Ghost in the Wire

I came across a very brief discussion over at the Chutry Experiment regarding what Chuck is calling "media times," a phrase that I think points to the various types of temporality depicted within and derived from various media. Chuck, film master that he is, is most interested in the temporality of film, but his brief brainstorm has me thinking about the more generic question of mediation qua temporality. And contrary to first appearances, this is a fairly important and demanding issue, though its importance is probably much more obvious to people who are just learning how to do criticism than it is to people who have already developed a critical faculty.

Here's the reason: one of the problems that critics face, again and again, is that of (accurate) representation. See, most criticism does something along these lines: "X happens in a film or a text or a television show, this X symbolizies, represents, or marks something that I will call Y, and Y is either problematic or beneficial for the following reasons." Now that doesn't sound like a difficult thing to get one's head around, but novice critics routinely scratch their heads when they get to the second part of the critical enterprise, in which X is somehow linked to Y. Why? Well, let's take a quick example of an artifact, say something like the movie Tron. This classic Disney film, one of (if not the) first films to incorporate computer-generated images, tells the story of a programmer who hacks his way back into a program he himself created, a program that has grown and evolved into an evil entity known as Master Control. Master Control zaps the programmer with a laser and transports him into the video game world, and there our programmer links up with Tron, a warrior who would fight the oppressive rule of Master Control. As a programmer made virtual, our lead character has superpowers (not unlike Neo of the Matrix movies) and is able to save the day, free the programs, and redeem his status and reputation in the real world.

Now, there are a lot of ways that one can do that "X relates to Y" part of criticism here. One could argue that it's a Jesus story, told for the video game age. One could contend the film speaks of corporate power, of capitalism, and the need for champions to rise and question its implicit hold on social organization. One could find in it the workings of erotic drive (the programs are very strangely sexed), and with the keen notation of various phallic movements, speak of the films internal gloss on sexual and identity repression. One could note that the two hero figures are male, and that the women in the film are really only there as decorative, quasi-sexual objects, and so it makes sense to read the film as another story of male domination, written by men for men. Whatever. The point is that there are lots of ways in which different Xs can point to different Ys. But this pointing relies fundamentally on some classical notion of representation, on the idea that the content of the film points (implicitly or explicitly) to content not in the film, and that this pointing takes the second set of content (Y) and makes us think about it in terms of X. In other words, the film re-presents Y as X.

Now for young critics, this process is invariably confusing. How are we to know which X-Y statement is the correct one? The only way to answer this question is to provide a metric that celebrates one ideological/critical disposition over another. One needs to accept and agree with certain psychoanalytic precepts, or to believe that religion has a prominent and privileged role in the shaping of the American psyche, or that gender dynamics deserve center stage for political or ethical reasons, and so on and so forth. From one of these groundings, a correct reperesentation can supposedly be selected from the field of possible representations.

The problem of course is that representation is somewhat of a shell game, since the ability to decide the proper interpretation begins with an ideological mastery that is responsible for hiding the shell in the first place. Faced with the fore-ordained awareness of gender dynamics' importance, it's hard not to find gender dynamics represented in an artifact in some way that displeases you or your potential readers. When backed by a utopian political or ideological horizon, it's hard not to see certain artifacts, no matter how progressive, as simply dirtying the skyline. This isn't to say that noting the deficiencies of these artifacts is without merit, only to say that criticism bound to a logic of representation, of X's relation to Y, already suffers from certain pronounced internal limits.

In addition, and perhaps more fundamentally, representation as a critical ground ignores entirely the actual role of mediation, of the temporality of any particular media form. This is why it helps to think the specificity of artifact not through a logic of representation, but rather through a logic of ecology. See, media do not merely represent the world or the word. They present a world or a word; literally they make it present — available to the here and now or preserved for a future here and now. They represent time. A particular time (stasis), a movement of time (chronos), a sense of timing (kairos): every representation is the reproduction of some object or event or person as a present. This is not to say that this act of presentation is what gives media its sense of reality – Heidegger is right to caution against thinking the vulgar temporalization of the present as being synonymous with the more fundamental experience of presence – but rather, this presentation is what gives media what we now think of as "real time," which is to say that it gives to media a sense of the temporality in which one encounters particular disseminations as something happening in the present, or as something happening "now." As a consequence, our perception of time changes along with the way different media organize our sense-perceptions; as certain media become more pervasive in our lives, the perception of their particular instantiation of “media time” in turn begins to structure our general experience of time's passing. As Derrida remarks: “This other time, media time, gives rise above all to another distribution, to other spaces, rhythms, relays, forms of speaking out and public intervention.”

We have to remind ourselves that time is not an ontologically discrete object. We experience time, without doubt, but that experience is always already governed by the inherited practices of measuring time, be it through the minutiae of the hour, minute, and second, the slow change of months or seasons, or the historical perspective produced by conceptualizing a past, present, and future. The existential reality of the passage through time does not, in other words, require that time be measured, but the existence of a measure (or rather, the technics that make measurement possible) necessarily determines how one experiences the passage of time.

A double-edged sword, in other words: on the one hand, the passage of time is utterly existential. Existence is structured, as Michael Hyde likes to say, by the movement of the now to the not-yet. On the other hand, the experience of the passage of that time is, for most people, dictated by the technics by which that passage is measured, i. e. temporalized. Take for instance, the technical reform of time that took place in Western Europe around the close of the thirteenth century: the birth of the mechanical clock. Rather than focus on fixing the calendar, as previous cultures were wont to do, the Europeans spent their time discerning how to measure the hour, to shrink the passage of time to more manageable units. The new hour clock (which took its name from related French and German words meaning “bell” because it made precise the system of bells that announced various points of the day in European cities) helped to dissolve more fluid conceptions of time and replace them with a view of time as quanta. Historian Alfred Crosby writes:

Time had seemed to most people an unsegmented flow. Therefore, experimenters and tinkerers wasted centuries attempting to measure time by imitating its flowing passage, that is, the flow of water, sand, mercury, ground porcelain, and so on – or the slow and steady burning of a candle out of the wind... Solving the problem becomes possible when one stops thinking of time as a smooth continuum and starts thinking of it as a succession of quanta.

The "need" for speed followed immediately on the steps of this discovery. This new reaction, McLuhan explains, manifests because the clock makes it “possible to fix time as something that happens between two points” which transforms the passage of time into a measurable, discrete concept of “duration,” and produces, concomitantly, "our impatience when we cannot endure the delay between events." Nostalgia for the old days, when the world passed slowly, without all those mechanical doo-hickies, no doubt followed shortly thereafter. What made possible this shift in the experience of time – a shift that helped usher in the European obsession with quantification and measurement, and subsequently the reimagining of science – is a mediation of time by different set of technics.

None of which is to say that the experience of time is entirely determined by technical apparatuses, or even entirely determined by the psychic imprint of those apparatuses. Heidegger's purpose in Being and Time is not just to think the essence of Being through the facticity of time, it is also to force a rethinking of time that is not beholden to its vulgar/technical reduction to quanta. That such a project is thinkable at all implies that technics cannot control entirely the experience of time. But criticism wedded to representation can never approach the temporal affects of media time, because such critical acts always already map the atemporal logic of representation (in this case, a symbolic logic) upon the more complicated temporalities of the act of presencing.