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The Conditions of Media's Possibility

A Foucauldian Approach to Media History

Jeremy Packer

Michel Foucault was not a media historian. This statement is neither surprising, nor likely to meet with much resistance. While clearly the books and texts forming the archives of Foucault's investigations are media, their explicit materiality as technologies for overcoming time and distance, reducing noise, or maintaining culture, was very rarely if ever the focus of his historical investigations.¹ Yet, numerous scholars have drawn upon Foucault's work in their historical investigations of media. An obvious question might then be, “How does one do Foucauldian media history?” In a schematic and overly generalized fashion, a simple answer is that there are two clearly distinct ways of bringing Foucault's thought to bear on media history. First, Foucauldian concepts, such as disciplinarity, the confessional, or panopticism, could be applied to the historical dimensions of media forms and technologies. This approach might be called the Foucauldian toolbox approach. Though it will not be developed herein, Foucault himself was certainly not dismissive of such application of his work as he suggested his own books might make up “a kind of tool-box others can rummage through to find a tool they can use however they wish in their own area [. . .] I don't write for an audience, I write for users, not readers” (Foucault, 1994). While keeping Foucault's consideration in mind, I would like to suggest a more robust form of Foucauldian media history.

This second approach would entail combining Foucault's two primary historiographic methods, archaeology and genealogy. Using them to investigate the historical processes of mediation, the creation and use of media technologies, and/or the rise and fall of media institutions could bear ripe fruit. Archaeology is Foucault's practice of investigating the historical constitution of a specific field of knowledge and can be seen most readily in his early work on psychology (Foucault, 1988), medicine (Foucault, 1994), and the human sciences of economics, biology, and linguistics (Foucault, 2002). Foucault's description of this method is most fully elaborated in The Archaeology of Knowledge (1982a). Genealogical investigation asks how power has been historically constituted and resisted through governmental rationalities, forms of knowledge, and practices of the self. Foucault (1977) specifically addressed power in groundbreaking ways in its productive capacities, as opposed to merely its working as a mechanism of oppression (Foucault, 1978). Further, he elaborated an understanding of rationalities for rule that organized power according to three variably arranged modes; sovereignty, disciplinarity, and security. Bringing archaeology and genealogy together provides a more “Foucauldian” form of historical investigation than the toolbox mode (not necessarily validating in and of itself). More importantly it allows for an analysis that can systematically focus upon three interlocked concerns (1) the production of knowledge, (2) relationships of power, and (3) modes of subjectification. These three arenas serve as a kind of Foucauldian triumvirate that he and others suggested ruled over all of his work.² The toolbox approach is most common in media studies generally and to some degree in media history as well. However, there have also been archaeologies of thought regarding communication, if not precisely media. Armand Mattelart's The Invention of Communication (1996) stands out as an exemplary Foucauldian account of this form. While not explicitly Foucauldian, one could read John Durham Peters's Speaking Into the Air (1999) in a similar light. Mattelart focused primarily upon France while Peters was more concerned with the development of thought in the United States.

This chapter will first situate some of this work within the field of media history, leaning heavily upon John Nerone's (2003) schematic of the field while acknowledging that recent work such as the collected volume Media Archaeology (Huhtamo & Parikka, 2011) presents other interesting means for following up on some of Foucault's archaeological concerns. It will then proceed to describe work that develops Foucauldian approaches for doing archaeology and genealogy that are particularly well suited to an analysis of media history. These models will come from four sources: (1) Friedrich Kittler's discourse-analytical approach to media history; (2) the so-called Stanford School of the philosophy of science, paying particular attention to their understanding of scientific instruments; (3) key work in cultural studies that builds upon Foucault's concept of governmentality; and (4) Giorgio Agamben's recently translated essays on method (Agamben, 2010) and the apparatus (Agamben, 2009). Each of these key historiographic and theoretical considerations will be developed to help us build a model of media history that avoids some of the criticisms directed at previous Foucauldian work in the field.

What results may allow for a directive to address the interconnections between power, knowledge and subjectification. These three problematics were taken up as the organizing principle for Gilles Deleuze's book-length explanation of Foucault's work, simply titled Foucault (1988). In it he explained how they form the backbone of Foucault's epistemological, ontological, and methodological foundations. I will ultimately suggest that a thoroughly Foucauldian media history should attend to the intermixing of these three elements as they elaborate an apparatus. Starting with such a conception and by asking questions related to media processes, we can see how genealogical and archaeological investigation can be put to good use for understanding how subjects come into being through mediation, entwined within technological and governmental relations of power, whose existence depends upon scientific and vernacular knowledge productive of and produced by media technologies, institutions, and forms. Such an approach would take Foucault's definition of technology as a starting point.

In an insightful interview in 1982 Michel Foucault was asked a series of questions that were meant by the interviewer, Paul Rabinow, to clarify Foucault's understanding of the relationship between architecture and politics. In an interesting redirection, one of Foucault's defining strategies, he explains that when it comes to understanding space and power, architects have since the nineteenth century taken a back seat to engineers and technicians devoted to the three great variables “territory, communication, and speed.”³ He argues that the political imaginary was no longer dominated by an idealized notion of the city whereby the state was imagined as if it were an extended city. Rather, with the advent of railroads and “a network of communication” the nature of the social and how one must govern were differently problematized. As a result, new behaviors and new forms of resistance radically transformed the population and a new political imaginary emerged which recognized the centrality of the media necessary to create and maintain greater and quicker communication.

Foucault ends the interview with a discussion of how he would approach the history of a specific field of practice and thought that bridged the divide between the technical and the aesthetic, in that instance architecture, though I will argue the same could hold for media. Foucault would focus on tekhne, “a practical rationality governed by a conscious goal” (Foucault, 2000, 364). Recognizing the possible conflation with the term “technology” understood too narrowly in his view as “hard technology, the technology of wood, of fire, of electricity,” Foucault asserts we also should broaden our understanding of “technology.” He claimed for instance 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.” Thus the historical study of a specific tekhne would demand situating it within the broader sense of the word to understand how it functions in terms of a practical rationality and a means to govern specific practices and peoples. Such an approach could lead us to ask, “Why and in what ways have media been imagined as an arena of analysis and application that could accomplish such practical goals?”

I invoke this interview not because it is one of the few places Foucault actually addresses communications or media in relation to technology, nor because it is the only possible directive for imagining what Foucauldian media history might look like.⁴ As I will argue below, there are numerous routes leading toward such an enterprise, none of which necessarily need cross paths with these few passages. However, the interview does point us in a few interesting directions that will be taken up later. First, Foucault's broad understanding of technology will help us get out of a division in the field of media history that John Nerone (2003) has expressed in terms of media/technology versus media/institution. Second, Foucault's assessment of the centrality of communication technologies in the reformulation of governance might be seen as a defining feature of media history. This was due in large part to the changed scale and tempo of the governmental imaginary that follows from the increased speed and reach of media, configured here as both communication and transport, following from some lines of thought more thoroughly elaborated by such figures as Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan, Lewis Mumford, and James Carey.

Foucault's Legacy and Media History

The work of Michel Foucault continues to have a more profound effect upon the humanities and social sciences in English-speaking countries than any other intellectual figure to emerge in the second half of the twentieth century or the early years of the twenty-first. While such a claim may seem contentious, if quantitative measures count for anything, a study by The Times Higher Education in 2009 showed that Foucault was the most cited author in the humanities. Further, Foucault has been the most cited figure in the Arts and Humanities and Social Sciences Citation Index every year since 1985, the year following his death (Nealon, 2009). In the midst of such evidential significance, having to defend against the question “Why Foucault?” would seem a bit tedious in any field. However, there are contextually specific reasons for explaining “Why Foucault for media history?”

Within the humanities no field may have been as simultaneously vexed and enchanted by Foucault's work than history. While it is not within the scope of this essay to consider the decades-long debates that Foucault's work has inspired, John Nerone has nicely summed up this tantalizing yet uncomfortable affair:

Nerone's description provides a transition to our more immediate topic, media history.

Several prominent scholars have pointed out that the field of media history still suffers from growing pains and as of yet has nothing resembling an official cannon (Nerone, 2003, 2008; Peters, 2008a; Zelizer, 2008). Given these circumstances, claiming that Foucault's work is worthy of inclusion could be taken as contentious for a number of reasons. It is eminently clear Foucault was not a media historian. In fact, a cursory glance at his seminal books, lectures, and essays shows that he never directly turned his gaze upon media technologies or institutions. Nor did Foucault spend considerable time analyzing the past 150 years⁵ – the bread-and-butter period for most media historians, as it saw the rise of modern mass media forms, technologies, and institutions.

However, at least one strain of media history, devoted to media/technology (as opposed to the more prevalent take media/institution), has partially emerged from a Foucauldian inclination (Nerone, 2003). Some contextualization is in order. Nerone argues that two common approaches to media history coalesce around distinct understandings of what media are. One approach, most clearly exemplified by the Canadian Medium Theory School figures Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan, focuses upon the grand sweep of historical change resulting from the implementation of different media technologies. Nerone suggests media/technology as a descriptor for this approach. The other common strain in media history, media/institution, is the more parochial and involves histories of mass media institutions and their content. This vein mostly produces histories of journalism practices and news organizations, industry-level alterations in the policy and economics of television and radio, the rise and fall of film studios, and the ever-growing importance of advertising. While the media/technology strain is often said to be infected by “technological determinism,” the media/institution wing is filled with the whiggish remnants of a time when great men (sic) lorded over history's conscience and were thought to man (sic) the great levers of time's passage. Nerone sees manageable maneuvers for escaping technological simplifications via micro histories of specific technologies that dwell upon immediate media environments. Huhtamo and Parikka (2011) suggest that such specificity of historical investigation is what is needed for media archaeology. Further, it denies not only technological determinism, but “construct(s) alternate histories of suppressed, neglected, and forgotten media that do not point teleologically to the present media–cultural condition as their ‘perfection’” (Huhtamo & Parikka, 2011, p. 3). In sum, it is suggested by Nerone as well as Huhtamo and Parikka that we may need micro histories that are careful not to (1) allow media or communication to encompass everything, (2) simply verify in new historical context what Foucault has already “discovered,” or (3) fall back into the grand-narrative trap set by teleology. Who needs to go to the archive if we already know history's carriage only stops at the doorstep of Foucault's house of disciplinary order?

Two other concerns regarding Foucauldian historical analysis need to be addressed. One has to do with periodization and the second has to do with the periods in which Foucault's work was first encountered in English. Treating Foucault as a historian rather than a philosopher or a methodologist leads both to “better” histories that prove him “wrong,” as mentioned, and also the problem of his historical accounts being misread as being teleological and programmatic. Such a misreading can lead to work in media history that simply extends the workings of a particular Foucauldian concept into a new historical period (by necessity a period following those dealt with by Foucault) or applying it to new media technologies with little attention paid to historical and contextual differences. To make matters worse, Foucault describes the emergence of different forms of power (sovereignty, disciplinarity, and governmentality/security/pastoralism) that often are taken to correspond to consecutive historical epochs. Deleuze (1995a, 1995b) further confuses the situation by adding the notion of “control society” as a form. Without belaboring the point, Foucault is quite explicit that no such epochal transformation has been afoot. “We need to see things not in terms of the replacement of a society of sovereignty by a disciplinary society and the subsequent replacement of a disciplinary society by a society of government; in reality one has a triangle, sovereignty–discipline–government [. . .] which constitute from the eighteenth century onwards a solid series, one which even today has assuredly not been dissolved” (Foucault, 1991, p. 102). Deleuze's description is looser and he describes “old sovereign societies,” “disciplinary societies,” and “control societies,” each with its attendant, and possibly defining, technologies. For Deleuze (1995b), writing at the beginning of the 1990s, the “key thing is that we're at the beginning of something new” (p. 182). This “new” may see “older means of control, borrowed from the old sovereign societies” (p. 182), brought back into the fold. The degree to which Deleuze's account is a break with Foucault or an extension depends largely upon whether (a) “control society” is akin to Foucault's work on security (see especially the first three lectures in Foucault, 2004) and (b) whether a borrowing of the old forms is an example of Foucault's “solid series” and “triangle.” In either event, applications of a misconceived sequential logic do exist even though it's quite clear that was not Foucault's intent.

A second way in which Foucault's work has been dismissed as being insufficient and/or teleological stems in part from the fact that the most prominent glosses of Foucault in English were written well before whole arenas of his work, most particularly his lectures from the College de France, began to appear in print and/or in English. In its worst incarnation we get a Foucault forever relegated to a set of fixed positions that tell us more about the concerns of scholars in the United States and the United Kingdom reeling from the various “posts” starting around 1980 and continuing into the early 1990s than about Foucault the philosopher/methodologist. Such concerns left all sorts of Foucaults (many for dead): a Foucault to forget (Baudrillard, 1977; Virilio, 1986), Foucault without an analysis of the state (Hall, 1980), Foucault the unbeknownst Marxist claiming to be anti-Marxist (Poulantzas, 1979), Foucault the Enlightenment crypto-normativist (Habermas, 1986), Foucault the anti-humanist nihilist (Waltzer, 1983), Foucault the unethical (Miller, 1990), Foucault who forgot feminism (Heckman, 1996), Foucault the postmodernist (Paglia, 1991), and Foucault the modernist (Bruns, 1994). Foucault rather enjoyed such divergent responses to his thought.⁶ Rather than fixing Foucault as a process of recuperation or setting him in his place, it may prove far more beneficial to look at how Foucault's thought animates a range of historical investigations central to the broad definition of media and technology outlined above. Below, four such animations are described. Taken together, they might be considered foundations for constructing Foucauldian media histories.

Friedrich Kittler and Media's Brute Facticity

One scholar who has most fervently pushed the boundaries of a poststructural media history is Friedrich Kittler. His three major works translated into English, Discourse Networks 1800/1900 (1990), Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1999), and Optical Media (2010), can be approached as the first full-fledged attempt to bring Foucauldian poststructural analysis to the historical study of media. The uptake of Kittler in English-language media history has been to this point rather sparsely scattered, a point several scholars have commented upon and tried to explain (Peters, 2008b, 2010; Winthrop Young & Lutz, 1999). In some ways it is rather obvious. Kittler's view of human–technological interaction feels cold and unflinchingly harsh (Wellerby, 1990). Much of the material he worked with was firmly situated in the roots of a German intellectual and literary tradition that is not easily penetrated by those unfamiliar with it (Peters, 2010). Further, Kittler draws not only from Foucault, but also quite heavily from Marshall McLuhan and the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Ensuring it is even less palatable upon first review, Kittler's fundamental theory of communication is borrowed from Shannon and Weaver's classic “transmission model” which has in the United States been situated as an adversary to critical and cultural approaches following James Carey's 1975 article, “A Cultural Approach to Communication” (1989). Finally, Kittler's historical teleology may seem problematic. All media technologies are viewed in terms of their perceived similarities with digital media and/or what technological, mathematical, economic, or theoretical elements they added to help “media history culminate(s) in the digital computer” (Peters, 2010, p. 7). Stone tablets, ink quills, and typewriters are necessary, though ultimately failed, attempts to reduce the noise that kept humans from hearing the sirens' call for a digitized world.

Kittler often acknowledges that he borrows heavily from Foucault for his method of historical analysis. It follows then that a discourse network is composed of “the network of technologies and institutions that allow a given culture to select, store, and process relevant data” (Kittler, 1990, p. 369) and that an “archaeology of the present must also take into account data storage, transmission, and calculation in technological media” (p. 369). The “also” here refers to the fact that Foucault's discursive formations “did not progress beyond 1850” and hence paid no attention to the second industrial revolution and “its automation of the streams of information” (p. 369). Thus Kittler seeks to historicize not the processes of meaning making, ideological struggle, or cultural reproduction; rather, it

This poststructural, post-hermeneutic approach to media history appeared as a corrective to the prevailing assumptions and concerns of literary studies, Kittler's initial academic home. The key here for Kittler is not meaning production, the play of ideology, or idealized discourse communities and publics. His maneuver out of the hermeneutic tradition depended upon a decentering of human agency and meaning production via a turn toward Foucauldian discourse analysis and Shannon's model of communication.

A further ingredient for Kittler isn't so much methodological, but rather his dependence upon Canadian medium theory. Combining Innis's concern with spacetime bias with McLuhan's “extensions of man,” Kittler looks historically upon the specific means by which time shifting and spatial transmission works to extend the sensory, memory, and logical capacities of the human. Whether this be by book, telegraph, television, typewriter, or computer, the brute fact of mediation according to Kittler is best characterized by Shannon's classic mathematical model (much misused and maligned in the US context of its inception) by which messages (or statements) are encoded by a sender, are transmitted through a medium, reach a receiver, and are decoded. Shannon's theory in the hands of Kittler elaborates the processes by which noise is overcome in order that data can be stored, transmitted, and processed. Thus, Kittler's Foucauldian media history, most succinctly presented in Optical Media, is the history of technological achievements in which the camera obscura and lanterna magica are not merely devices that predated photography and film, but rather elements in discourse networks that reshaped how optical data were collected, moved about, stored, and processed. Such media technologies reorient power/knowledge formations as they create new means for knowing and acting upon the world. For instance, the camera obscura functioned mimetically as a means for an understanding of human optics, perspective, and even ballistic predictability. Further, from such a vantage, media are certainly “extensions of man,” but only insofar as the “man” in question was never an a priori, but rather an always-already extended product of discourse and technology. Thus, McLuhan's humanistic sensibility gets reworked.

There are several more specific takeaways from Kittler's work for thinking about Foucault and media history. First, the study of discourse as it relates to media looks very different from what Kittler (2010) derides as a “trivial, content-based approach to media” (p. 31). Rather, discourse relates to the networks of associated technologies and statements which organize what can be said (data-knowledge), where and to whom it is said (transmission-power), and what can be made with such statements (processing-power/knowledge). The importance of media technologies is that they changed such dynamics. It made the visual and auditory realms mechanically capturable, storable, searchable, transmittable, and processable. It combined the time shifting of memory or print with analog data capturing that did not have to pass directly through human observation, but rather through mechanical means of production and processing. Cameras may have first depended upon human hands to be made operable, but once freed from such constraints they are capable of capturing data regardless of intentionality, human agency, or the constraints of meaning making. Much meaning will be made and humans will enact agency via the camera for all sorts of intent, but the pivotal issue for Kittler is how it transforms the capturing of data. This is one aspect of the facticity of Kittler's media analysis. The world was being newly inscribed, not by human hands writing, chiseling, or making marks on papyrus, paper, or some other surface (what Kittler refers to as the artisanal stage of media production), but rather through apparatuses that combined chemistry, mechanics, and optics.

Kramer suggests that Kittler's media history is fundamentally about both technologies and institutions:

Here we have one of the possible means for overcoming the divide that John Nerone sees in the field of media history between examining technologies and institutions. We will return in the section on governmentality to how a Foucauldian media history could be used to bridge such a division. For now, however, because Kittler's historical accounts are so attentive to the inner workings of technological development, we are given a view into the institutional laboratories from which they are formed. From such a vantage, specific techno-mechanical, biological, chemical, electrical, and human assemblages are the actors, while institutional demands and physical limitations are the well-lit stage.

Most central to a Foucauldian media history may be the question of knowledge production and the games of truth that are increasingly played out via media. Media are fundamental to knowledge production; from how data are collected, how they are made visible, their form, the life of their existence, their degree of malleability, the extent to which they can be translated from machine to machine to machine, and ultimately how they can be processed to make things happen. In the end, for Kittler, the digitalization of data, of the world, of knowledge, makes all media “the same.” From such a vantage, the effects on the continuing production of knowledge have clearly not fully come to be understood. In terms of a Foucauldian media history, the project of making sense of how media have altered the production of knowledge that organizes how the world is known, processed, and acted upon has barely begun. Yet what is needed isn't merely the Foucauldian project of archaeology, of discourse, but rather of genealogy.

Kittler's Foucault needs to be complicated by power relations to counter what Peters (2010) calls his “disdain for people, or more specifically, for the category of experience” (p. 5). In particular, I would like to imagine that many of Kittler's insights would not lead to categorizing humans into what emerges in his work as (1) the geniuses of scientific invention and philosophic understanding or (2) the great masses of unnecessary and powerless “so-called humans” who fail to populate his histories.⁷ Rather, a Foucauldian media history might focus not only upon the early Foucault of knowledge production and discourse networks with their attendant ruptures, but more so on Foucault's later work on power and subjectification. Our understanding of the relationship between subject formation and media would become richer and more complex, not flatter and reductive. This would involve not only focusing upon Kittler's favored loci of struggle, nationalist scientific competition, and war, but rather the messiness of struggle over epistemology and invention that take place in local contexts of lived experience. The give and take between from-on-high and down-low has been a difficult relationship to chart. The archive favors the memory, and hence the perceived power, of those who could write their thoughts, file their notes, and mail in their patent formulas. At the very least we know that the creative power of “the people” to create their own discourse networks has been alive and well for a very long time. Foucault summed up the two approaches in his 1977–1978 lecture series Society Must be Defended: “To put it in a nutshell: Archaeology is the method specific to the analysis of local discursivities, and genealogy is the tactic which, once it has described these local discursivities, brings into play the desubjugated knowledges that have been released from them” (Foucault, 2004, pp. 10–11). So where might we find such release? We can start up high, before moving below.

Philosophy of Science and Instrumentality

In part, a poststructural Foucauldian media history would investigate, if we follow the lead of Friedrich Kittler, the specific formation that allows particular statements to be made. I want to work this terrain by looking toward the so-called Stanford School in the philosophy of science for insight into two interrelated concerns. First, as part of their work in the history of science, they have often foregrounded the apparatuses of investigation, scientific instruments. Such histories provide useful insights for media history not simply because these instruments look an awful lot like what are often thought to be media technologies. Take, for instance, the X-ray machine that takes photos of an invisible interior or better yet various forms of radar developed to “see at a distance.” Radar combines radio-wave transmitters and receivers, data processors and amplifiers, and cathode tubes with a projection screen similar to that of early television. Second, far more than media historians, philosophers of science tend to be interested in epistemological and ontological concerns. The scholars whose work I will be referencing most frequently, Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, to lesser and greater degree profess a debt to Foucault's work and often follow his methodological lead in their historical analysis. Their insights regarding scientific instruments in their historical and epistemological dimension, I will argue, are widely applicable to developing a uniquely Foucauldian media history.

Before beginning in earnest, it is useful to note that there is a rarely stated assumption that media studies, even those that focus on technology, should focus on mass media technology. Hence, studies of instruments, rather than “media,” which accomplish similar goals (McLuhan's [1964] “extensions of man”), but aren't viewed in terms of consumption, but rather in terms of production, tend to be overlooked. Yet, even from the comfort of my desk chair (a place of production and consumption), I see numerous such media/instruments: an electronic meat thermometer used for “feeling at a distance” (impaled into the untouchable interior of the roast in the oven), binoculars and spectacles for “seeing at a distance,” whether it be birds perched atop a distant cell-tower or the small print in John Berger's Ways of Seeing (1973), and the remote control for “manipulating at a distance” the volume of my stereo to reduce the noise that keeps me from completing my thought. Are other instruments, the piano and saxophone, media technologies? I can't see the speakers around the corner that seem to be transmitting sound waves that result from the transistor tube-magnification of electrical signals produced by the interface of the vinyl LP A Love Supreme (Coltrane, 1965) and the turntable/tonearm/cartridge apparatus. Would it matter if it were instead a real person interfacing with molded brass to convert breath and finger strokes into similar sound waves? Would the definition be further complicated if the range of my ears were extended by an electronic hearing aid? The issue for media history is not simply the replacement of old forms (oral, print, mechanical) for new (electronic, digital), but also determining the cut-off point used to define media from something else. For Marshall McLuhan (1964), clothes and cars are media.

Peter Galison may be best known for his book Einstein's Clocks, Poincare's Maps: Empires of Time (2003), which outside of John Peters's reworking of Carey's classic essay “Technology and Ideology” and Chris Russill's (2009) work on weather and television, doesn't seem to have had much effect on media history. Yet, in his work, Galison provides a clearly stated and thoroughly Foucauldian-inspired model for doing media history. I'll let a summary passage of his speak to this:

It is evident that Galison's concern here is with the control of time over vast distances, a fundamental concern of media history. He presents it here in terms of the institutional, economic, and epistemological demands placed upon the production of knowledge that are implicated in the relations of power that were newly organizing the world.

While Galison's commitment to unearthing power/knowledge relationships are clear, insights from other work help fill in how media might play a part in understanding the power/knowledge/subjectification process. First, Galison provides a vocabulary for attending to the “Conditions of Instrumentality” of what I'm calling media instruments. Second, in his work with Lorraine Daston, Objectivity (Daston & Galison, 2007), a model for investigating the co-production of instruments and ethical forms of subjectification is developed via a genealogy of the scientific invention of objectivity. Taken together, these insights provide a means for media historians to heighten their sense of the epistemological centrality of media. There are huge perceptual and cognitive effects resulting from our forms of mediation. Peters (2008a) cleverly points out that our media determine our very perception of the past, our sense of history and our ability to create it, and Lisa Park's (2005) investigation of how satellite imaging technology created new means for studying ancient Alexandria proves the case. As such any media history is itself dependent upon the media available for accessing, retaining, processing, and representing the past. But this is merely one of myriad ways in which academic, professional, institutional, and vernacular forms of knowing are hugely dependent upon and altered by the media forms through which we experience and interact with the world. Mediation is the process by which we come to know the world. Further attention to epistemological concerns would demand investigating how instruments that mediate our engagement with the world are often devised to overcome a perceived epistemological limit or delve into an arena of methodological darkness. They are created to overcome the limits of human perception, representational acuity, and processability. These two broad epistemological concerns, as effect and as prime mover, move us toward a consideration of Foucault's concern with the historically contingent possibilities for knowledge production. Thinking of media “instrumentally” furthers such a project.

Galison (1997) extends Foucault's notion of the “conditions of possibility” into the realm of scientific instruments in his account of “conditions of instrumentality.” In the Archaeology of Knowledge Foucault attempted to describe how certain statements came to be used as opposed to others. He asked what conditions needed to be in place to make it possible to describe the world in a particular way and be able to claim the description was true and accurate. Galison extends this sensibility by focusing attention upon a similar co-dependent process. These conditions address (1) how specific instruments (media) need to be present to make particular statements or discursive utterances possible and (2) that only under certain conditions can particular instruments come into being and/or seem necessary in the first place. Simply, “what can and should be made representable?” In large part the criteria determining the use of instruments accord with the degree to which such forms of instrumentality produce or reduce “noise.” Thus a communications sensibility orients the “conditions of instrumentality.” In a recent article on imaging technology in dentistry it is argued that Foucault's assessment of a “unified discourse” in medicine is up-ended by the sophistication of these new instruments and by the distributed care given by a host of medical practitioners (Bleakley & Bligh, 2009). I would suggest that attending to these changes according to their “conditions of instrumentality” and the attendant forms of distributed subjectification is precisely the sort of analysis needed. The necessary fidelity of an instrument is of course historical and flexible, but a statement about its fidelity is determinative of what sorts of discourse are recorded, verified, processed, and disseminated. In other words, there is no overarching schema for determining the acceptability of an instrument's clarity, but a concern with clarity conditions such use and helps configure who uses such instruments. Jonathan Sterne's The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (2003) is a significant investigation into such “instrumentality” providing for example an analysis of “a new medical semiotics” (p. 128) in which “doctors could hear what they could not see” (p. 127).

Galison wants to move beyond Kuhn's model of wholesale paradigmatic change to a model that is more complex, more nuanced, and pays attention to both the work of translation (a linguistic communicative problem) and decontextualization (how do things get translated and newly “instrumentalized”). As Agamben (2010) also notes, Foucault desires in the Archaeology of Knowledge to move away from the language of the paradigm to the episteme; precisely the move that Galison wants to make. So what can we take from this that is “multifold” for the study of media history from a Foucauldian perspective? First, that in experimental (as well as the theoretical) sciences, the production of discourse is dependent upon the “possibilities of instrumentality.” The mediating technologies that respond to and produce observable representations of physical phenomena are integral to an understanding of media, as are the technologies of reproduction and dissemination. (Kittler's camera obscura and lanterna magica, for instance.) In other words, all knowledge is dependent upon forms of technologically mediated discourse. Whether this runs through the eye (observation) and the hand (a picto-drawing or lab notes) or digital representations resulting from sound waves (3D ultrasound), the process of mediating experience into discourse (statements that make a claim on the world) is a technological process. So any study of discourse needs to attend to what Galison calls “possibilities of instrumentation.” I might further suggest that any study of media history should also. The kinds of statements that could be inscribed at any given moment depended upon the forms and types of instruments present, available, and in use. The world has become representable and knowable through media technologies.

Part of the etymology of the term “instrument” is that which is used as an agent in a performance. The reason the term “media instrument” holds such potential value as opposed to “media technology” is that “instrument” already implies some effect, some agency, over the very possibilities for representing and processing the world into data. Instruments are not merely facilitators or tools used at the behest of human agency. Further, we might take up the relationship developed by Galison (2002) and Daston and Galison (2007) between science, instrumentality, and subjectification. Gallison (2002) looks to the contingency of authorship in physics. There he begins to develop an analysis for the examination of “technologies of a scientific self.” Distributed authorship is one technological aspect to a collective form of scientific subjectivity, different from other sciences and practices of authorship. Physics projects modes of subjectification.

More fundamentally, Daston and Galison (2007) argue that the formation of what has come to be understood as scientific objectivity is largely the result of how new instruments for producing and representing data are intertwined with what they call “epistemic virtues.” They work through three differing forms of such virtue: truth-to-nature, objectivity, and trained judgment. What they all share is a belief that instruments and discursive rules exist which when properly used can overcome subjectivity, with all of its misperceptions and perspectival limitations. Scientific atlases, filled with hand-drawn or mechanically produced images, charts, x-rays, echocardiograms, and the like, have all been used to teach the proper means for seeing and thus knowing the world. “Once internalized by a scientific collective, these various ways of seeing were lodged deeper than evidence; they defined what evidence was” (Daston & Galison, 2007; p. 369). Hence, an ink-fed needle marking a continuous line that jumped vertically up and down across a series of predetermined horizontal lines became the means for objectively representing and hence knowing the relative health of the cardiovascular system. Yet, a trained reader, ethically committed to an epistemological framework, needed to be simultaneously produced to integrate these markings into an institutional network that could fix this heart so it could later produce a healthy chiaroscuro of markings that fell within the limits of the norm. This co-dependent relationship between technology and subjectification determines what technological forms get developed for use while simultaneously legitimating an understanding of the world that is fundamentally mediated by those same technologies. In Histories of Scientific Observation (2011), Lorraine Daston and Elizabeth Lunbeck provide a summary of how such processes work together. “Observation educates the senses, calibrates judgment, picks out objects of scientific inquiry, and forges ‘thought collectives’” (p. 1). It has increasingly done so by way of technological instruments. What we might call media.

Cultural Studies and Media Governmentality

In the early 1990s Foucault's work on governmentality first began to appear in English.⁸ One area of scholarship to quickly struggle with the importance of this work was cultural studies. Most fundamentally, Tony Bennett (1992) argued that culture, the foundational concept of the field, must be newly theorized. No longer was culture only to be understood through two prominent modes: (1) the anthropological sense of a “whole way of life” and (2) Matthew Arnold's sense of culture as the best and brightest products of humanity or its opposite, the lowbrow “popular” forms. Rather, culture was also to be understood as an arena for the shaping of conduct. Understanding in this form derives from agriculture and acknowledges that the same sort of attention, care, and cultivation that farmers invest in their crops is akin to how through cultural forms and processes the conduct of individuals and populations alike could be shaped and groomed by governing institutions and agents. Such a redirection demanded new methods and new political commitments. The focus was no longer to be so text oriented and hence cultural politics couldn't be played out merely via ideology critique.

While it was not explicitly stated as a directive to conduct historical research, much of this work in cultural studies has nonetheless been guided by historical investigation. In fact, Bennett's first full-scale project in this vein was suggestively titled The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (1995). At the crux of Bennett's historical analysis is the argument that cultural institutions, public museums for instance, developed out of a commitment to reshape an unruly mass into a better-mannered and productive population. For Bennett, the British Museum is a political technology of governance, culture its primary tool. Others have taken up this work on the museum in other national contexts, for instance Mary Coffey (2012) examined the formation of the modern twentieth-century state museums in Mexico as a mechanism for the creation and distillation of an explicitly modernist Mexican citizenry built upon a manufactured sense of shared culture and history. Miranda Brady's (2007) investigation of the National Museum of the American Indian looks to how museums are increasingly infused and integrated with media as a mechanism for extending and updating their governmental logic. What this and other relevant work shares is a historical examination of institutionally embedded uses of communicative, cultural, and media practices to shape conduct and create ethical subjects.

For instance, in Culture and Governance: The Emergence of Literary Education (1988), Ian Hunter examines not the book as technology per se, but rather the teaching of literature as an example of a technology of governance that uses culture, literary education, as a primary tool. This sort of historical specificity moves beyond the tracing of circulation as a measure of a medium's effectivity. Rather, it acknowledges media or culture as technologies of governance, and not simply as a text or product imbued with meaning, and acknowledges that institutions try to accomplish goals through the use of media as technologies for governance. This is not a return to “uses and gratifications” models, as the purposes are often institutionally inscribed and defined. Hunter argues that the primary reason for the ascendancy of teaching literature in the nineteenth century was to transform a particular class of reading subjects. The extensive use of the novel in the humanities was due to its imagined role as an ideal means for working upon the intellectual and ethical dimensions of a developing professional middle class. Literary books became a technology for what Nicolas Rose (1999) has termed governing souls.

Similarly, Greene and Hicks's (2005) Cold War-era genealogy of the practice of switch-side debating worked to develop an idealized form of ethical citizenship through the circulation of specific forms of speech practices that articulated democratic decision-making to the ability to rationally take the position of “both sides.” Greene and Hicks suggest that these idealized protocols for communication informed wide-scale acceptance of liberal citizenship. Hence, teaching debate and organizing contests were said to not only provide a set of skills for speaking in public, but a set of criteria for judging good arguments from bad and faulty reasoning from sound. Further, debating both sides was imbued with a personal ethic that idealized a liberal market model of citizenship as a means of countering state socialism. More broadly, Greene (1998) has argued that the field of rhetoric, often housed along with media studies in communication programs, needs to examine how the practices and norms which it proposes are attentive to the sorts of citizen/subjects that it has historically worked to create. We can easily view these examples as genealogies of communicative, if not always media, practices in their functioning as institutionally specific technologies of governance.

While I do not want to conflate cultural studies with media studies or communication with culture, there are good reasons for looking to these areas for guidance. Much historical research on media as technologies of governance has begun to appear over the last few years. I turn again to the work of Greene (2005), in this case a study of the use of film by the YMCA from the late 1910s to the 1930s. Greene sees his work as a means for investigating the “relationship between communication technologies and the logics of social welfare” (Greene, 2005, p. 21). Further, he is invested in doing historical analysis that bridges the technology–institutional divide: “unlike institutional approaches that foreground the political economy of film and critical traditions that focus on the film text as an object of ideological representation, this paper locates the YMCA's film program within a cultural problematic of liberal governance: namely, how communication technologies shape conduct” (p. 21). Greene describes how the YMCA built a vast network for distributing and exhibiting film that worked in conjunction with viewing guides, discussion sessions, and educational programs to help shape the conduct of industrial workers, many of whom were newly arrived to the United States. Such an approach articulates not only how media technologies can function as part of a technology of governance, but that technology works only insofar as it is situated in and by institutions. Kalen Churcher's (2008) scholarship on the history of inmate-produced media specifically attends to how media production, as opposed to reception, can also function as a technology of institutionally specific governance with the aim of providing new modes of prisoner reform.

James Hay has provided several examples for how to historicize the role of television in more generalized modes of governance, in particular those related to mobility and the home (Hay, 2001, 2003, 2004) and as part of a means for configuring media as necessary elements in the history of urban renewal plans (Hay, 2012). Laurie Ouellette in her own work (2002) and along with Hay (Ouellette & Hay, 2008) has also provided historical detail to television as a tool of governance. Ouellette's work on PBS specifies how television has been imagined and struggled over as a mechanism of governing through a unique blending of private and state initiatives regarding good taste, educational programming, and cultural uplift. While Hay and Ouellette's more recent work is not a historical account per se, as it looks at the recent formation of reality TV, the historical trajectory they chart situates television across “three historical conjunctures.” Each conjuncture describes television as a changing technology in a particular governmental arrangement. In its early broadcast period, television was situated in a series of ongoing debates about how to best serve the “public interest” through the perceived freedom of private industry in contradistinction to Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Further, “radio and television mattered as technologies of territorial/global expansion, mass suburbanization, market growth, and mobility” (Ouellette & Hay, 2008, p. 25). The second conjuncture is best understood in terms of a discourse on diversity that would mitigate the “great wasteland” of private television product. It saw the role of government as regulating an idealized balance between corporate management's ability to create popular programming, but directed toward sensibilities of cultural uplift and good citizenship. Out of such debates eventually arose the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and PBS. The third conjuncture witnesses a reinvention of television through cable and niche marketing as a means for lifestyle programming and networks that reorient the role of television as a technology of self-actualization. Hay and Ouellette's work on the history of television provides a model for rethinking the history of media in terms of the interrelated potentiality of technology and institutions (government, private, and otherwise) to be used for the governance of populations in ways that move beyond beliefs, attitudes, and effects. Their work has recently inspired other genealogies of television such as Shayne Pepper's (2011) history of HBO as a pseudo-replacement for PBS, particularly in its role in governing the AIDS crisis.

One criticism of work in governmentality is that it tends to be overly institutional insofar as the governmental goals of institutions are treated as if they automatically produce their desired and intended effects (Bennett, 2003). In part this is to say that the workings of culture, from below, are not taken into account, thereby ignoring all the findings of subcultural analysis and audience studies that began in the 1970s and continues to this day. It is in essence to ask about the people, about the public. Don't they have some agency to resist, co-opt, or opt-out of such governmental arrangements? One confounding conceptual point here is that for Foucault there is an epistemological shift in which people, the masses, or a state's or king's subjects began to be newly understood as a “population” during the nineteenth century; something which can be studied, experimented upon, and prodded toward new directions of conduct. The point isn't merely semantic. One provision of these histories is that they are first and foremost histories of governmental rationality. They are generally not histories from below. The status of the audience or the public is being reanimated in interesting ways by two other Foucauldian approaches.

The necessity of the field as currently constituted through concerns over the public, ideology critique of representation, ownership, audience studies, and many other key concepts looks very different when viewed through the Foucauldian poststructural lens; different even than the merely disciplinary Foucault. In fact, much work has been done to upset the taken-for-granted nature of the field's key terms. Further, this work is often historical in nature. Specifically poststructural Foucauldian work in these areas weakens the always-alreadyness of such terms as the public or the audience. As Russill (2008a) shows, publics result from specific problematizations. They are manifested through truth claims (knowledge) that invoke the capacities of peoples (power) to be affected by some phenomena. “Problematization” is a term Foucault coined to exemplify the process by which something comes to be thought of in terms of a problem to be solved through analysis and which is caught up within contested claims of truth and falsity. Similarly, audiences are neither publics, nor even a group of people who share a common discursive experience; rather, they are an effect of knowledge claims about the affectivity of mediation upon groups of people (Bratich, 2005). Or to put it differently, the term “audience,” within the field of media studies, for media institutions, and for political agents, invokes a whole set of beliefs and assumptions about how people respond individually and collectively to mediated communication (scientifically informed and otherwise). Such assumptions set in motion how media industries are organized and what sorts of content and hardware are produced to elicit the desired effect upon or through an audience. Various iterations of the audience, often simultaneously at play, result from epistemological assumptions regarding cognition, social action, affect, consumption habits, and so forth. Audiences are not merely studied; they are both figuratively and actively produced via analysis and experimentation. This does not assume that such prodding, dissecting, organizing, and directing produces the desired effects. It does mean that the ontological, epistemological, and methodological underpinnings that guide academic, economic, governmental, and technological organization of media practice have effects.

Historical research that simply looks at the rise of disciplinarity or surveillance would not necessarily approach the public or the audience in poststructural terms. Rather such work tends to approach audiences as a fixed entity that are increasingly locked into or made participative members of networked surveillance practices. The public may more broadly be conceived in such terms, or it may be looked at in terms of its relative acceptance or rejection of surveillance practices. In either event, the conceptual nature of audience or publics (or even “the subject”) may very well be left outside analysis. This is just the sort of analysis that Nerone sees as being overly deterministic.

Agamben and the Apparatus⁹

This final section draws upon Foucault's description of the apparatus and Giorgio Agamben's extended discussion of the term. The concept of the apparatus can help unite a number of the themes developed in previous sections. It provides another means for bridging the divide between media technology and media institution, as it involves the interdependent relations between power, knowledge, and subjectification to which I have been gesturing in much of this chapter. By necessity such an approach will involve looking to how various competing and overlapping institutions work to develop, organize, dominate, control, and disseminate the uses of various media technologies. Further, as we saw in the histories of scientific instruments, the possibilities of instrumentality also necessitate the formation of specific technological subjectivities. Agamben suggests a similar form of subjectification results from more traditionally recognized media technologies. In terms then of media and instruments, we can investigate the necessarily historical production of “subjectivities” coinciding with the use of specific technologies and we can look to how users become “objectified” through the accumulation and generation of data/knowledge facilitated by such technologies. This double articulation is central to Foucault's theories of the subject and power, as will be elaborated below.

In What is an Apparatus? (2009) Agamben untangles how the concept “apparatus” works to tie together a number of interrelated concepts in Foucault's thought. More profoundly, Agamben extends the notion of apparatus to encompass all such activities and institutions intended to alter (or, in more Deleuzean terms, capture) human behavior and thought. He even provides two “media” examples of apparatuses, the cellular telephone and the television, which prove fruitful for our concern here with media history. Foucault described the key elements of the apparatus (dispositif in the original French) in an interview from 1977, from which Agamben draws heavily:

Here we see a few key elements of the apparatus. It is strategically organized to address a perceived problem or urgency. It works as a network of interested and associated forms of knowledge that are directed toward creating strategic administrative and technological “solutions.”¹⁰

What does Agamben add to Foucault's understanding? Agamben proclaims:

For Agamben, then, the range of apparatuses is vast and he might draw fire for being so broad as to not provide any useful specificity for analytic application. However, a second necessary element in these compositions is that “Apparatus, then, is first of all a machine that produces subjectifications, and only as such is it also a machine of governance” (Agamben, 2009, p. 20). Thus we can see that cigarettes, for instance, are the result of a complex of forces and materials that have for a very long time been at work creating the subject position “smoker.” This is both a means of capturing one's time, resources, and desires as well as a biopolitical attempt to objectify the smoker, turn them into data, in order to know them, reform them, and make them “unsmoke.” Agamben's qualification that subjectification is central to the apparatus goes a good way in narrowing and clarifying it as a useful concept. As media scholars we still may question why cellular telephones or pens should be considered an apparatus. We don't speak of the “cellular subject” or “cell phoners.” Do we need a more nuanced means for thinking about the apparatus as it relates to media history?

Foucault (1982b) provides some insight into how communication forms an integral part of an apparatus when answering the question “How is power exercised?”

How then does communication and mediation work in terms of power? And wouldn't nearly all dimensions of social activity be subsumed under the banner of the apparatus if even language (as Agamben suggests) is an apparatus? Brief rumination upon Agamben's examples and Foucault's description of power and communication would lead us to see that media apparatuses are immediately composed of signs, signifiers, and technologies of inscription, collection, and processing (following from Kittler). Further, we would need to provide insight into the power relations enacted through media and media that are structured by power relations.

We could think of a “Stop” sign or a book in such terms. They are signifiers or sets of signifiers as well as technological elements created within vast infrastructures used to guide and direct thought and action. They produce meaning and are the product of labor: creative, affective, manual, and technical. They are technologies each with their own histories and institutional embeddedness. In the same way that Foucault (1977) read Bentham's diagrams and descriptions for the panopticon and “read” the panoptic prison itself, we might imagine reading the history of infrastructure and architecture of media technologies for their power effects, for an understanding of how the movement and mobility of signs, products, and people work to uphold power relations, to see how they form and deform subjects. If we took Agamben's (2009) example of television, we would need to look beyond the content of television – as Raymond Williams (1974) so ably demonstrated and Hay (2003) extended – to understand how a specific formation and organization of television functions as one element in a larger apparatus that he calls “mobile privatization.” As Hay explained: “Williams described television as a technology whose utility and effectivity can only be understood with considerable difficulty as part of a widespread ‘social investment’” (Hay, 2003, p. 169). Similarly, understanding the cell phone as an element in a widespread social investment would entail more than Agamben's (2009) suggestive assessment that “gestures and behaviors of individuals have been reshaped from top to toe by the cellular telephone” (p. 16). Further, “He who lets himself get captured by the ‘cellular telephone’ apparatus – whatever the intensity of the desire that has driven him – cannot acquire a new subjectivity, but only a number through which he can, eventually, be controlled” (p. 21). For historians of media, Agamben's analysis can only seem hasty and any significant account of how one is “captured” would need to be much more nuanced than Agamben lets on. For instance, the cellular telephone is far more intricately entwined in a much longer history regarding the governance of mobile media. Further, the cellular telephone, as such, is itself something of a historical anachronism. It is unclear whether one can even purchase a device singularly devoted to making telephone calls, as Henry Jenkins noted in his 2005 book Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. Rather than taking aim at Agamben directly, I prefer to use his outline of the apparatus as suggestive of the general direction one might take when setting one's sights on media history. In this spirit, a brief rumination upon an earlier form of mobile media, citizens band radio, will be used as a more extended example than provided so far in this chapter.

When I began historical research on citizens band radio several years ago the first major hurdle was figuring out what it was that I was actually researching. What was my archive? Given that there was no commercial content and that conversations were fleeting – mandated by FCC regulation to last a maximum of five minutes – the historiographic issues were obviously troubling. Such obstacles could also be used to explain the very limited number of academic studies that had been done at the time of CB's peak of popularity from the mid-1970s through the early 1980s (I was never able to locate more than a half dozen), when as many as 20 million CBs were said to be in use. In part this was because the assumed objects of study were the utterances and lingo that marked the use of CB. Yet, without extensive recording technologies and the technological ability to eavesdrop on a nearly limitless set of conversations and commands in mostly moving vehicles, there were virtually no collections of any of these conversations from which to begin a historical investigation.

Modeling an approach built on the notion of the apparatus would suggest recognizing the non-centrality of media as the specific object of historical investigation, while recognizing media as central to holding together nearly any given apparatus. They are never the entire answer – nor thereby their content the whole archive. But they are always part of the answer. Thinking in terms of the apparatus keeps this tension in sharp focus. Further, the focus upon the role of media in the construction and maintenance of various apparatuses is not necessarily merely ideological or “cultural,” if we think of the cultural as the realm of meaning making. Rather, taking a well-understood division in the field, it would entail studying media history in terms of both transport and culture (Grossberg & Carey, 2006). It would recognize that the historical importance of media (as in mediate, “to bring together”) is manifest in both realms. It works to maintain culture over time (cultural) and to maintain the networks and infrastructures that facilitate the movement of people, goods, and cultural artifacts across space throughout time (transport).

Thinking in terms of CB as part of an apparatus of “mobile privatization” or “disciplined mobility”¹¹ allows for different sets of questions to be asked by which the content of CB conversations, though important in terms of their general uses, is not central. Let me clarify. Rather than look to the specifics of any given conversation, we might begin with the rules for conversations (the brute facticity of what can be said) in general and CB's imagined use as first outlined by the FCC. It also would mean recognizing that such determinations changed over time and were struggled over by numerous invested parties. In terms of the apparatus we would need to examine which experts were able to make truth claims as to how the population could conduct itself with the aid of CB and enable the conduct of others through the proper use of this technology.

A key element in such an investigation entails the official debates over who was granted jurisdiction and how such a determination was made. It also involves understanding how their knowledge claims are legitimated and hence used to organize formations of the apparatus. For instance, CB was initially seen as a useful business tool for the dissemination of important information, particularly in the form of urgent messages. As such it was most often used in the management of fleet mobility by businesses or as part of rapid response strategies of governmental agencies such as the Coast Guard. Its range of use was relatively short, but in the case of managing a fleet of taxis or local deliveries it was eminently useful in monitoring and managing the movement of labor and product.

The FCC is not the be-all and end-all for such considerations, but it is the policymaking body with jurisdiction over CB in the United States. However, this does not mean treating it merely as the police or policy arm of government. It means to take seriously its ability to make truth claims about a specific realm of activity. When Mark Fowler famously compared televisions with toasters, TV became a different technology. Literally. It became part of a different apparatus. It was now governed and expected to be understood – known – through a different rubric. As such the set of social and material relations in which it was a part were reset, rearticulated. CB went through such a transformation as well, though not because of a proactive change on the part of the FCC, but as the result of new cultural uses – aided by technological and economic changes – which could not have been imagined by the FCC. Within the power/knowledge relations, the FCC became the relevant institution that determined how CB should be understood (knowledge) in part as the result of the ongoing collection of data related to its popular use and because it was the governing body that licensed and monitored specific cases of CB's use. The FCC also determined the fine structure for infractions and assessed them. Thus it set the stage for the proper use and surveillance of CB and organized its use into a rubric of penalties-based governance.

As those who study technology (media in particular) know, the original intentions for how a technology is to be used rarely play out as hoped. In particular, the state's use of such technologies for policing and military advantage, as well as the specific applications for advancing business interests, are often eclipsed by other uses. This was exactly the case with CB. Military forces, policing agencies, and rapid response civil services such as fire departments and ambulance services initially and most extensively used two-way radio, of which CB is a subset, as it developed for land use. This state appropriation of two-way radio's potentiality was eventually spread out into the realm of business, as with the fleet management already mentioned, and finally into the public via the citizens band. Yet even there it was envisioned as a measure to extend its commercial uses and an extension of the state's ability to surveill the road system and promote motorized safety. (For a lengthier history of CB, see Packer, 2008, Ch. 4.) It was never seen as a carrier of culture. The content of CB was to be free from “idle chit-chat.” However, this changed radically beginning in 1973 when truckers began to use CB as their communications tool for organizing political protest and building community.

While it is not my intention to retell this historical shift in CB use, I do want to suggest a few ways of thinking about CB as an element in two apparatuses, mobile privatization and disciplined mobility. Thinking about CB in terms of mobile privatization would mean asking how CB alters the key triumvirate in Williams's account of the primary public and private spaces that are traversed in a car-oriented suburban lifestyle: the home, the automobile, and the workspace. For Williams the automobile functions as a private space that extends the possibility for an increasingly private domestic life. It bridges, or brings into possibility, the domestic sphere of the home and the public sphere of labor. Television similarly bridges the public and private by bringing the outside world into the home. It links the home to the local community, the nation, and the world. Similarly, the transistor radio brought the outside world into the relative privacy of the automobile, making the car a rolling version of the living room. When CB entered the private sphere of millions of automobiles in the mid-to-late 1970s, this equation came under attack. Suddenly, in-car radios were no longer only mass media, but rather a two-way form of broadcast. Conversations could be struck up, debates were had, and information was freely and collectively shared. New forms of culture and community were nurtured and the possibility for a non-commercial form of amassed media emerged. In other words, the private sphere of the automobile became a public sphere that could be and was used to initiate political protest and to foster non-commercial forms of (mass) communication.

CB also emerged as a force within the disciplined mobility apparatus. In its simplest terms, disciplined mobility can be understood as the orchestration and governance of technologies of autonomous motorized transport (primarily automobiles and motorcycles) according to the seemingly competing logics of freedom and safety into a well-disciplined machine for the efficient and productive movement of peoples and goods. While disciplined mobility depends heavily upon proper forms of training and the panoptic presence of police surveillance, CB was used to provide heroic tales of danger and the means to produce a counter-surveillance machine. While two-way radio on the road had historically been monopolized by the state and commerce, the public use of CB allowed for new games of truth to commence and for new relations of power to manifest.

One such power dynamic featured a struggle between the CB citizenry and state policing. A whole host of low-budget films and popular songs told just such stories. They depicted how automobile drivers are situated in a struggle over the validity of motorized safety and what role they played within a vast surveillance apparatus. Should drivers extend the state's ability to monitor motorized behavior by using CB to snitch on errant drivers or should they work together to inform each other of police whereabouts, thus blunting the element of surprise necessary for the working of panopticism? Such tales of popular struggle clearly articulated a vision of populism resonant with the perceived potentiality of CB as a force to thwart state surveillance and commercial control of the media.

In terms of CB's “conditions of instrumentality,” we would need to examine the historical potentialities at work that cohered to normalize or instrumentalize CB use; to make certain forms of conduct standard. What technological, economic, and social potentials united to create a new media instrument? More specifically, what role was played by changes in electronics manufacturing and design as transistors replaced tubes? What new social capacities emerged as prices for electronics were driven down by economies of scale and the exploitation of postwar Japanese labor? How did the co-constitutive infrastructures of highways and gasoline distribution get reoriented through the OPEC-induced oil-crisis? How did the range of CB transmissions make possible or hinder community building, cultural interaction, and networked knowledge production? Such material conditions, constraints, and consistencies are the backbone of the apparatus. This is not a technological determinism, but rather an understanding of the apparatus as the outcome of intentionally focused actors wrestling with material, economic, and epistemological constraints.

There was clearly also the creation of a specific form of CB subjectivity. As a technology of the self, CB promoted a self-broadcast, recoded, renamed, and multichanneled (literally) communicative subject that was open to constant interruption, noise, and squelch. As a population, the CB citizenry were pulled by the forces of state surveillance, a populist counter-surveillance mechanism, and a form of media collectivity that created its own programming and was free from the political–economic machinery that organized other widely used media. CB subjects and populations were mobile in spatial and linguistic terms, yet situated in a struggle over the proper use of a media technology, by those competing institutions that wanted to capture the potential of CB and its users. These modes of subjectivity were widely discussed and represented in film as well as in CB user guides and manuals, of which millions were sold. Such manuals existed in part because the FCC mandated that a copy of its rules must be present with all CB transmitters and receivers. As such, each CB guide included the rules, thus making them a complementary element in the legal ownership and use of CB. Beyond the presence of the official discourse, these guides most often opened with a variation on the general CB manifesto that outlined the democratic potentiality of CB to replace mass media and bring the power of communications to the masses. The guides also provided updated glossaries of the ever-changing lingo necessary for successful CB communication. Most generally, these guides provided the tools and ethos, both official and resistant, for becoming a member of what was being called the “CB Citizenry.” It provided the rules and modes of conduct appropriate to “proper” CB use. For instance, while the inclusion of the FCC rules was a necessary element, for the most part the manifestos and glossaries provided resistant vocabularies in which the FCC and the police were recognized as “the enemy.” Yet, “proper” use was still understood to be that of conversation and not singing for others' entertainment. Discussions were imagined to be about the location of police, not recitations on poetics.

Questions for the Apparatus

In an earlier essay (Packer, 2010a) that attempted to answer the question “What is an archive?” from a Foucauldian perspective, I proposed five sets of questions or realms of enquiry from which one might begin the process of doing a Foucauldian media history. Borrowing from the four arenas considered above, I now propose to expand my set to eight.

(1) Look to organizations, institutions, or credentialized experts whom we might call the determinators. These are groups or individuals (not at all mutually exclusive) who have been given, granted, or taken the authority to make truth claims regarding specific phenomena. (Though often these realms can bleed over into seemingly unrelated areas.) They articulate desires and plans to alter institutions and individuals. A first question to ask is who has jurisdiction to make truth claims. The process that determines who is “in the true” and who can be an adversary in the games of truth is of particular interest. A further consideration is how particular venues of deliberation and institutions – media and otherwise – grant such authority. These often have substantial documents and holdings for investigations into their workings and to determine the mechanisms they use to create truths that can be “legitimately” acted upon to reform and alter behavior. So to begin to understand how an apparatus works would necessitate examining the discourse of those with plans to alter others' behavior – as with, say, Jeremy Bentham in the case of Foucault's scholarship in Discipline and Punish, the FCC in the case of CB, or at the YMCA in Ronald Greene's scholarship on film.

(2) Look to the statements that come to be “free-floating legitimators.”¹² These are the statements that are used across numerous discursive sites of contestation to reanimate and legitimate claims and assumptions that organize numerous apparatuses. For instance, the terms “safety” and “freedom” worked to accommodate a wide range of goals, alterations, and reorganizations of institutions and people as they relate to the automobility system. We could ask what are the free-floating legitimators for an apparatus of disciplined mobility or mobile privatization? What are the overarching claims and goals that legitimate the movement to the suburbs or the organization of television as a one-to-many form of broadcasting? How has a term like “safety” been used to justify a whole host of military, governmental, commercial, and even familial initiatives? How have claims of “objectivity” been invoked not only by journalists, but in regard to scientific instruments?

(3) Locate the competing and sometimes resistant forces and knowledge claims. Although the “search for resistance” has at times led scholarship down the slippery slope of inconsequence, it is nonetheless the case that force acts on force. Which is to say that the creation of knowledge is always an act of violence against competing knowledge claims and those institutions, disciplines, and individuals who are their promoters. It must also be said that the victors in such struggles are not to be universally despised, nor are the proponents of subjugated forms of knowledge – who may have passed into obscurity – to be lauded for merely having struggled. With such caveats in place, it is essential that media history be composed not merely of the statements of victors or victims, but the full complement of competing discourses in their combative play of force. It is precisely through an understanding of how such force was exerted, thwarted, and redirected that a finer, more nuanced view of power/knowledge comes into focus. It may be just as likely that such analysis leads to a realistic understanding of the solidity of a particular power relation as it is to discover a latent resistance. In either case, if we acknowledge that the apparatus is the result of strategies for the alteration of behaviors, we must then proceed by first understanding how such strategies won out. Yet, strategies are enacted against an adversary. Understand one's adversary.

(4) Look to how media technologies work in terms of the material functioning of the apparatus. They are the articulators of apparatuses. They work to bind things together. They are connectors – as in infrastructure. That is, they provide the mechanisms and processes that maintain the necessary movement and flows to keep an apparatus working smoothly. In this sense CB is a fairly obvious example. It allowed for the organization of fleet mobility, while also creating a mechanism by which important travel information could be shared amongst those using the road, most notably truckers and the police. We could say that one role of cellular telephones is to do precisely the same thing. It allows for the exchange of information necessary for orchestrating the movements of bodies and things in a highly mobile and fluid social environment. It links people into networks and provides a real-time response mechanism to adapt and alter trajectories in coordination with others. Because of the complex of forces exerted via the cellular phone, it is too simple to call the cellular telephone itself an apparatus in the way Agamben suggests.

(5) Look for the processes of subjectification that are co-constitutive of the apparatus. As Agamben suggests, this is the elementary process in the establishment of an apparatus. Subjectification works upon life itself, what it means, how it should be lived, and who can manage it (biopower). Beyond the obvious institutional realms of public health, medicine, and psychiatry, numerous guides for living articulate a vision of the good life or more specifically, how to organize the self and others via media. Lynn Spigel's Make Room for TV (1992) is an exemplary account of how television was imagined as a new means for remaking women's selves. As Spigel explained, there are often narratives, fictional and otherwise, which provide templates for imagining such new forms of subjectification. In relation to disciplined mobility, drivers' education manuals, guides for successful hitchhiking, and CB users' manuals provide practical advice and articulate a vision of a changed subject and an ethos said to be fused with such practices. Becoming a hitchhiker according to such guides is to reorient oneself to all sorts of spiritual and experiential dimensions (knowledge) unknown to the non-hitchhiker. It is also to place oneself into new economies of exchange (sharing of automobile resources) and new obligations to fellow hitchhikers (power). One obvious place to begin such investigation is to look for cases in which a subject is turned into an object. By what process and according to whom does a person become a patient, a child become a delinquent, a woman become a hysteric, a driver become a road-rager, a viewer become a couch-potato, or Facebook user become a friend?

(6) What are the conditions of instrumentality and attendant epistemological stakes? This is not so much a question of how struggles over meaning and truth take place. Rather, such a historical approach would look to the realms of phenomena that became differently experienceable, presentable, or knowable due to the emergence of a particular media apparatus. Underwriting such a process will be a particular “will to knowledge.”¹³ Through what keyholes and into what new realms do media instruments peer? How do cosmic and microscopic become spectralized? Which murmurs are made audible and what cacophonous squelching is modulated into perceptibility? Through what sinister synesthesia are smells visualized, tastes given voice, and light weaponized? The simple is made complex, the complex simple, but most importantly all is translated into processable data. This is one miracle of our media instruments.

(7) What is the brute facticity of a media discourse network? Following from Kittler, any Foucauldian media history would need to investigate how discursive networks are newly arranged by the introduction of new technologies by specific institutions. New kinds of markings, statements, utterances, sounds, and visions become possible, leave their traces, extend the life and reach of transmission, are differently processable, and distinctively networked and translated. Yet, the world is not merely made knowable, but actionable. Networks arise through the binding demands of data transfer. The bundling of instruments, people, and institutions results from the need to move people, data, and product from place to place in order to actuate effects. The content of CB speech is of much less significance than the potentiality to alter the trajectories and speeds of bodies and vehicles. But CB's fleeting data trail is also useful for our thinking. The impermanence of each CB transmission and the limited reach of its broadcast organize the extension of the network, the fidelity of messages (both in terms of “squelch” or noise and in terms of it only existing “in memory” to be passed along after translation by another CB citizen), and its limited capability to “impart culture” as opposed to its ability to “make culture” through conversation and dialogue.

(8) How is the apparatus organized as a technology of governance? Wrapping back to Foucault's explanation of tekhne demands that we think of media apparatuses as institutionally situated technologies used within specific governmental rationalities. These may be technologies that have worked to govern the self, captured the latent creative force of an audience, or created a public through problematizations. A historical investigation of a media apparatus draws attention to how it co-emerges with governmental formulations and modes of subjectification. New technological arrangements and scientific applications constitute power/knowledge relationships that are worked out in a context of epistemological, economic, political, and societal problems. The Japanese electronics industry, truckers, state troopers, rationed fuel, radar guns, automotive speed limits, C. W. McCall, and rapidly mutating linguistic codes emerge as part of the CB apparatus. CB does not bring them into being. CB is, however, thrown into the noisy fray and emerges as a conductor of disparate instruments, forming a new marching alignment. Media apparatuses hold together governmental formations, just as they are held together by multiple invested parties and institutions.

Conclusion

Foucault suggested he did not write histories of the past, nor was he interested in being a historian of philosophy. Rather he alternatively claimed to write fictions, experiments with the real, and histories of the present. When it was suggested that “You know very well that what you say is really just fiction,” Foucault would always reply, “Of course there's no question of it being anything else but fiction [. . . M]y problem is not to satisfy professional historians; [I] invite others to share an experience of what we are, not only our past but also our present, an experience of our modernity in such a way that we might come out of it transformed” (Foucault, 2000, p. 242).

In terms of transforming our present, I have suggested four arenas of scholarship that provide compelling examples of a Foucauldian-inspired media history. The work of Friedrich Kittler demands that we take into account how media alter the brute facticity of what is said, what is stored, and what is processed. He builds on Foucault's archaeological approach by adding media to the mix. The Stanford School of the philosophy of science has been investigating the interrelationships of scientific instruments, epistemology, and the formation of scientific subjectivity for the past two decades. By opening up what counts as media to nominally include, if not centralize, such instruments, media historians can more thoroughly situate media as the centerpiece in how we come to know the world; how media are central to the production of knowledge. This means more than seeing media as purveyors of ideology or agenda setting, but rather as bearers of epistemological potentiality to the point of establishing the beginning of perception itself. This is what Deleuze, following on from Foucault, calls perspicuity. This quality of being perspicuous or noticeable is one of the oft-overlooked elements of Foucault's description of panopticism. Third, historical and theoretical work in cultural studies, oriented by Foucault's understanding of governmentality, can be built upon. Just as this work approaches culture as a realm for the shaping of conduct, media need to be situated in the broad array of technologies of governance. This centralizes power as a realm of relationships in which media are imagined, implemented, and used as solutions for the shaping of conduct. Media are mechanisms by which governance takes place. Lastly, Giorgio Agamben has championed the notion of apparatus as a means for examining a wide range of activities and technologies, including media. By treating the notion of the apparatus with greater precision and historical specificity, the history of media becomes a history of interconnections (of power, of knowledge, of subjectifications). Media apparatuses do not simply connect ethereally. Rather they are more akin to gravity; a force that holds things in place, sets the rules for space and time, and conditions material and technological possibility.

NOTES

1 The closest Foucault comes to treating the book as a media technology is in “What is an Author” wherein he addresses how the material form of books and other written media have differing effects on how the notion of an author functions.

2 Foucault first proposed such a schema in his introduction to The Use of Pleasure (1990).

3 Though it had earlier appeared in 1982 in Skyline and again in the Foucault Reader in 1984 as “Space, Knowledge, and Power,” it also was mistakenly attributed to Stephen Riggins and misnamed “An Ethics of Pleasure” in the 1989 collection Foucault Live. More importantly, the interview follows up on themes that Foucault had not formally written about, but had most fully developed in his 1978–1979 lecture series Security, Territory, Population (2004).

4 As Clare O'Farrell (2005) is quick to point out, “studies of media” are one of the areas which Foucault “scarcely alluded to” but their practitioners have still “borrowed his ideas.”

5 Though to be fair, one of his more powerful and recently published lecture series, The Birth of Biopolitics (2008), dwells upon the development of neoliberal economic models for governance in post-World War II Germany and the United States.

6 Shortly before his death in 1984 Foucault addressed the bewildering variety of characterizations used to describe him:

7 Peters (2010, p. 6) points out this tired joke, which is not only telling of Kittler's sense of humor, but more prominently his elitist political convictions.

8 The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Burchell, Gordon, & Miller, 1991) is clearly the book that first generated wide-scale interest in this period of Foucault's work, in part as it was the first place the 1978 lecture “Governmentality” was published in English.

9 Some portions of the following section appear in Packer (2010a, 2010b).

10 This notion can be summed up by the Foucauldian use of the term “problematization.” Such an approach in communications history and scholarship has to some degree been advanced in such articles as Russill (2008b), Bratich (2005), and Packer (2006).

11 This is a term I have used (Packer, 2003) to make sense of how the vastly increased freedom of movement enabled by automobility throughout the twentieth century came to be organized and implemented.

12 While obviously borrowing from Derrida here, there is a clear difference between what I'm implying by the use of this term. Derrida (1976) claims that all signifiers can be freely associated with different signifieds. Or more precisely that the play of signifiers, only ever referring to the general grammar of a given language, has no necessary correspondence to its referents. What I'm suggesting is that particular terms come to take on such significance that they can be used to justify nearly any truth claim across numerous discourses in order to justify a vast array of initiatives, plans, responses, and resistances.

13 Foucault describes the different forms of a “will to knowledge” that for each of which is “sketched out a schema of possible, observable, measurable and classifiable objects; a will to knowledge which imposed upon the knowing subject – in some ways taking precedence over all experience – a certain position, a certain viewpoint, and a certain function” (Foucault, 1982b, p. 218).

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