Medialogies

Reading Reality in the Age of Inflationary Media

David R. Castillo, William Egginton

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781628923636
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

We are living in a time of inflationary media. While technological change has periodically altered and advanced the ways humans process and transmit knowledge, for the last 100 years the media with which we produce, transmit, and record ideas have multiplied in kind, speed, and power. Saturation in media is provoking a crisis in how we perceive and understand reality. Media become inflationary when the scope of their representation of the world outgrows the confines of their culture's prior grasp of reality. We call the resulting concept of reality that emerges the culture's medialogy. Medialogies offers a highly innovative approach to the contemporary construction of reality in cultural, political, and economic domains. Castillo and Egginton, both luminary scholars, combine a very accessible style with profound theoretical analysis, relying not only on works of philosophy and political theory but also on novels, Hollywood films, and mass media phenomena. The book invites us to reconsider the way reality is constructed, and how truth, sovereignty, agency, and authority are understood from the everyday, philosophical, and political points of view. A powerful analysis of actuality, with its roots in early modernity, this work is crucial to understanding reality in the information age.

Part One

Inflationary Media

1

Editing Reality

In a memorable moment from Wes Craven’s 1996 camp horror classic Scream, Randy, a movie-obsessed teenager, explains to a friend in reference to a recent murder, “It’s the millennium. Motives are incidental.” This line, along with many others from the movie, entered the media mainstream in part because it seemed to encapsulate an understanding of late twentieth-century realities shared by popular culture and intellectuals alike. According to this view, U.S. culture specifically but also western culture in general had entered a period in which its media saturation had reached a kind of critical threshold, beyond which the reality underlying media representations no longer seemed that real. In the political realm, this sentiment was most trenchantly captured in a conversation the journalist Ron Suskind had with an unnamed aide to President George W. Bush (later identified as Karl Rove), whom he cited in a 2004 New York Times Magazine article as saying “that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.”¹ These examples from film and politics seem to buttress the theses of numerous academics and journalists who have written frantically for the last few decades of the loss of reality attributable to the rise and intensity of our new media culture and its ever-increasing saturation of our daily lives.

What provokes this erosion of reality is our increased awareness of the media’s ability to edit our world, to show us what someone else wants us to see instead of what’s actually there. We call today’s media inflationary because they impact not only the message they ostensibly convey, as Marshall McLuhan so famously argued, but our entire understanding of the world. This situation, however, is not unique to our age. Four hundred years ago the western world was also engulfed in a media revolution that, although the specific media were different, also provoked a reality crisis. Moreover, while we tend to think that the specific media determine the effects on reality, we forget that the concept of reality a culture has to begin with is equally vital.

Media edit reality by framing lived experience as a coherent narrative or set of images. Insofar as the content of the frame, or screen, is conceived as a specific perspective or version of the real, the framing function projects an ultimate but unattainable reality behind that screen, while excluding from its purview anything that threatens the screen’s coherence. Both early modern and current medialogies are constructed in exactly this way. But while media in the former age used prior notions of reality as its raw material (specifically, the human world as microcosm of the divine), media in the new age exercise this function on the very notion of reality that was itself created by the first age. Thus, the first age—characterized by the conjunction of theater, print, and perspective in painting—produced reality as ineffable but fundamental, and based ideas like national identity and wealth on it, while editing out certain racial, national, or sexual exclusions. The second age—that of electronic media—takes those copies and puts them into everyone’s hands, or at least into the hands of those who have the purchasing power. Now the previous realities are located in tangible objects again: copies are made into things; books, vinyl, bodies acquire new powers of presence. Fundamentalism in its modern form arises with new literalisms; nation states devolve into tribalism and religious orthodoxy; and the current exclusions are those outside the bandwidth of the electronic revolution, those without purchasing power—the homeless, the dispossessed—whose exclusion is expressed in our media culture in the form of modern monsters.

By the early 1400s the first works of linear perspective were produced, and the technique spread like wildfire in the 1500s. When Brunelleschi painted a single-point perspective copy of the Florence Cathedral, witnesses were tricked into thinking a picture was the real thing: a flat surface conveyed depth. By the late 1500s the stage was attempting to do the same thing with reality itself, to great success. The first spectacular mass medium was born—the modern theater—with the explosion of interior, fungible, representational space as one of its signatures.

In the mid-fifteenth century, of course, another medium was born as well: the printing press. Books would later start proliferating as mass-produced, largely identical copies of a source text. From that point on, a text would no longer be a thing in the world; rather, it would become the phantom idea behind a potential infinity of exact copies. Paintings, stages, and books are all means of copying the world, and their status as copies provokes us to question their own reality while simultaneously projecting an ideal reality beyond their surface. Just as the modern theater depends on self-reflexivity—stages about stages, where characters are also actors—modern literature emerges as an endless series of texts about texts, where characters are also authors. This self-reflexivity with its attendant paradoxes and possibilities begins to define the aesthetic realm, but also the economic and political spheres.

The term that may best define the culture wars of the first age of inflationary media is the baroque trope known as desengaño or disillusion, literally un-deception. The basic idea is that we were naïve in our beliefs; we were living inside an illusion that we are now invited or guided to transcend. What the term desengaño describes is a reframing of reality, a realignment of the border between the visible and the invisible, and the new media—theater, perspective painting, the book—hold the promise of the truth beyond deceptions. The point to emphasize is that this reframing of reality may work to shake us awake from the dream of worldly deceptions and fix our gaze on the metaphysical truth beyond (this is the “solution” that we would associate with the baroque major strategy) or, alternately, it may fold back on itself to show that the deception is actually in the framing, as if to shout, “It’s the framing, stupid!” This is the revelation that we associate with the minor strategy of baroque aesthetics.²

The notion of desengaño was central to the visual arts, literature, and theater of the first inflationary age. It’s no accident that the period spanning roughly from the 1550s to the 1650s marked the highest point in the popularity of anamorphic images, that is, visual artifacts that incorporate hidden perspectives revealing to their viewers that their initial impressions were inaccurate. Art historian Julián Gállego has gathered evidence of the popularity of anamorphic paintings in the early 1600s and concludes that, “everyone seemed to have them.”³ The sonnets of desengaño created by poets like Luis de Góngora, Francisco de Quevedo, Lope de Vega, and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, among many others, are considered paradigmatic examples of baroque poetry. In prose, the success of the picaresque genre is based on the titillation of the life stories of marginal social types: undesirables, rogues, criminals, and “free women.” These life stories and the worldviews that come with them, which had been largely invisible before 1550, relied on the trope of “undeceiving” their audiences. The first literary pícaro made this point rather effectively in the Prologue of Lazarillo de Tormes (1554): “For I believe that matters of such significance, which have never been heard or seen before, must be noted.”⁴ Similarly, the baroque exemplary novellas of Miguel de Cervantes and María de Zayas put the spotlight on what is excluded from view. Even more significantly for our purposes, the new full-length novel, which emerges during this period, focuses on the complexities of framing mechanisms in literature, theater, and reality itself, most influentially in the masterpiece considered the first modern novel, Don Quixote (1605; 1615).

But at the time the true blockbusters were the plays composed according to the winning formula popularized by Lope de Vega in his treatise The New Art of Making Plays in Our Time (El arte nuevo de hacer comedias en este tiempo), which the playwright first read before the Madrid Academy in 1609. Many of the plays associated with the cultural phenomenon of the comedia nueva rework historical material dealing with the tumultuous period stretching from the late Middle Ages to their contemporary period. They project an idealized version of the here and now as the desired and necessary outcome of history’s progress: a unified Christian nation under the tutelage of the absolutist monarchy and the Catholic Church. Such popular plays as Lope de Vega’s Fuenteovejuna and Calderón de la Barca’s The Alderman of Zalamea (El alcalde de Zalamea) may be considered predecessors of today’s action flicks and crime shows. These and other historical plays and dramas de honor redefined “honor” as a genuinely Spanish value, a patriotic trait shared by loyal commoners and noblemen alike, which distinguishes us (honor-loving and God-fearing subjects of the Crown) from them (infidels, heretics, barbarians, immoral, and disloyal lords…). They depicted the dramatic tension of their subject matter, often resulting from noblemen acting in distinctly dishonorable ways, as temporary failures of judgment or vision, easily corrected by divine providence or the actions of royal authority guided by the honor code.

This is not to say that all the plays associated with the comedia nueva or new theater work exactly in the same way. We can find a number of full-length plays, especially among the so-called comedias de enredo as well as short comedic pieces, that poke holes in the honor code and its strictures. Yet within the tradition of historical plays and honor dramas, the new and improved (and thoroughly theatrical) concept of honor works as an interpellation in the proper Althusserian sense, a call to act out our belief in the essential and trans-historical Nation, and thus to embody the symbolic law as represented or performed on the stage.

While there is new content, form, and functionality in today’s age of inflationary media, the prevailing strategies of ideological interpellation are remarkably familiar, and similar cultural reverberations occur. As Sherwin writes: “We are awash in images, which means we know from watching […] We know, or think we know, partly because we have absorbed useful stereotypes and recurring representations from popular culture. We carry them around in our heads, images that help to construct our personal and collective histories.”⁵ Sherwin provides illustrations from our present or immediate past, including iconic images in films like Apocalypse Now and Platoon that have become synthetic memories of the Vietnam war; or Jarhead and Syriana in the case of the war in Iraq; even the series of TV images that documented the 9/11 attacks of the World Trade Center, which stabilized our perception of anti-freedom terror “like a totemic stand-in for the chaotic barrage of events too discordant and too painful to confront.”⁶ The same could be said about the popular honor dramas of the 1600s. Fuenteovejuna and The Alderman of Zalamea, among many other “historical plays” of the period, offer their audiences imagistic synthetic memories of chaotic and complex events, appropriately distilled to “mean something,” that is, to speak to the values of the age in ways that helped their audience understand who they were (or ought to want to be) both as individuals and as communities.

As historical reality is absorbed by the culture of the spectacle, it becomes “a visual template, an archive of iconic sounds, images, and words”⁷ that anchors our reality in reference to stabilizing categories and values. In this context, “freedom” is for the political reality of America what the theatrically propagated notion of “honor” was meant to be for an early modern imperial power like Spain, “a condition of neutralization” of true political alternatives—to paraphrase Vattimo and Zabala—“where ‘freedom’ is only possible within the established dialogue.”⁸ Indeed, in the political landscape of America, this synthetic notion of freedom has long been entangled with nationalistic claims of historical exceptionalism.

Comedian Stephen Colbert has written on the political entanglements of American exceptionalism with characteristic sharpness in his book America Again: Re-Becoming the Greatness We Never Weren’t. There he quotes from Newt Gingrich’s political best-seller A Nation Like No Other: “America’s greatness, America’s exceptional greatness, is not based on that fact that we are the most powerful, most prosperous—and most generous—nation on Earth. Rather, those things are the result of American Exceptionalism.”⁹ Colbert’s satirical commentary drives the point home: “Amen! America is Exceptional because of our Greatness and the source of all that Greatness is how Exceptional we are.”¹⁰

This is not unlike the circularity of Tigger’s familiar song from the Walt Disney version of A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh, “The wonderful thing about Tiggers is that Tiggers are wonderful things,” where we simply replace Tigger with America: “the wonderful thing about America is that America is a wonderful thing.” Of course, in their respective contexts of enunciation, the Exceptionalism of America now and Spain then stand for the interests of elites that are readily defined as the communal interests and, more importantly, the natural expression of the Nation’s trans-historical spirit. In the process, the circularity of Tigger’s song about us establishes a corresponding circularity about some excluded others: the terrible thing about them is that they are a terrible thing! They are defined not just as external or foreign enemies but also as internal nonbelievers or, as Colbert writes, “bad boys and girls who don’t say ‘under God’ in the Pledge of Allegiance.”¹¹

Our political discourse continues to produce and reify mythical images of the national spirit and the trans-historical evildoers that work relentlessly to destroy our communities. And now, as then, our exclusions come back to haunt us. Our industry frames culture for mass consumption, and culture strikes back with relicts that are in turn commoditized.

As with the first age of inflationary media, media in our new age can simultaneously be a means of liberation and oppression. The extent of media’s reach, though, threatens the coherence of nation states just as the previous inflationary phase threatened traditional localities and led to organizations of a national nature. In the age of global capitalism, nation states are the traditional structure. Inflationary media enables globalization as both an oppressive and liberating potentiality. A commercial for the iPhone 5 ended with the manifesto, “I have the right to be unlimited,” by which Apple means, to upload unlimited data, to make a copy of my entire life, my entire world. The world is now truly my oyster. If before I had an individual perspective on the world, now I can upload that entire perspective and carry it with me wherever I go.

If the framing machines of the first age of inflationary media led to commodity fetishism, those of the second age of inflationary media incorporate their commodity form into their very structure. In the first age, things took on the mode of copies. In the second age, copies take on the mode of things. Where the nation state was an organization of people treated as copies; now the forces of globalized capital are symbolic entities treated as people, as clarified by the Supreme Court’s 2012 Citizens United decision extending First Amendment protections to corporations. Likewise, encrypted numbers are now treated like the wealth they ostensibly represent. Underlying the flow of values over the global network is a loose system of beliefs built exclusively on the relative confidence of markets in given currencies. When national entities are criticized, their identity is alleged to be “historical.” The organizations that strive to replace them, though, portray themselves as real, unconstructed. When Newt Gingrich called the Palestinians an invented people, he passed over the irony that this utterance was issued from the United States of America. As Borges once wrote, “in America it is absurd to invent a country”; there, one could only propose “the invention of a planet.”¹²

2

A New Perspective

Writers, thinkers, and artists prior to the first age of inflationary media most often conceived of themselves and others as seamlessly embedded in the cosmos; accordingly, they did not see the cosmos as existing independently of its observers or inhabitants. By the end of the sixteenth century, they began to develop an entirely different notion of the individual, and in early modern works of literature as well as in painting and architecture the individual’s perspective began to be a central concern.¹ Simultaneously once Copernicus and after him Kepler had clarified that the earth was not at the center of the cosmos and that the planets followed elliptical orbits, natural philosophers such as Giordano Bruno were free to imagine the cosmos as an infinite expanse of space without necessarily granting the earth or ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Medialogies
• Part 1: Inflationary Media
• Part 2: Fundamentals
• Part 3: Exclusions
• Part 4: In Defense of Being
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint