of difference but, 'in order to designate the integrity or
integrality of the object', he says, we require the 'complex notion
of different/ciation' (Deleuze, 1994: 209). This complex
notion is the double articulation in which every object 'is double
without it being the case that the two halves resemble one another,
one being a virtual image and the other an actual image. They are
unequal odd halves' (Deleuze, 1994: 209-210). The only danger in
all this, Deleuze says, is that the virtual could be confused with
the possible, which would in turn suggest that the virtual and actual
resemble each other. However, Deleuze distinguishes the virtual
and the possible in three ways.
Firstly, the possible is opposed to the real, and the possible
is thereby subject to a process of "realisation". 'By contrast,
the virtual is not opposed to the real; it possesses a full reality
by itself. The process it undergoes is that of actualisation' (Deleuze,
1994: 211). For Deleuze, this terminology is not a "verbal dispute",
but, rather, 'a question of existence itself'. Whenever the question
of existence arises in terms of the possible and the real we are
forced to 'conceive of existence as brute eruption, a pure act or
leap which always occurs behind our backs and is subject to a law
of all or nothing' since, he says, there can be no difference between
the existent and the non-existent if the non-existent is already
possible. The virtual, however, is 'the characteristic state of
Ideas: it is on the basis of its reality that existence is produced,
in accordance with a time and a space that is immanent in the Idea'
(Deleuze, 1994: 211).
Deleuze secondly distinguishes the virtual and the possible by
the fact that the latter refers to 'the form of identity in the
concept' while the virtual designates 'a pure multiplicity in the
Idea which radically excludes the identical as a prior condition'
(Deleuze, 1994: 211-212). The third way in which Deleuze distinguishes
them is that, in terms of the possible's possibility of "realisation",
the possible 'is understood as an image of the real, while the real
is supposed to resemble the possible'. This is what he calls the
defect of the possible: that in fact it is produced after the fact
– 'as retroactively fabricated in the image of what resembles
it' (Deleuze, 1994: 212).
As opposed to the realisation of the possible, the crucial point
about the actualisation of the virtual is that it always occurs
by 'difference, divergence or differenciation' (Deleuze, 1994: 212).
Actualisation, for Deleuze, breaks with both resemblance as a process
and with identity as a principle. Actualisation (or differenciation)
is 'always a genuine creation' that is not limited by, nor does
it result from, 'any limitation of a pre-existing possibility'.
He writes that for 'a potential or virtual object, to be actualised
is to create divergent lines which correspond to – without resembling
– a virtual multiplicity' (Deleuze, 1994: 212).
And it is in this sense, and for these reasons, that the notion
of the virtual breaks with a representational model. It is not about
resemblance, identity, simulation or representation. It is, rather,
about creation within the real. It is difference and repetition
in the virtual which 'ground the movement of actualisation, of differenciation
as creation. They are thereby substituted for the identity and the
resemblance of the possible, which only inspires a pseudo-movement,
the false movement of realisation understood as abstract limitation'
(Deleuze, 1994: 212).
The mistake that is often made in areas such as new media studies
is precisely this confusion of the virtual and the possible. This
then leads to the virtual, rather than the possible, being placed
in opposition to the real. This mistake cannot be over-emphasised,
it is crucial – because the effect of this mistake is that the virtual
is accommodated to the order of simulation and representation and
therefore loses its reality. In this accommodation, we lose the
principle of operation of the virtual – the virtual, in effect,
loses its virtue. Deleuze is very specific about the magnitude of
the effects of this mistake in that 'Any hesitation between the
virtual and the possible, the order of the Idea and the order of
the concept, is disastrous, since it abolishes the reality of the
virtual' (Deleuze, 1994: 212).
We can demonstrate now, in terms of Deleuze's concept of difference,
how the virtual can be reduced to the possible which, in this view,
means that the virtual (which is now merely the possible) is not
real and therefore must be "realised". In this view, technology
"realises" the possible. This view therefore overlooks the reality
of the virtual as such. In this view, technology comes to stand
in for realisation. Also in this view, as a result of the erasure
of the reality of the virtual, the actual, and the creativity of
the process of actualisation, are bracketed out. It is often from
within this view of technology – as that which realises the possible
– that the celebration of the digital, the idea that something new
– something technically determined – is being produced, arises.
But, as we have found in Deleuze, the identity and resemblance of
the possible 'only inspires a pseudo-movement'.
Deleuze's concept of the virtual, then, describes an unsettled
region, a zone of potential, that nonetheless contains the real
material or content, and above all the idea, of what, for example,
will become photography. "That-which-would-become photography" becomes
photography through the struggles (indeed a struggle for a language
which would be adequate to the task) within culture to manifest
this desire for some kind of imaging practice. In order to do this,
this desire continually refers beyond the present by attempting
to grasp something that is not yet. The virtual in this sense describes
a movement towards (in Heidegger's terms, this is a pro-jecting,
a throwing of existence ahead of itself) the object that is in the
process of coming to presence. In the instance of photography, this
is the coming to presence of the idea of photography, manifesting
as Batchen demonstrates, as this discursive desire to photograph.
In general, we find that the notion of the virtual is inherent
in the concept of technology as such, in its essence. The virtual
is essential to technology's activity as a mode of revealing. Technology,
as such, is virtual. What the essence of technology generates,
as specific desires struggle for form, language and expression,
are actual technologies. This is what happens in the
case of photography. The virtual which inheres in photography, of
course, does not end in 1839, but continues and subsists within
and as the idea of photography. This subsistence of the virtual
within photography is essential to photography's continued existence
– there must always be a photography-to-come. We recall from Deleuze
that when the virtual content of an idea is actualised there are
two determinations: "differenciation", the actualisation of that
virtuality into 'species and distinguished parts', led to specific
technologies and discourses (the "advances" in photography – new
cameras, new techniques, new film, the digital etc.). The determination
of the virtual content ("differentiation"), however, folds back
into the virtual to become part of future actualisations towards
that-which-photography-will-become. This demonstrates the necessity
for the continuous iterative structure of the virtual-actual circuit.
It is this virtual of photography through its continuous process
of actualisation or becoming, that generates the specific
technologies, and all that might become "new" for the photography-to-come.
In this way, through the concept of the virtual, we can approach
the emergence of "new" (media) technologies in terms of the discursive
desires they are attempting to manifest. We can look within the
present social world for desires that are struggling for
form and expression: that is, to examine the virtuality of the future
to come. Much of my own work has been in this area and, specifically,
has been oriented towards something that can be designated or determined
as a "post-print" age. That is, that we can find such discursive
desires implicit (folded-in) and complicit (folded-with) with and
within the current social world which concern a desire for another
kind of textual model as the textual model of the age of
print begins to overflow its limit.
The print-based textual system has always presented an infrastructure
that consists of a two-dimensional surface to which it sutures a
subject in a face-to-face relationship – the requirement is for
a certain kind of text, a certain kind of subject, and a certain
kind of relationship between them – a highly prescribed and circumscribed
textual infrastructure. What would constitute a post-print age?
The kind of difference that is at stake here concerns Deleuze's
notion of the cultural image of thought where each era thinks itself
by producing its particular image of thought. This image of thought
is what Deleuze and Guattari call the plane of immanence which is
not a concept that is or can be thought but rather the image
of thought, the image thought gives itself of what it means to
think, to make use of thought, to find one's bearings in thought.
(Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 37)
The notion of the post-print concerns a shift in this sense: that
what we are moving towards, or perhaps what is moving towards us,
is a textual system concerned with movement and three dimensionality.
We see the gestures towards this with current multimedia/new media
presenting simulated three dimensionality on print-age screens
and monitors.
What we would need in order to think this further would be an instance
which manifests this desire, a series of actualisations which would
fold back into the virtual. We can find this instance in the notion
of the hologram. The hologram provides us with an image of thought
which can account for desires which are insistently pushing at the
limits of our current textual model. The hologram can be seen as
achieving a kind of pre-eminent form that this imaging and imagining
takes. We see this in similar areas to those in which Batchen located
the desire for the kind of imaging that was to become photography.
Holography, as a practice, was considered during the 1960s as a
kind of three dimensional photography. It achieved prominence during
the 1970s as a result of the new age cosmology that became known
as the Holographic Paradigm, predicated primarily on the work of
neurosurgeon, Karl Pribram, and physicist, David Bohm.
[4] It became prominent in Cyberpunk fiction,
especially in the work of William Gibson whose first published story
was Fragments of a Hologram Rose in 1977 (Gibson, 1988).
[5] This
text is particularly interesting in this context in that it prefigures
a holographic society as a 'shift away from the Lascaux/Gutenberg
tradition' (Gibson, 1988: 56-57). The holographic is worked in various
ways through many of Gibson's texts with perhaps the most sophisticated
rendering in Idoru (Gibson, 1996) where there is a sustained
exploration and engagement with the textuality of the holographic.
Also in popular culture there have been the holodecks of Star
Trek, both in 'The Next Generation' and 'Voyager' series, and
especially the holographic Doctor in the 'Voyager' series. Projection
has particular significance in relation to the hologram. In the
optical physics of holography, the hologram is literally (a) projection.
For the holographic Doctor, his projection is his ontology, his
approaching-Dasein.
These cultural practices/artefacts are all indicators of a desire
for a three dimensional textuality. This desire is also evident
in the substantial technological investments going towards actualising
holographic technologies. This investment is in part because the
hologram is not merely a benign image – it in fact has real physical
properties, and therefore interactive potential. A hologram of a
magnifying glass for example really does magnify objects placed
behind it. For these same reasons we find that holographic elements
are being used in telescopes for astronomy, and the US military
uses holographic elements in some of its "smart bombs". The United
States military research laboratories have been developing a photo-refractive
crystal which they claim will allow them to produce holographic
field manuals – that is, three dimensional motion holography to
demonstrate the use of sophisticated military technologies in the
field. We've seen this kind of use prefigured in popular culture
already: the holographic video of Princess Leia in Star Wars
for example. There is also research into the development of holographic
computing interfaces, especially in connection with voice recognition
technology.
The hologram, in this sense, is more than just a transitory phenomenon.
It appears rather as a figure which is attempting to manifest an
image of thought appropriate to the era that we are projecting ourselves
towards. Such an image of thought has radical implications. What
we will find is something beyond representational thinking or, rather,
something that precedes it. What will be disrupted is the whole
representational structure of the age of print: its texts, its subjects,
and the relations between them. The crucial point about the hologram
is not the thing itself, the technical instance of a holographic
image, nor even its properties, although these all contribute significantly
to what it is. The crucial point about the hologram, rather, is
that the trope of the hologram is brought into the domain of writing
– as an aspect of virtuality, a culture of writing-to-come.
For new media studies, and for those amongst the various disciplines
that come to bear on this field of new media in terms of a more
critical and theoretical new media studies, we are still struggling
for language(s), practice(s) and way(s) of thinking that are "yet-to-come".
What new media is in this sense, is still virtual, and its current
diverse and collective instantiations can be seen as partial actualisations,
instances of what might be for the technologies, practices and ways
of thinking that we can name as "that-which-new media studies-will-become".
It is in this sense that new media studies is not defined by an
object of study but, rather, by its virtuality. This concept of
virtuality, I suggest, needs to be addressed as a necessary and
productive engagement with culture and (new media) technologies.
This is precisely what Derrida points us towards in 'The Deconstruction
of Actuality', he says:
Virtuality now reaches right into the structure of the eventual
event and imprints itself there; it affects both the time and the
space of images, discourses, and "news" or "information" – in fact
everything which connects us to actuality, to the unappeasable reality
of its supposed present. In order to "think their time", philosophers
today need to attend to the implications and effects of this virtual
time – both to the new technical uses to which it can be put, and
to how they echo and recall some far more ancient possibilities
(Derrida, 1994: 29-30).
Author's Biography
Phillip Roe teaches within a multimedia studies program in the
School of Contemporary Communication at Central Queensland University.
His research interests include new media theory, arts, practice
and pedagogy; poststructuralist literary theory; culture, information
and technology; web design and development.
Notes
[1] "Arrival" and "event" should be thought here
in the senses given by Derrida:
An arrival must be absolutely different: the other that I expect
to be unexpected, that I do not await. The expectation of an arrival
is a non-expectation; it lacks what philosophy calls a horizon
of expectation, through which knowledge anticipates the future
and deadens it in advance. If I am sure that something will happen,
then it will not be an event. (Derrida, 1994b: 33)
The event is what does not allow itself to be subsumed under
any other concept, not even that of being. (Derrida, 1994b: 32)
[back]
[2] A change in tone would involve a different,
almost bodily stance towards the object(s) of study. Tone is a question
of voicing for Derrida, and particularly of the non-discursive voice.
Derrida articulates tone in terms of the notion of the "to-come",
asserting that the word "come", its semantics, or the concept of
the "to-come" are not what counts in this regard. Crucially, what
counts is:
that the thought of "to come" or the event itself depended on
the uttering [prolifération], on the performative call of "come",
and that this is not exhausted by its meaning. Addressing the
other, I say, the "coming" to the other. I say "come" but I mean
an event that is not to be confused with the word "come" as it
is said in language. It is something that can be replaced by a
sign, by an 'Ah', by a cry, that means "come". It is not itself
a full presence; it is a differential, that is to say, it is relayed
through the tone and the gradations or gaps of tonality. (Derrida,
1994a: 21)
The question of writing for Derrida always concerns the differentiality
of tone, 'since tone is never present to itself', and changes in
tone, and hence always consists in pluralising the tone. It is this
pluralising of tone, he says, which does not allow him 'to be confined
to a single interlocutor or a single moment' (Derrida, 1994a: 22).
The crucial effect of this differentiality of tone is spatialisation
– 'a dispersion of voices, of tones that space themselves, that
automatically spatialize themselves'. Derrida says:
And this effect of spatialization – in my texts as well as others'
texts – sometimes scares them even more than do spatial works
themselves, because even spatial works that should produce this
effect still give the impression of a kind of gathering [rassemblement].
We can say the work is there, it's a terrible thing, it's unbearable,
it's menacing, but in fact it's within a frame, or it's made of
stone, or it's a film that begins and ends; there is a simulacrum
of gathering and thus the possibility of mastery, the possibility
of protection for spectator or addressee. But there are types
of texts that don't end or begin, or disperse their voices, which
say different things, and which as a result hinder this gathering.
One can listen but can't manage to objectify the thing. (Derrida,
1994a: 21)
A change in tone, then, would enable new media studies to resist
the "simulacrum of gathering" which would close off a field such
that it becomes an object of study which then resists the possibility
of embracing radical difference to the paradigm so constituted.
And this change of tone is oriented towards the difference that
is imbricated within the notion of the "to-come".
[back]
[3] Dasein is not a mentalist or representationalist
category. Rather, from Okrent (1988) and McHoul's (1998) pragmaticist
readings of Heidegger, Dasein is an eminently direct and practical
mode of being in the world which by no means depends on the centrality
of consciousness or any other capacity for self-representation.
[back]
[4] A comprehensive account of the Holographic
Paradigm can be gained from the work of Bohm (1980), Pribram (1969),
Talbot (1996), and Wilber (1985).
[back]
[5] 'Fragments of a Hologram Rose' was first published
in 1977. Bruce Stirling notes in the preface that it was also Gibson's
first published story (Gibson, 1988: 10).
[back]
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