Excommunication – Three Inquiries in Media and Mediation (TRIOS) - Hardcover

Galloway, Alexander; Thacker, Eugene; Wark, Mckenzie

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0226925218 ISBN 13: 9780226925219

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2014

Synopsis

Always connect - that is the imperative of today's media. But what about those moments when media cease to function properly, when messages go beyond the sender and receiver to become excluded from the world of communication itself - those messages that state: "There will be no more messages"? In this book, Alexander R. Galloway, Eugene Thacker, and McKenzie Wark turn our usual understanding of media on its head by arguing that these moments reveal the ways the impossibility of communication is integral to communication itself - instances they call excommunication. In three linked essays, Excommunication pursues this elusive topic by looking at mediation in the face of banishment, exclusion, and heresy, and by contemplating the possibilities of communication with the great beyond. First, Galloway proposes an original theory of mediation based on classical literature and philosophy, using Hermes, Iris, and the Furies to map out three of the most prevalent modes of mediation today-mediation as exchange, as illumination, and as network. Then, Thacker goes boldly beyond Galloway's classification scheme by examining the concept of excommunication through the secret link between the modern horror genre and medieval mysticism. Finally, Wark evokes the poetics of the infuriated swarm as a queer politics of heresy that deviates from both media theory and the traditional left. Reexamining commonplace definitions of media, mediation, and communication, Excommunication offers a glimpse into the realm of the nonhuman to find a theory of mediation adequate to our present condition.

About this title

About the Author

Alexander R. Galloway is associate professor of media studies at New York University. He is the author of four books on digital media and critical theory, most recently, The Interface Effect. Eugene Thacker is associate professor in the School of Media Studies at the New School. He is the author of many books, including After Life, also published by the University of Chicago Press. McKenzie Wark is professor of liberal studies at the New School. His books include A Hacker Manifesto and Gamer Theory.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

EXCOMMUNICATION

THREE INQUIRIES IN MEDIA AND MEDIATION

By ALEXANDER R. Galloway, EUGENE THACKER, MCKENZIE Wark

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Copyright © 2014 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-226-92521-9

Contents

Introduction: Execrable Media Alexander R. Galloway, Eugene Thacker, 
McKenzie Wark..............................................................
1
LOVE OF THE MIDDLE Alexander R. Galloway..................................
25
DARK MEDIA Eugene Thacker.................................................
77
FURIOUS MEDIA: A QUEER HISTORY OF HERESY McKenzie Wark...................
151

CHAPTER 1

LOVE OF THE MIDDLE

Alexander R. Galloway

On July 7, 1688, Irish scientist William Molyneux sent a letter tohis friend the philosopher John Locke in which he proposedthe following hypothetical scenario. Consider a man, blindfrom birth, who knows the shapes of spheres, cubes, and otherobjects, but being blind only knows them via his sense of touch.If the blind man were suddenly given sight, would he be able toidentify and distinguish between these same spheres and cubesby vision alone?

Known today as Molyneux's Problem, the thought experimentwas one of the central philosophical problems of its time.Any number of thinkers proffered solutions to the problem,from G. W. Leibniz, Voltaire, and Denis Diderot, to Hermann vonHelmholtz and William James. Molyneux's problem was socompelling at the time, and indeed still resonates today, becauseit addresses key questions in mediation, aesthetics, and the sciencesof perception, and in what would become psychophysicsand cognitive science.

While ostensibly a thought experiment about the cognitiverelation between different modes of perception, in this case tactileand visual perception, Molyneux's Problem also speaks togreater issues within the Western tradition. Indeed Molyneux'sProblem is so compelling because it is, at root, the great allegoryof Greek philosophy. What role will vision play in the organizationof the faculties? Can knowledge be gained simply by gainingsight? Is the path of philosophy the path that leads to enlightenment,and if so what role do light and vision play in sucha revelation? In a certain sense, Molyneux's Problem is not unlikethe cave of shadows and the path to light and knowledge describedin Plato's Republic. Just as Plato's pupil must wrestle withthe murkiness of false knowledge and the hope of higher cognitionunified by the light, Molyneux's blind man must determineif and how his newfound sensory ability will aid the communicativeinterplay between self and world.

Author of the Dioptrica Nova (1692), Molyneux helped establishthe modern science of optics, and in particular theseventeenth-century conception of visuality as translucence, asopposed to today's notion that visuality is largely a question ofopaque surfaces like screens or images. Indeed the story of theblind man who learns to see, only to face the risk of being unableto assimilate his visions and thus being dazzled by that verylight, shows the importance of dioptrics in particular (the divisionof optics concerned with light passing through materials)and of optics in general, both as a science but also as a metaphorfor what enlightenment man might be.

A few years earlier, in the 1670s, Spinoza wrote his own allegoricaltale of transformation. It comes near the end of the Ethics,and we might assign it a name, Spinoza's Poet.

Sometimes a man undergoes such changes that I should hardlyhave said he was the same man. I have heard stories, for example,of a Spanish Poet who suffered an illness; though he recovered,he was left so oblivious to his past life that he did not believe thetales and tragedies he had written were his own. He could surelyhave been taken for a grown-up infant if he had also forgotten hisnative language.

Himself a master craftsman in the dioptric sciences, Spinozauses his poet to illustrate a very different kind of illumination.His is a light lost in the shadows. It points not to the Republic butto the Phaedrus, the Platonic dialogue in which Socrates notesthe inferiority of writing to pure thought. Writing is an image ofspeech, Socrates explains, and therefore an image of the self onceremoved. As a mediation of speech, writing is thus something ofa problem for the Platonic tradition. Following Plato, BernardStiegler calls this the problem of hypomnesis, that is, the problemof the translation of memory into physical media supports.With a "grown-up infant" who can no longer speak because he hasforgotten his language, Spinoza gives a play on words. The Latininfans means the non-speaking, from a negation of the deponentverb fari, to be speaking. In this sense, media threaten to renderus speechless, turning us into grown-up infants. The poet'slight is a dark cloud within the self, pure opacity in a forgettingof media.

Each story deals with mediation, and each contains a metamorphosisof the communicative faculties. One is the story ofreason acquired, the other of reason lost. Spinoza's Poet experiencesa collapse into oblivion (lethe), while Molyneux's Seerexperiences a newfound revealing of the world through reasonand sight (logos). The one is about the truth of one's ownMuse, one's own memories. The other is about the journey outof chthonic knowledge (through tactile feeling) and coming toknow reason. Ultimately they represent two competing assessmentsof seventeenth-century modernity.

The risk to Molyneux's Seer is that he will be dazzled by vision,his sense of sight uncorrelated to his sense of touch; the riskto Spinoza's Poet is that he will slip into the psychosis of amnesia,his own expressions effaced and banished from consciousmemory.

If Molyneux's Problem is a modern reinterpretation of Plato'scave, which is to say an allegory about learning to recognizethe world through a reorganization and cultivation of thecognitive faculties, Spinoza's Poet is an anti-cave, a story aboutunlearning and forgetting what one already knows. Spinoza'sPoet is the story of oblivion gained (lethe) instead of oblivion lost(aletheia). Not quite "the death of the author," nevertheless thepoet in Spinoza produces works that he can no longer recognize.It is the ultimate revenge of one's own literary production, theultimate excommunication, the ultimate betrayal by media.

* * *

The goal of this chapter is to tell a story about mediation, to determinea few facts as anchor points along the way, then to makean argument about a very particular transformation in the historicalarrangement of media.

Many will say that mediation is of a single kind, for examplethe single kind of mediation evident in Spinoza's Poet. To somethis single mode of mediation appears sufficient, for it capturesthe basic paradox of media, that the more we extend our mindsinto the world the more we risk being alienated from it.

Others will ratify the single kind, but complement it witha second kind: Spinoza's Poet together with Molyneux's Seer.Again, the two appear sufficient. For every danger of alienationand obfuscation there exists the counterbalance of cultivationand clarity. Even if a person loses his or her communicative faculties,there is the hope that the person will gain them again. Ifthe world falls dark, it will soon grow light.

But there is not simply one kind of mediation. Nor is theproblem solved by adding an auxiliary mode to include experiencesof cultivation or enlightenment. I hope to convince youthat these two are engulfed within a third middle, a third modeof mediation that is both emblematically modern and as old asthe Earth.

Three modes of mediation, three middles: the first is communicationin the most workaday sense, mediation as extension,transit, representation, reflection, mimicry, and alienation. Itincludes both circulation and exchange and the dangers theyprovoke such as disenchantment, fraud, and deception. The secondis pure and true communication, or the kind of communicationfound in communion, immediacy, and immanence. The third isthe multiplicity of communication, a complex affair in which thecommunicative infrastructure itself dilates and reduplicates tosuch a degree that it extinguishes any sort of middle whatsoever(and with it any sort of media).

Each middle has its own avatar. First is Hermes, the embodimentof communication in the most normal sense, for, as thegod of the threshold, he governs the sending of messages andthe journeying into foreign lands. From his name we derive theterm hermeneutics, the art of textual interpretation understoodas a kind of journeying into texts. Second is Iris, the other messengerof the gods, often overlooked and overshadowed by themore influential Hermes. As Greek goddess of the rainbow, Irisindicates how light can bridge sky and land. She presides overcommunication as luminous immediacy, and from her we gainthe concept of iridescent communication. Third are the Furies,the most rhizomatic of the divine forms. They stand in for complexsystems like swarms, assemblages, and networks. The terminfuriation captures well the way in which the Furies can upend asituation, thrusting it into a flux of activity and agitation.

What does this mean today? As a number of critics and theoristshave observed in recent years, hermeneutics is in crisis.Formerly a bedrock methodology for many disciplines acrossthe humanities from phenomenology to literary criticism,many today consider hermeneutics to be in trouble, in decline,or otherwise inappropriate for the various intellectual pursuitsof the age. Why plumb the recesses of the human mind,when the neurological sciences can determine what peoplereally think? Why try to interpret a painting, when what reallymatters are the kinds of pre-interpretive affective responses itelicits—or, to be more crass, the price it demands at auction?Many have therefore spoken of a "post-hermeneutic" moment,in which stalwart interpretative techniques, holding sway sincemedieval scholasticism if not since antiquity itself, have slowlyslipped away. But what has replaced hermeneutics? Some findinspiration in a new kind of scientism (disguised as cognitivismin many disciplines), others return to a pre-critical immanenceof experience, and still others are inspired by a newfound multiplicityof "flat" experience endlessly combining and recombiningthrough rhizomatic networks.

The task here is thus multiform. First is to define mediationas hermeneutics, by way of the figure of Hermes himself.But Hermes does not have the last word on communication toutcourt. Although he is the traveler, there are certain journeys onwhich even Hermes is unwilling to embark. Thus two additionaljourneys will be of interest: after Hermes, a second journey backto Iris and immanence, and a third out to a kind of tessellated,fractal space inhabited by the Furies.

All three modes of mediation bear witness to the paradoxesof communication. Hermes's hermeneutics acknowledges thateven the clearest form of communication is beset by deceptionand withdrawal. Iris's iridescence brings the communicants intoan ecstasy of immediacy, producing a short circuit of hypercommunication.And the Furies' infuriation destroys the primacy ofsender and receiver, reduplicating communicative agents intoendless multiplicity. The hermeneutic wayfarer, the ecstaticmystic, and the furious swarm are thus all excommunicants insome basic sense. They all venture beyond the human into theunknown. All three modes incorporate the logic of excommunicationinto themselves, since they each acknowledge the impossibilityof communication, whether it be via deception, immediacy,or multiplicity.

Yet, at the same time, none of the three modes consummateexcommunication entirely, for none forsake mediation altogetheror attempt to communicate with the purely inaccessible.Excommunication is quite militant. Excommunicationis the message that says there will be no more messages. AsThacker and Wark will demonstrate more fully in the chaptersto come, excommunication refers to the impossibility of communicationthat appears at the very moment in which communicationtakes place. While my three modes of mediation makecertain overtures to that effect, they forgo the ultimate step.They remain firmly rooted in this world, the human world ofthe here and now. So, in laying a certain terrain, I aim simply tostart the conversation rather than finish it. Only by venturingout into the realm of the purely nonhuman will we be able totake stock of excommunication proper. The subjects of the chaptersto come, Thacker's dark communication and Wark's aliencommunication, give an indication of what this realm might be,not so much an image of our world, but a message from a worldin which we are absent.

HERMES AND HIS EPITHETS

The myths tell of Hermes that he was "born in the morning, bymidday he was playing the lyre, and in the evening he stole theca_ le of far-shooting Apollo." He grows up rapidly and has nopast, or so it appears. He is clever and inventive, but also cunningand deceitful. His brother Apollo calls him a "friend of darknight," and christens him "The Prince of Thieves." To whichHermes, still a baby, retorts with a fart and a sneeze.

As mediator, he is perhaps best known as Hermes diaktoros,Hermes the messenger. A traveler from afar, he is often depicted,particularly in sculpture, in the act of binding his sandalsin preparation to depart. He is that thing that is just aboutto leave. "Nothing in him is fixed, or stable, or permanent, orrestricted, or solid," wrote Jean-Pierre Vernant. "In space andin the human world, he represents movement, passages, statechanges, transitions, contacts between foreign elements. Athome, his place is by the door, protecting the threshold, wardingoff thieves because he himself is the Thief." In the HomericHymn to Hestia, Hermes is called angelos. This word meansmessenger too, but it is also the word that gives us "angel," thedivine messenger, the one who mediates and chaperones travelerswhile they are on a journey. Thus Hermes is the guiding god.He accompanies travelers and merchants. The Greek poet Theocrituswrote: "I go in / Awe of the terrible vengeance of Hermesthe god of the wayside, / For he is greatest in anger, they say, ofthe heavenly powers / If anybody refuses a traveller wanting directions."

Because of this he is also known as Hermes of the turninghinge (Hermes strophaios) and is often present at the front doorof houses, that is, by the hinges of doorways. "[T]he practice [ofinstalling Hermes at the door] might also have arisen from hispower over the ghostly world; for we know that the primitiveGreek was troubled by the fear of ghosts entering his house, andused spell-words ... and other magic devices to prevent it; anda statue of Hermes at the entrance would be a natural religiousprophylactic." The god of the threshold is, in this way, also thegod of borderlands, market places (Hermes agoraios), and theprotector of merchants (Hermes empolaios). Indeed merchantsare those daring souls who must travel to foreign lands in orderto circulate goods, and the two terms merchant and Mercury,Hermes's Roman appellation, share a common root. "Whilemany other deities were also agoraioi [among them Zeus, Athena,and Artemis], Hermes was the market-god par excellence." Butwhy? "It is probable that the way-god is here again asserting hisimmemorial rights, acquired before the development of cities,when trade was conducted by traveling merchants, who neededthe help of the deity of the road, and whose safest market wasperhaps on the borderland between two communities, where aboundary-pillar of Hermes would preserve the neutrality andguard the sanctity of the spot." Moving fluidly across borders,Hermes thus illustrates a high level of promiscuity. He isgiven, in the Homeric Hymns, the title of king of exchanges. Wemight therefore call him the god of circulation itself. Indeed, forthis reason, Jacques Derrida called Hermes, with some brio, the"signifier-god."

He is the signifier god for all of these reasons. But he is alsothe signifier god in a more literal sense, for Hermes is said to bethe inventor of writing, the alphabet, and numbers. (That he isalso the inventor of fire, before Prometheus procured it for humanity,is also rarely noted.) The Neoplatonist philosopher Plutarchrecounts the following observation: "Hermes ... was, weare told, the god who first invented writing in Egypt. Hence theEgyptians write the first of their letters with an ibis, the birdthat belongs to Hermes, although in my opinion they err in givingprecedence among the letters to one that is inarticulate andvoiceless"—and here Spinoza's Poet again looms large. Themute ibis bird, inarticulate and voiceless, stands in for the alphabetand hence writing in general as that thing both externalizedand opaque. As Plato writes in the Phaedrus, the individual usingwritten language must, in varying degrees, come to terms withthe fact that the written text kills all forms of dialogue, for it cannever speak back, only parrot over and over its own fixed contents.As with Spinoza's Poet, the object of expression (thepiece of writing) is that thing that is rendered foreign and unintelligibleto the one person most likely to be able to communewith it, its author. The Latin writer Hyginus recounts the followingon the invention of letters: "The [three Fates] Clotho, Lachesis,and Atropos invented seven Greek letters—A B H T I Y.Others say that Mercury invented them from the flight of cranes,which, when they fly, form letters. The cranes in flight arenot mere wildlife in this example, but a totemic incorporationof Hermes himself, the one who flies on journeys. So when thecranes take a shape, and the shape is a letter, it is at the same timeHermes who forms (invents) the letter.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from EXCOMMUNICATION by ALEXANDER R. Galloway, EUGENE THACKER, MCKENZIE Wark. Copyright © 2014 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS.
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Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0226925218
• ISBN 13: 9780226925219
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 224