The arts of contingency

Critical Inquiry

Volumn 31, Issue 1, 2004, Pages 7-25

  Esposito, Elena ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MODENA AND REGGIO EMILIA   (Italy)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 33750333517     PISSN: 00931896     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/427300     Document Type: Review

References (49)

1. See Giuseppe Cambiano, Platone e le tecniche (Turin, 1971).
2. A similar approach can be found in Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (London, 1974), where he argues that diffusion is a secondary aspect in the sense that it comes later. First there is redefinition of the functions and of the process of communication, leading then to new techniques for diffusion. An example is lithography, which was developed to produce portraits to preserve memories for those who already knew the represented person and was used later to overcome spatial and temporal distances (see in particular § 1.3). I owe this reference to James Chandler.
3. In sociology, systems theory, associated mainly with Niklas Luhmann (for an overview, see Niklas Luhmann, Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft [Frankfurt, 1997]) represents the rather controversial and very complex attempt to research society starting from communication rather than from people or the objects of the world. Objects of sociological analysis are then first of all the ways and forms of communication, from which follow not only the configuration and the complexity of the concepts used to consider the world but also what, for a given social formation, is the world: not an independent external datum but the external reference of communication. In this way, science and law, economics and politics, religion, formal organizations, love, and much else have been examined. For such an approach, the study of media is clearly central, even if at the moment there is no finished treatment of this topic. Media, however, cannot appear as external instruments (typewriter, telephone, or television set) but as modalities that configure and organize communication, first of all as its internal articulations, which will then use these instruments.
4. George Spencer-Brown spoke of a space that can be inferred only when a mark has distinguished inside it a marked state and an unmarked state, and the initial space can be reconstructed as the unity of both states, a unity that, however, at that point no longer exists; see George Spencer-Brown, Laws of Form (New York, 1972), chap. 2. According to Spencer-Brown, this produces the shadow of paradox accompanying each step of the logical calculus developed from the initial distinction, like a sort of condition of possibility that must be neutralized at each passage in order to be effectively forgotten (but never eliminated).
5. The problem is quite near to the one in a philosophical perspective from which Derrida's construction starts (or deconstruction; see in particular Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie [Paris, 1967]). If one investigates the original forms of communication one encounters a language that is from its very beginning writing, that is, a mediated form that breaks the unity with a "violence originaire" (ibid., p. 55). The primary forms are already secondary; they are the result of an exteriorization, and immediacy is only the illusion of an observer looking for a world where he or she does not exist (transcendency). The study of media is then nothing more than the study of this inevitable mediatedness, accompanied also in this case by the aura of a paradox often latent but never eliminable.
6. See Luhmann, Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft, p. 195
7. and Die Kunst der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt, 1995), p. 165.
8. The distinction medium/form has been elaborated by Luhmann starting from the distinction medium/thing presented by Fritz Heider in the frame of the theory of perception; see Fritz Heider, "Ding und Medium," Symposion 1 (1926): 109-57;
9. translated as "Thing and Medium," Psychological Issues 1 (1959): 1-34.
10. Here I skip the historical reconstruction and the examination of the differences between both approaches, about which one can read in Luhmann, Die Wissenschaft der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt, 1990), p. 53.
11. See Luhmann, Soziale Systeme: Grundriß einer allgemeinen Theorie (Frankfurt, 1984), p. 224. Systems theory, like deconstruction, inverts the trivial chronological priority relation of common sense and of disciplines like linguistics, which assume oral communication to be the most authentic form of communication and consider all others to be derivative forms.
12. This hierarchy can itself be a consequence of the availability and pervasiveness of alphabetic writing, as is shown also by the fact that in cultures without accomplished phonetic writing, like ancient Mesopotamia, written names were the ones expressing the destiny and the nature of things because they could be analyzed and handled with the typical techniques of a divinatory culture, while orality was secondary; see Jean Bottéro, Mésopotamie: L'Écriture, la raison, et les dieux (Paris, 1987), p. 126.
13. Eric Havelock bases his reconstruction of the origins of abstract thinking in ancient Greece on this thesis; see Eric Alfred Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cambridge, Mass., 1963).
14. See Luhmann, "The Form of Writing," Stanford Literature Review 9, no. 1 (1992): 25-42.
15. There is a widespread hypothesis that the birth of the critical attitude, together with the praxis of observing and revising the contents of communication, is due to alphabetical writing; see Marcel Detienne, Les Savoirs de l'écriture en Grèce ancienne (Paris, 1988).
16. See Luhmann, Soziale Systeme, p. 128.
17. This is also a very controversial argument of Havelock: in the moment when the alphabet enables a reproduction of communication that is really independent of the context (while even syllabic writings presupposed that the reader already possessed the information necessary to eliminate the ambiguity of reading), the context itself becomes independent and can become the object of an autonomous analysis, from which philosophy originates; see Havelock, Preface to Plato, p. 148;
18. Bottéro and Marie-Joseph Stève, La Mesopotamia: Dalla scrittura all'archeologia (Turin, 1994), p. 42;
19. Bottéro, Mésopotamie, p. 103;
20. and Jan Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung, und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen (Munich, 1979), p. 220.
21. See Albert B. Lord, The Singer of Tales (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), p. 99
22. and Detienne, Les Maîtres de vérité dans la Grèce archaïque (Paris, 1967), pp. 46, 56. This apparent ambiguity is often presented as one of the characteristics of mythical thinking.
23. The originary deixis is replaced by a system of references to other elements of communication, which in linguistics is called Diskursdeixis; see Rüdiger Weingarten, Die Verkabelung der Sprache: Grenzen der Technisierung von Kommunikation (Frankfurt, 1989), p. 19.
24. Here also originates the problem of interpretation, to which we will return later. Even Gadamer, however, insists finally on the "unity of the text" (Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode [Tübingen, 1960], p. 375).
25. and Elizabeth Eisenstein, preface to The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1983). Many accuse Havelock and Eisenstein of considering respectively the alphabet and the printing press as the cause of social and semantic transformations. The data they present actually contradict this claim, showing that the transformations in question did not follow the diffusion of the new technologies but accompanied them - thereby making the causal constellation much more complex.
26. See Alexander R. Luria, Cognitive Development: Its Cultural and Social Foundations (Cambridge, Mass., 1976).
27. Actually, the communicative competence proceeds at the same pace as the acquisition of the individual competences in the use of writing: annotation and modeling. 18. See Jack Goody, The Domestication of the Savage Mind (Cambridge, 1977)
28. and Walter Ong, The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (New Haven, Conn., 1967), p. 43. This deep solidarity between words and things is not affected by the availability of nonalphabetical forms of writing exactly because these do not allow for the contextual autonomy I discussed above.
29. Chinese culture developed very complex and refined ways of manipulating words, but apparently never questioned the reciprocal dependency and interpenetration of words and things; see among many David Palumbo-Liu, "Schrift und kulturelles Potential in China," in Schrift, ed. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and Karl Ludwig Pfeiffer (Munich, 1993), pp. 151-68.
30. See Luhmann, "Die Lebenswelt - nach Rücksprache mit Phänomenologen," Archiv für Rechts- und Sozialphilosophie 72 (1986): 187.
31. See Luhmann, Das Recht der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt, 1995), p. 255.
32. Saul H. Steinberg, Five Hundred Years of Printing (London, 1959), p. 21.
33. See Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, p. 83.
34. See Jean Vezin, "Poèmes figurés," in Mise en page et mise en texte du livre manuscrit, ed. Henri-Jean Martin and Vezin (Paris, 1990), p. 439
35. and Martin, conclusion to Mise en page et mise en texte du livre manuscrit, p. 462. This volume offers much interesting material on the techniques of organization of the pages in manuscripts.
36. See Paul Saenger, "La Naissance de la coupure et de la séparation des mots," in Mise en page et mise en texte du livre manuscrit, p. 448.
37. See Hélène Toubert, "Fabrication d'un manuscrit: L'Intervention de l'enlumineur," in Mise en page et mise en texte du livre manuscrit, p. 417.
38. Particularly for consideration of the effects of the move to the market on the constitution of a critical public sphere, see Jürgen Habermas, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (Neuwied, 1962), chap. 1.
39. See Rolf Engelsing, Analphabetentum und Lektüre: Zur Sozialgeschichte des Lesens in Deutschland zwischen feudaler und industrieller Gesellschaft (Stuttgart, 1973).
40. See Terence Cave, "The Mimesis of Reading in the Renaissance," in Mimesis: From Mirror to Method, Augustine to Descartes, ed. John D. Lyons and Stephen G. Nichols, Jr. (Hanover, N.H., 1982), pp. 149-65.
41. See Cave, "The Mimesis of Reading in the Renaissance," p. 163, who speaks explicitly of an "unforeseen mental horizon."
42. See Cave, The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (Oxford, 1986).
43. The case of the news is particularly studied, about which one speaks of criteria of newsmaking that have little to do with truth, morality, or objectivity; see, for example, David L. Altheide, Creating Reality: How TV News Distorts Events (Beverly Hills, Calif., 1976)
44. and Altheide and Robert P. Snow, Media Logic (Beverly Hills, Calif., 1979).
45. Luhmann, Die Realität der Massenmedien (Opladen, 1995) presents the mass media as an autonomous functional system of contemporary society.
46. See Heinz von Foerster and Paul E. Weston, "Artificial Intelligence and Machines That Understand," Annual Review of Physical Chemistry 24 (1973): 1353-78.
47. See von Foerster, "Notes on an Epistemology for Living Things," Understanding Understanding: Essays on Cybernetics and Cognition (New York, 2003), p. 252:
48. "The environment contains no information; the environment is as it is" - coherently outlining the consequences of the first developments of cybernetics and of circular causality introduced by Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Cambridge, Mass., 1948).
49. On this double relationship of mass media to time, due to which the communication of the new is always at the same time production of the old, see Luhmann, Die Realität der Massenmedien, chap. 3.