Introduction
The materiality of communication
What could be less material than communication? Signs and symbols, messages and meanings … the rhetorical strategies of logos, pathos, and ethos … the ethereal transmission of signals and the glow of vacuum tubes … the ephemeral quality of thought itself … the superstructural insubstantiality of ideology and culture. These conceptualizations of communication suggest a realm of intangible phenomena that mediate our embodied human experiences of the concrete world. In many ways, the immateriality of communication is the ontological assumption for mainstream theory in the fields of communication, rhetoric, and media studies. Within this familiar ontology, communication is always inadequate, an imperfect, or even manipulative attempt to represent the real or connect with others through various mechanisms of signification. Critical theory, too, has been predicated on textualist, narrative, semiotic, or ideological paradigms, and the epistemological quandary that this ontological assumption creates has led numerous scholars over the past two decades to identify a poststructuralist impasse that needs to be escaped. Such discontent has often led to a turning away from “mere communication,” toward materiality as a corrective.
The chapters in this volume comprise a series of such correctives, although their strategies for materializing communication are diverse. One such strategy is to figure materiality as physicality. Infrastructure, space, technology, and the body become the focus, a move that situates communication and culture within a physical, corporeal landscape. Another move is to examine the materiality of communication itself, focusing on discourse as inscription in the material strata of sound, optical media, the built environment, and the brain. In this view, which draws on both posthumanism and medium theory, discourse itself (including thought as self-communication) is a material process, whether it is physiological, mechanical, or digital. A set of relays and traces moves across the sensorium and its milieus – across the neural networks that thread through the body, increasing in density inside our heads, and through the infrastructure that envelops the planet. As John Durham Peters says in this volume, reflecting on the recent convergence of media studies, cognitive science, and brain imaging, “Our brains are quite literally on fire.”
The move toward materiality in the fields of communication and rhetoric appears to be part of a broader shift toward a new materialist realism that spans the humanities and social sciences. The authors in this volume draw upon and engage with critical geography, cognitive science and neurobiology, communication history, mobility studies, philosophy, neo-Marxism, media studies, science and technology studies, and cultural studies to enliven and ground materialist approaches. Following a long period of focusing almost exclusively upon the problematics of language, meaning, and representation, there has been a renewed interest in establishing means for making claims about the real. Where critical theory had been oriented toward the problematic relationship between discourse and reality, leading to deadend debates over truth and falsity and a textual politics of deconstruction and ideological critique, there are now attempts to set aside epistemological debates in order to compose new ontologies that enable theoretical innovation and political intervention. As Katherine Hayles notes in her interview, the recent philosophical move into speculative realism is one such attempt.
This book assembles the results of one recent effort to think through the implications of a materialist approach to communication and rhetoric. We gathered the authors of this volume for a two-day symposium at North Carolina State University in September of 2009. That event confirmed our belief that scholars investigating media and communication have much to add to an understanding of materiality. We would suggest that scholars in other fields will also benefit from the work presented here, which demonstrates the constitutive role of communication and media in the production of the real. Five materialist thematics emerged at the symposium and became more pronounced as the authors completed their chapters: economy, discourse, space, the body, and technology. The authors rarely focus on only one of these themes. Rather, their approaches to materiality are grounded in differing configurations of two or more of these thematics: technology and body; space and economy; body, technology, and discourse, and so on. While we do not suggest this list is exhaustive or even epistemologically hermetic, it does encompass an important array of considerations that need to be accounted for if the field wants to move beyond the immaterial impasse.
Economy
The recent turn to materiality entails a number of ontological and phenomenological concerns that range far beyond the classical historical materialism of Marx and Engels, yet the lens of “economy” continues to be rooted in a Marxist sensibility and remains a key optic for examining the materiality of communication and culture. The authority of economic theory, whether Marxist or neoclassical, has often rested on a depth model in which the economic is figured as an underlying, more fundamental structure in relation to which the less tangible, and less determining superstructure – communication, culture, ideology … in short, the realm of the symbolic – must be understood. One can and should produce alternative readings of Marx, particularly by focusing on the most empirical and historical of his analyses, but the fact remains that most neomarxists (the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School as well as present-day political economists of communication) have relied on the dualism of the base–superstructure model to figure “economy” as the more material, more real, foundation of communication. Gramscian and Althusserian analyses sought to complicate the dualism of the model, arguing for a more constitutive concept of culture as ideology or hegemony, yet in many ways contemporary thinkers have retained a notion of the economic as a realm of the real, over which or upon which culture is constructed. As John Durham Peters notes in this volume, this approach to “economy” (as well as a similar position that is often articulated around the concept of “technology”) can be seen as “a kind of rhetorical blackmail in being more materialist than thou … a kind of bullying that goes along with claiming to be a materialist.”
Attention to “the economic” is thus a classical move within materialist traditions of social theory, but the contributors to this book endeavor, in various ways, to move beyond the conceptual frame of base and superstructure. Here, the economic is not seen as a separate realm of the real underlying communication and culture; rather it is understood as a specific logic of social, material, and cultural organization expressed in a range of different contexts, including the production of urban space (Hay), the composition of geographical regions as fields of social interaction (Parks and Sheller), the role of technical media in the everyday practices of laboring subjects (Greene, Packer and Oswald, Sharma, Sloop and Gunn), and the assembling of new translocal social spaces via networked social relations (Wiley, Moreno, and Sutko). In these materialist analyses, the present authors draw substantially on the work of Foucault, Lefebvre, and Deleuze to examine the economic logics at work in two key contemporary processes: the production of space and the production of subjects.
For a number of the authors in this book, the objective is to rethink the production of social space as a response to, and perhaps a struggle over, historically situated projects for the capitalist (re)organization of production, labor, technical infrastructure, the built environment, and social practices. Mimi Sheller’s essay on the airport as a site of surveillance and control of mobility reveals the ways in which differential mobilities – of bodies, of capital, of images – constitute the Caribbean as a region that is opened up, on the one hand, to the inward flows of investment and tourism, and regulated, on the other, to manage or block unwanted outward flows of migration. Lisa Parks’ analysis of the destruction and rebuilding of Iraq and Afghanistan reveals these campaigns as projects for the restructuring of space in which military and economic logics govern both the dismantling of older communication infrastructures and the (commercially contracted) building of new infrastructures for communication, remote sensing, and surveillance. Steve Wiley, Tabita Moreno, and Dan Sutko, like James Hay, draw on Lefebvre’s (1991) approach to social space as the production of the social relations of production. Given the context of globalization, they argue that social space must be rethought from the standpoint of social networks, mobilities, and translocal media.
For Hay, the work of Henri Lefebvre and Michel Foucault provides the conceptual foundation for a new analytical framework – spatial materialism – in which urban space may be understood as a reorganization of both the built environment and networks of technical media in ways that enable the production of neoliberal subjects. As Hay notes, neoliberalism is here understood from a Foucauldian framework within the long history of the “reason of State” where “political economy” was instrumental to “governmental rationalities” concerned with the limits and capacities of the Modern liberal State. In this sense, economy is both produced by differing and competing forms of governmental reason and productive of new forms of subjects. Economy is not only productive “in the last instance”; it is itself produced by power/knowledge relations and the activation of “free” subjects. Some of the present authors follow this Foucauldian line of enquiry, situating communication within such economic programs. Ron Greene examines the YMCA’s use of film and rhetorical training as pastoral techniques of power. These strategies were evident in the struggle to minimize class conflict, in part by forming rhetorical subject/critics at the behest of capital during the 1920s and 1930s. As Greene suggests, “To recognize textual commentary less as a generalized art of rhetorical interpretation, and more as a technology of the self is to pay closer attention to the institutionalization of textual commentary and modern criticism.” Kathleen Oswald and Jeremy Packer suggest that the production of “free subjects” via mobile media screens allows for the reorganization of flows of people, goods, culture, and capital in alignment with the potentialities, freedoms, and dictates of a neoliberal rationality.
Discourse
One of the most difficult questions for a materialist theory of communication concerns the ontological status of discourse itself. We noted at the beginning of this introduction that communication is often seen as immaterial – as a layering of human perception, thought, language, and symbol over the real or, in a thoroughly phenomenological view, the social construction of reality itself in language and culture. This dualist ontology can be traced through Plato, Descartes, Kant, and Hegel to phenomenology (Heidegger, Husserl, and Schutz); structuralism (Saussure, Levi-Strauss, and Althusser) postmodern and poststructuralist theory (Baudrillard and Derrida); and present-day “mainstream” theories of communication, culture, language, and rhetoric. A dualist ontology places the analyst in an apparently irresolvable paradox: any attempt to think “the real,” including theory itself, is inevitably a discursive construction trapped within historically specific languages and worldviews. Taken to its logical extreme, ontological dualism led to postmodern relativism and a textual politics of deconstructionism.
The current turn to materiality may be, as the editors of New Materialisms note, largely a reaction to the exhaustion of that text-centered, social-constructionist paradigm (Coole and Frost, 2010). This was already clearly evident among German media scholars as early as the late 1980s, as manifested in the collected volume Materialities of Communication (Gumbrecht and Pfeiffer, 1994, originally published as Materialitat der Kommunikation in 1988). As its coeditor, K. Ludwig Pfeiffer, noted, “The point then … is not a search for the reality of the material or the materiality of the real. We are looking for underlying constraints whose technological, material, procedural, and performative potentials have been all too easily swallowed up by interpretive habits” (p. 12). Here, we identify three strategies for materializing discourse – three ways in which recent work, including that of the contributors to this book, has sought to move beyond the text-centered (or message-centered) approach to communication that has prevailed during the last few decades. As noted above, political-economic analysts attempt to recuperate the materiality of discourse by focusing attention on the economic, spatial, technological, or corporeal context within which meaning is constructed. Others have turned the base–superstructure model on its head, noting the discursive or rhetorical properties of embodied, physical reality. And finally, a number of theorists have built on the ontological monism and posthumanism of Foucault, Deleuze, and others to analyze the materiality of discourse itself.
A familiar materialist move is to locate culture or meaning within an economic, physical, or embodied context. In this approach, the turn toward materiality is a turn away from textuality, meaning, and deconstructionism in order to grasp the real – economy, technology, physical space, the body – as hard external ground. Characteristic of this approach is arguments in favor of political economy as a kind of realpolitik of communication. Yet such an approach to materialism reproduces a dualist ontology in which the move toward materiality is simply a corrective that functions by “going back” to the physical, the infrastructural, the corporeal, or the economic “base” as a recuperation of what really matters. Such an approach reifies and takes for granted discursively or rhetorically constructed “hard” realities such as technology, money, the economy, policy, and corporations (i.e., it accepts given realities too quickly, failing to recognize their status as historically situated discursive regimes), and it fails to recognize the materiality of discourse itself, the material properties of statements that determine a number of important capacities: Are they reproducible, processable, translatable, transmittable, transportable, and physiologically effective?
A second strategy for recuperating the materiality of discourse is one that is employed by a number of the contributors to this book. Working one vein of the tradition of material rhetoric (see, e.g., Biesecker and Lucaites, 2009), these theorists see physical reality itself (embodied practices, physical sites, and urban spaces) as rhetorical and communicative. As Victoria Gallagher, Kelly Martin, and Kenneth Zagacki note in their study of Chicago’s Millennium Park, “scholars in rhetoric have taken materialistic principles and, by applying them to artifacts and structures within urban spaces, shown how they function to encourage and evoke interaction and feeling.” William Balthrop and Carole Blair focus attention on the rhetorical properties and effects of commemorative sites themselves, including the spatial practices of visitors. Jeff Rice develops a rhetorical performance to reveal – or even produce – the networks of decision making that compose urban space.
A number of contributors to this book develop a third strategy of materialization – one that seeks to grasp the materiality of discourse itself. One means for moving beyond both hermeneutics and structuralism as a means for understanding the materiality of discourse has been in circulation at least since Foucault proposed a new form of discursive investigation in The Archeology of Knowledge (1972). Foucault attempted to address the presence of statements – the brute fact that one statement exists as opposed to others. Kittler added media to Foucault’s concerns by showing how specific media, as elements in discourse networks, make certain statements possible, even probable – statements that were impossible prior to the invention of media such as film or the phonograph (1999). Such an orientation toward media inscription highlights technological storage and processing. However, Bernd Frohman’s explanation of documentality opens up the possibility for thinking all material as potentially discursive. In Frohman’s terms, everything, including an antelope, has the potential to communicate, to become a statement, but it must be made to speak. Building on DeLanda (2006, 2007), Frohman argues that such potentiality can only be realized within specific “assemblages.” Byron Hawk also employs the concept of assemblage to rethink rhetoric as an incorporeal, yet material element in the constitution of life. Hawk’s intervention builds on the vitalist tradition of Agamben (2004) and Deleuze and Guattari (1987) to “put rhetoric in a materialist flow that acknowledges both corporeal and incorporeal aspects and functions of rhetoric’s role in emergence …” As Hawk argues, “Such rhetorics of (non)communication operate in the movements and relations of bacteria, the swarms and flows of bees and ants, the birds’ transitions among territorial and courtship assemblages, and the movements of people through Chicago’s Millennium Park.”
Other contributors to this book understand discourse as a material process that crosses human–environment boundaries. Peters’ suggestion that we treat mollusks as media, as carriers of historical data, echoes some of this sensibility, though he notes that there must always still be a witness for any statement to exist, for communication to occur. Katherine Hayles’ assertion that discourse must be understood as cognition and information processing – processes that are not exclusive to humans – may offer an alternative to Peters. From a distributed cognition perspective, “discourse” is understood as moving across and through human–machine networks, a view that decenters human thought and emphasizes the increasingly powerful role of computer processing in relation to human cognition. Mark Hansen’s analysis also shifts the focus from traditional understandings of discourse centered on thought, language, semiotics, and persuasion, to a focus on sensibility – the preconscious processes of sensation and cognition that occur prior to the perception of a meaningful phenomenal world. Such a suggestion treats meaning as epiphenomena of more fundamental, diffuse, and less human-centered processes of composition.
Technology
Communication always manifests through technology if our definition is open to conceiving language as a technology. From such a perspective technology refers not only to modern devices. Rather, a rich tradition of scholarship has shown us the importance of the technological aspects of speech (Ong, 2002), the printing press (McLuhan, 1962; Eisenstein, 2005), writing (Havelock, 1988), books (Kittler, 1992), stone tablets, paper, and papyrus (Innis, 1950), maps and clocks (Galison, 2004), money (Simmel, 2004/1904), and calendars, clocks, towers (Peters, in press). In some ways a focus on technology, the technical or procedural means through which communication is enacted, seems self-evidently materialist. After all, the projector, film, screen, seats, and theater exist in the material realm. They are physical and embodied, and lasting in ways that the flickering image of a movie is not. Such a division between content and medium does remain in much contemporary scholarship. At times media technologies only seem to matter in terms of how the meaning of content might be altered by the mode of expression. However, for the majority of authors in this volume, technology matters in far more consequential ways. For some (Hay and Greene), technology is very broadly conceived, following from Foucault, to include technologies of governance or technologies of the self in which communicative forms and norms are merely a part. For others (Parks, Peters, Sharma, and Wiley, et al.), the most permanent aspects of technology, infrastructure, are shown to matter even where they may seem imperceptible, particularly as they enable mobility and control (de Souza e Silva and Frith, Gunn and Sloop, Oswald and Packer). Some authors (Hansen, Hayles, Hillis, Slack, and Wise) treat technology as an environment or milieu in which the human is constituted.
Both James Hay and Ron Greene explicitly draw upon a Foucauldian understanding of technology as a means for analyzing two different material aspects of communication. In an interview given rather late in his life, Foucault suggested a fairly straightforward means for thinking about technology. He said one should focus on tekhne, “a practical rationality governed by a conscious goal,” not “technology” understood too narrowly in his view as “hard technology, the technology of wood, of fire, of electricity.” He further suggested that “government is also a function of technology: the government of individuals, the government of souls, the government of the self by the self, the government of families, the government of children, and so on” (Foucault, 2000). Hay takes up such considerations when he examines how media technologies are envisioned as part of a series of historical attempts to implement differing governmental rationalities of urban renewal which envisioned media as mechanisms for extending and organizing the governance of urban space and citizens. Greene investigates how rhetoric serves as a technology of the self within the YMCA’s pastoral formation of power by which it attempted to govern working subjects. For Greene, film, a “hard technology,” was a mechanism by which audiences were brought together in front of specially trained rhetors who could articulate a new pastoral relationship between film, audience, the YMCA, and capital.
All of the relatively recent shifts in media technology that mark the ascension of digital over analog have demanded new forms of infrastructure. As Kittler (1999) has noted, such ascent does not lead to immateriality: the digital is materialized as light pulses within fiber optic infrastructure, created to maintain command and control networks that could survive a nuclear war. In her analysis of satellite imaging technologies, Parks suggests that the materiality of communication infrastructure is very often purposely designed to be invisible in order to hide various relations of power exerted by media. Thus, the historical focus upon the representational may be seen as perpetuating a framework in which infrastructure, data networks, and the decision making that governs them remain unseen. Peters uses the term “logistical media” to stress the infrastructural role of media in terms of storage, time and space, and processing. Such a focus shares much with Kittler’s historical work (1999, 2010) and, as Peters suggests, helps us to realize that the audiovisual media that have dominated the fields of media studies and communications were historical peculiarities, not the norm.
A number of the contributors to this book examine these issues via the analysis of concrete conjunctures. Oswald and Packer describe mobile media as the new infrastructure for what they term “screening technologies.” Such “screening” reorients how data/bodies are moved, tracked, and guided through highly individualized yet controlled regimens. Where Gunn and Sloop, Oswald and Packer, and Sharma see mobile media as part of capital’s neoliberal project, de Souza e Silva and Frith see mobile devices as largely empowering individuals with the ability to control their experience of public space. For Joshua Gunn and John Sloop, publicity itself has been reoriented by social and mobile media, with the effect that the very logics that serve to distinguish public from private are being reorganized. Sharma directs our attention toward what she calls a “temporal infrastructure” that is only in part made up of various media technologies, but also includes attendant forms of labor and organization necessary to manage people’s relationships to time.
Many of the authors in the volume would agree that technologies – understood as technical media environments in which we are increasingly immersed – play a fundamental role in the composition of historical forms of sensation, cognition, experience, consciousness, and subjectivity. However, some authors find these processes of particular import. Peters, Hayles, and Hansen, drawing frequently on the work of Friedrich Kittler, suggest that different technical media and media environments entail different capacities and limitations, thus altering the forms that human, and human–machine, cognition can take. For Ken Hillis, new digital media environments such as webcam-based interactions produce a new spatial-material relation of bodies – telepresence – which goes beyond audiovisual representation and interpretation to constitute an experience of real connection. This approach gives technical media a constitutive role in the production of embodied experience, a sensibility that is also evident in the work of both Greg Wise and Jennifer Slack. Wise, like Hansen and Hayles, is concerned with the locus of cognition within arrangements that radically decenter human subjectivity. If perception and cognition are distributed across human–machine assemblages, Wise argues, then attention is not a mere outcome of a human “executive” faculty of cognition, but rather is an expression of the assemblage itself.
Space
In some ways, the recent interest in materiality may be characterized as a broadening and deepening of the earlier “spatial turn” in social theory in the late 1900s, a shift that may have been associated with a waning confidence in history as the realm of progress and expanding freedom. Attention to questions of space may also be seen as a theoretical response to two perceived shifts in the social world: an acceleration in the mobility of people, goods, money, and media (Appadurai, 1990; Clifford, 1992; Sheller and Urry, 2006), and an apparent deepening of the interconnection and interdependence of disparate networks, places, processes, and social relations (Castells, 1996, 2009; Giddens, 1991; Hardt and Negri, 2001, 2004). In both cases – as an internally felt frustration with the limits of dialectics and history, or as an externally motivated response to pressing changes in the world around us – the spatial turn led to a rethinking of communication as a material element in the production of places and territories.
In this context, a number of contributors to the present volume analyze space by reanimating an older understanding of communication as the overcoming of barriers in order to facilitate the movement and interaction of people, goods, and culture. Charles H. Cooley, an influential figure in the Chicago School and Social Psychology, argued in his 1894 dissertation that the two arenas of physical transport and the transmission of information should no longer be considered together, reinforcing, in the field of communication, a division between the physical and the symbolic. Later scholars, such as James Carey, would seek to reassemble these two modes, but this often reproduced the initial dualism while simultaneously arguing against the limitations inherent in conceptualizing communication as the merely symbolic. In this view, communication can be understood as a practice of connecting, bringing together, assembling, or arranging – a practice that entails both corporeal (embodied) and incorporeal (enunciative) expressions. This has led to recent work that focuses on communication infrastructure, transportation and mobility, mobile technologies, and the production of urban, regional, and translocal social spaces.
A number of authors in the present volume take up this materialist approach to communication as the production of space. For Hay, urban space is “the production of a spatial arrangement, a complex of interdependent facilities (the ‘mediations’ and ‘cultural technology’) of liberal citizenship.” Similarly, for Sheller, space is composed of differential mobilities and immobilities whose contradictory logics become apparent in the practices of airport security, migration and tourism, and transnational financial flows. Like Hay and Sheller, Parks works outside the traditional paradigm of communication as representation. Instead, she considers the military and commercial logics shaping the construction of new Web 3.0 communication and information infrastructures that constitute territories of surveillance, control, and economic development in theaters of war. Wiley, Moreno, and Sutko propose a model of non-Euclidean social space as an assemblage of social, technical, and transportation networks. Like Hay, they begin with Lefebvre’s conceptualization of space as the production of the social relations of production, but they go on to argue for a “hydrological” analytical strategy that permits the discovery of networked, translocal social relations.
While the aforementioned authors examine the production of space on the scale of the city, region, or transnational network, several of the contributors to this book focus on the practices and experiences of individuals as they employ new media technologies in everyday life. Ken Hillis, for example, rethinks space and mobility as they are constituted in mediated interactions such as webcam sessions and Second Life. The indexicality of webcam images and avatars – their real-time connection to participants’ bodies – allows such interactions to be “increasingly positioned as seemingly actual spaces in which aspects of actual humans have come to reside.” For de Souza e Silva and Frith, location-aware mobile technologies and practices change users’ experience of urban space, allowing users “to further control how they manage their interactions with nearby people and information.” Sloop and Gunn also take up the spatial implications of mobile technologies and social media. They examine control from a different angle, however. Updating Raymond Williams’ concept of mobile privatization, they argue that the relation between technology, mobility, domesticity, and privacy must now be rethought in the context of what Deleuze (1997) termed the society of control. Sharma also focuses attention on spaces of everyday life but argues against the now-dominant spatial turn, pointing out that an exclusively spatial analysis neglects the fundamental importance of temporality in structuring relations of power. As with other analyses of technology and social space, these contrasting perspectives point to the paradoxical and possibly contradictory logics at work in the material infrastructures of communication.
In a somewhat parallel set of developments, rhetorical scholars have also turned to the analyses of space as one strategy for thinking about the materiality of communication. Characteristic of this move is the interpretation of physical space – public parks, commemorative sites, and entire neighborhoods and cities – as performing a rhetorical function. Balthrop and Blair, for example, interpret the World War I commemorative sites of the Western Front as “practiced and produced” places whose “borders, character, and ‘authenticity’ [are] rhetorical effects.” Similarly, Gallagher, Martin, and Zagacki employ classical rhetorical concepts to interpret Chicago’s Millennium Park – “literally its brick and mortar construction … as an important physical infrastructure of communication.” Rice’s performative analysis of a particular region of Detroit, 8 Mile Road, also takes a physical site as its object, interpreting, via the author’s individual memories and participatory observations, the ways in which “physical space offers a rhetoric of decision making within networked culture.” For these material–rhetorical analyses, “materiality” is understood as physicality, and a materialist analysis entails the application of rhetorical strategies of interpretation, critique, and invention to the ways in which physical, embodied, and networked spaces exert rhetorical effects.
Bodies
One of the themes that runs through many of the chapters that follow is the materiality of the body. We see such a grounding as stemming from at least three overlapping lines of thought. First, communication may be seen as an alwaysimperfect attempt to reconnect, and a focus upon the embodied practices of rhetoric and communication is one attempt to address such a dilemma. As John Peters states, “Bodies can touch but minds cannot, and that’s the fundamental dilemma of communication.” Second, bodies have become networked into increasingly extensive media, a situation that demands new understandings of the body/media relation. Following McLuhan and Kittler, media are understood quite literally as “extensions of man (sic)” that are necessarily respondent to the limited bandwidth of human senses. Third, building upon Michel Foucault’s understanding of biopower and the monist, materialist posthumanism of Deleuze and Guattari, a number of our authors see material embodiment in terms of the power relations and forms of knowledge that work upon the interlinked capacities of individualized bodies and populations. Our networked media bodies are implicated in biopolitical struggles that cross human, animal, and technological thresholds – a state of affairs that forces us to recognize that the body is more diffuse, less fixed, and more pervious than once was thought. Media are central to such extension and malleability.
The dream of overcoming communication’s immateriality is addressed by authors in this volume through various categories or definitions of embodiment. Ken Hillis argues that the indexical nature of visualizing the body in real time via networked media creates the experience of bodily interconnection. By drawing attention to the embodied enactment of rhetorical performance, Ken Zagacki, Vicki Gallagher, and Kelly Martin examine how bodies experience Chicago’s Millennial Park as a “Communicative City.” Similarly, Balthrop, Blair, and Michel’s account of memorials as material enactments focuses attention on the constitutive role of embodied performances. For Hillis and these rhetorical scholars, the body’s “being there” matters for how we make sense of the line dividing the material from the immaterial.
Media and communication alter what the body can be and how it can interface with the world. Drawing upon the work of McLuhan and Kittler, several authors address how the body is extended or networked. In the most radical of such formulations, the body is simply the sum of these extensions. Acknowledging the influence of McLuhan, Joshua Gunn and John Sloop argue that all media alter the body, particularly in its movements, and mobile, “social” media do so to a greater extent than previous forms. Both John Peters and Katherine Hayles are interested in building upon Kittler’s understanding of “the senses as processing devices” (Peters). For Peters, this demands a recognition that all signification has an immediate material dimension. Hayles argues for the formative force of technical media but calls for greater attention to embodiment and experience – elements of distributed cognition that crosscut human and machinic strata and work to constitute specific historical productions of “the human.” Mark Hansen also analyzes the body and its sensory capacities in relation to technical media, especially the ubiquitous media environment of the contemporary moment, in the production of experience. Hansen reworks the phenomenology of Husserl, Whitehead, Sartre, and Fink within the context of recent neurobiology and ambient media art to argue that human consciousness is a function of the resonances of the microtemporalities of environmental “worldly sensation.” According to Hansen, such a recognition decenters human sensation by situating it within other temporalities, both mediated and natural.
Greg Wise and Jennifer Slack each draw upon a Deleuzean understanding of agencement (arrangement or assemblage) to offer new conceptions of communication’s role in bodily configurations. For Wise, attention is an expression of an assemblage of the body and its milieu – a milieu that is increasingly constituted through networked media technologies. Agency is immanent to the assemblage, which organizes bodies and technologies in specific configurations that constitute varying forms of subjectivity and agency. In differing ways, Hayles, Hansen, Wise, Slack, and Sharma all make evident that a materialist approach to communication and the body does not narrow our focus of analysis; rather, it demands that we recognize the body as both pervious and extensive – that it is but one element (and a particularly reified element, at that) in a broader configuration out of which “the human” emerges. Indeed, Slack extends this line of thought to question the basic assumptions underlying the field of communication – its historical focus on transmission, modes, and media. If the posthuman body is constituted in the midst of a whole range of technological, biopolitical, and interspecies relations, Slack argues, then the field of communication must broaden its scope radically or risk being left behind as other fields take up the conceptual, practical, and political challenges of the new context.
Conclusions
Clearly, a volume such as this cannot propose a singular point of departure or line of thought for investigating the materiality of communication. However, taken as a whole, these essays do more than merely provide some new possibilities or offer suggestions for future work. It should become clear that the authors in this volume are struggling with the messiness of materiality conceptually, methodologically, and practically. The philosophical and political outcomes of these endeavors are not guaranteed. But of the various attempts to move beyond the modern and postmodern quagmires we have outlined, there seems to be some general agreement that our material existence needs to be given a fuller account. We have located five mechanisms for orienting such an account (economy, the body, discourse, space, and technology), none of which should be wholly surprising. However, once assembled, these mechanisms start to take shape and repeat movements in consistent and measured fashion. How to monitor, gauge, and trace such movements is not yet fully clear. We wonder if there is not a more able cipher than the editors, which could be unleashed upon this volume to decrypt this materialist knowledge-producing apparatus into being.
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