Immediacy

Author: Carson Welsh

In his essay “Genesis of the Media Concept,” John Guillory marks a problem that has haunted theories of mediation since well before the twenieth century: a “philosophical confusion … between mediation as an abstract, even logical process and medium as material technology” (338). Recent and disparate work in media theory makes one wonder whether anything is not a medium in at least one of these two senses, and indeed whether this conceptual dissolution is itself symptomatic of a lifeworld ever-more governed by processes that can be subsumed under the title of “mediation.” Attempts to grasp the contemporary world through the concept of mediation in any case evince the possibility of relating both media theory and cultural forms of mediation — as both “logical process” and “material technology”— to their historical and socio-economic conditions.

That “immediacy,” on the other hand, possesses a similar historical valence is perhaps not as obvious. But precisely such an understanding of immediacy has traversed many attempts to map the historical relations between forms of mediation and reification. Before reaching these attempts, it is worth pointing out the difficulties that specifically accompany the “media concept” (and the “immediacy” concept) in the Marxist tradition, which will primarily be considered here. Marxist uses of the Hegelian concept of “mediation” (Vermittlung) have transformed it from a negation of conceptual immediacy (Unmittelbarkeit) to a historical process — labor — that structures historical subjects’ relation to the objective world.^[1] In either case, any given totality is only accessible through an intermediary: though conceivable, the former can never be grasped all at once. It is in this sense that, while the need in the early twentieth century to theorize emergent “mass media” upset these conceptual schema by locating the more general processes of mediation in material communicative technologies, it also provided the opportunity for the (albeit local) reconciliation of these conflicting ideas. Though mediation still extended beyond technological reproducibility, it could also mean the material technology through which the totality is grasped and of which that totality is itself partially composed.

In his “artwork essay,” Walter Benjamin provided precisely such a theory connecting the technological reproducibility of culture to that of commodity production via the concepts of mediation and immediacy. Across its many versions, the essay maintained that the technological mediation of artworks entailed the destruction of their “here and now,” their aura, which provided for Benjamin the standard of immediate experience prior to the extension of the technical means of industrial production over the realm of culture. Whereas in cultures of manual production the artwork’s “access” to history was inseparable from such experience, this access wanes with the advent of technological reproducibility, especially through photography and film. Manual labor had inscribed uniqueness in the object itself, granting it an authenticity that waned after the technologization of production. Technological mediation in the realm of culture is thus part of the same process that defines the mediation of labor. Or, as Jasper Bernes puts it, “the work of art and work in general share a common destiny” (1).

What is most significantly changed by reproducibility, however, is not art — which had long since been reproducible — but the productive quality of perception itself, such that it now “extracts sameness even from what is unique” and disengages the subject from immediate historical experience (105). If, as this essay will suggest, the age of technological reproducibility is over, even as reproducibility persists, it is for the same reason that Benjamin marks the beginning of the age of reproducibility not with the invention of reproduction, but with its installation as a cultural dominant whose influence extends beyond art objects to produce effects at the level of subjectivity. This is due to the priority that, as Jameson points out, Benjamin’s periodizations grant to relations of production (or, in a sense, “logical processes”) over forces of production (“material technologies”) (The Benjamin Files 218 and the foregoing chapter).^[2] Despite its focus on a new technical milieu, Benjamin provides a framework for thinking the historicity of mediation and immediacy without allowing concrete media technologies to determine that history.

In the second version of this essay, Benjamin describes the loss of aura with a dialectical evenhandedness — it arrives with political potentials and pitfalls. Under the conditions of contemporary capitalism, however, there reemerges a “uniqueness” reminiscent of Benjamin’s aura, but for which this same evenhandedness may not be adequate. Fredric Jameson groups this contemporary fetish of “uniqueness” with an overcoming of time by space to form his notion of “the aesthetics of singularity.” The “installation” is paradigmatic of this aesthetic: it emphasizes space, elevates certain aesthetic categories (“the art object”), is constituted via an act of curation, and performs a “de-differentiation of the various arts and media” (“The Aesthetics of Singularity” 107-8). Though emphasizing their own uniqueness, singularities carry with them the same industrial logic of the commodity that overcame the aura: “Art today is generated by a single bright idea which, combining form and content, can be repeated ad infinitum …” (112).

While Benjamin’s essay helps ground the following discussion of immediacy as an effect that only becomes legible against the background of industrialized media cultures, Jameson points to the problem of theorizing the seemingly auratic qualities that contemporary commodification is reconverting into fetishism. I will argue that certain aspects of the contemporary novel, particularly its peculiar version of realism, provide a way of addressing this problem as a problem of immediacy in the midst of transformations in production on a scale larger even than those experienced by Benjamin. In altering the contemporary meaning of the term immediacy, novels like Tom McCarthy’s Remainder, Colson Whitehead’s Zone One, and Rachel Cusk’s Transit will also carry with them notions about how the contemporary novel can operate within a media environment that seeks to provide immediacy but breeds hypermediacy.

There are, of course, other models for understanding this logic to which the contemporary novel will provide a contrast. Writing as the object now known as “new media” was just beginning to come into view, Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin attempt to renovate Benjamin’s understanding of reproducibility, primarily through the complex and multi-valent concept of “remediation.” Remediation shows that the history of (communicative) media is not that of an ever-more-faithful reproduction of a preexisting reality, but rather a process of a given medium interacting with others in a series of oppositions without wholly positive terms. What is mediated, in other words, is always other media. This remediatory logic rests on an interplay of “immediacy” and “hypermediacy,” an effacement of the medium which defines itself in opposition to its conspicuous presence elsewhere.^[3] A new medium takes on a status “closer to reality” in comparison to another. After film, for example, photography only captures still images. A novel such as Frédéric Pajak’s Uncertain Manifesto exemplifies this logic in the novel form, which Bakhtin identified as a form capable of integrating other forms. Within a single book Pajak plays with photography, drawing, realist narrative, biography, manifesto, and memoir, each of these media or genres having its own relation to and method for achieving a certain immediacy — the direct experience of the “I” in autobiography or the “eye” of the drawings being one relationship whose incommensurability Pajak foregrounds. The unfaithfully reproduced experience of the eye — at times dissolving into abstraction (30) or diverting to historical scenes for which Pajak was not present (46)— at other times pretends to a mimetic immediacy which the words even more obliquely approximate, though often providing logical precision on the level of the sentence.

The introduction of genre into this problem points out that it is not only a medial process in the material sense. In terms of genres themselves, such an interplay is at work in Colson Whitehead’s Zone One, in which genre and medium enter into a dynamic relationship. Taking up the zombie apocalypse genre, Zone One finds itself in the position of an older medium remediating a newer, more “popular” one. His appropriation of the zombie genre in this sense must address its history, from the world of independent filmmaking to its lucrative reproduction in Hollywood. Zone One constantly identifies discrepancies between its own zombie apocalypse — that experienced by “average” protagonist Mark Spitz — and those portrayed on screen. Though having grown up with the lone survivor fantasies that accompany the apocalyptic imagination, Mark Spitz was quickly disabused of such ideas: “Now he was grown up and the plague had granted him his wish and rendered it a silly grotesque” (244). Likewise, though in the “cinema of the end times, the roads feeding the evacuated city are often clear,” Mark Spitz experiences traffic jams and other minor inconveniences (168). What this distancing from cinematic portrayals produces is the divergence between a “real” zombie apocalypse (or a literary one) and those of Hollywood. Zone One thus evinces a need to “realize” the zombie apocalypse, whether due to the proximity of various impending socioeconomic and environmental catastrophes or due to a cultural imperative to present the “real” of any given content. In either case the genre becomes a pretense for effacing its own generic conventions.

In both Uncertain Manifesto and Zone One, the relationship among different formal modes of mediation — be they genres, styles, or media themselves—involves a certain claim to representational veracity that is made by way of contrast with other forms. Such was the case with the model of literary history presented in Viktor Shklovsky’s early essay “Art as Device,” in which literary history becomes a series of negations undoing the attempts of earlier styles to establish themselves as natural — all in order to usher in a new method for achieving immediacy, with the sun becoming sunny once again, as he famously wrote (1-14). From the position of a burgeoning high modernism in the early Soviet Union, the dereifying movement of estrangement (ostranenia) may have appeared plausible as the motor of cultural change, but the oppositions of contemporary realism do not follow from a progression uncompromised by factors external to the history of literary devices. While the emergence of this contemporary realism will merit analysis in its own right, such analysis will hinge on an updated conception of immediacy. As for their own theories about immediacy, Bolter and Grusin open their book with an example that illustrates the problems that specifically attend the concept of immediacy in a contemporary world that they do not hesitate to consider hypermediated. They draw this example from the film Strange Days (1995), set in a future whose technological advancements have produced a medium — “the wire” — which achieves what Bolter and Grusin deem the ultimate purpose of mediation: “to transfer sense experiences from one person to another” (3). The paradoxical effect of this invention, however, is that it renders all other media obsolete, creating a new “immediate” standard of experience only by means of an extremely complicated form of hypermediation. But such an advanced medium ultimately operates by a logic no different from any other, at least within their communicative definition of media. As Alexander Galloway puts it: “any mediating technology is obliged to erase itself to the highest degree possible in the name of unfettered communication, but in so doing it proves its own virtuosic presence as technology, thereby undoing the original erasure” (62).

A parallel tension has been observable in the cultural logics of the “age of technological reproducibility,” not least of all because reproducibility entails the possibility of a mass culture/avant garde opposition. Galloway provides several pairs of terms for this opposition — including text/paratext, Aristotle/Brecht, Hitchcock/Godard, image/frame —the latter of each representing a “political modernism” that extends across much of the twentieth century (41).^[4] As in the logic of remediation, the modernist term can only operate by undoing some form that has achieved a certain “naturalness,” not unlike Shklovsky’s model of ostranenie. Whether or not it perpetuates “an ideology of the new,” the postmodern novel could still be identified with such tropes of estrangement, drawing attention to its own inherited representational structures (from Barthelme to Cortázar). Certain contemporary novels can also be said to have inherited this trope. Daniel Kehlmann’s Fame, for example, insists on the mediatory moments of narrative and language, technological communication, and identification, in a sort of spiraling hypermediation that foregoes any “immediate” foothold. In the novel’s final pages, for example, as his girlfriend Elizabeth discovers to her dread that her own narrative is being written as one of his novels, the writer Leo makes explicit the meaning of the novel’s diegetic infractions: “‘We’re always in stories. … You never know where one ends and another begins! In truth they all flow into one another. It’s only in books that they’re clearly divided’” (173). Fame thus performs this narrative dedifferentiation in the one place Leo considers still narratively organized or “divided.”

Do other contemporary novels produce immediacy without resorting to these strategies of immediacy-hypermediacy? Ultimately, by focusing on their implicit understandings of immediacy, it will be clear that the dynamics of political modernism described above and ushered in most completely as a response to the mass culture of reproducibility, no longer so strictly define the formal positions these novels can take. Insofar as it can be read as a meditation on the contemporary desire for immediacy, Tom McCarthy’s Remainder points toward possible ways of approaching this question. McCarthy’s damaged narrator, having been struck by a piece of equipment that fell from the sky, uses a large sum of money received in a legal settlement to reconstruct the chance encounters and fragmented memories that return to him “like a film run in instalments” (23). Several of Benjamin’s examples of aura seem like they would serve almost as well as moments of sensory awareness the narrator wants to recreate: “To follow with the eye … a mountain range on the horizon or a branch that casts its shadow on the beholder is to breathe the aura of those mountains, of that branch” (105). The difference, of course, is that the moment the narrator wants to capture is not one of direct experience of nature, but rather of the dense hypermediation of urban life itself. Even the repetitions the narrator forces his actors to perform take on a ritualistic importance akin to the one Benjamin ascribed to the aura and to which he opposed the political basis of mass media (105, 106). If this is the case, however, it is most likely due to the narrator’s insistence that, in order to maintain something of their aura, his reenactments not be filmed, or committed to technological reproducibility — despite resembling in every way the construction of film scenes (even filing for a film-set permit at one point). Instead, the reproducibility inheres in the experience itself — the endless repetitions to which he submits the actors.

At any rate, the narrator’s desire for immediacy follows a circuitous route, and occasions a reflection on what instigates that desire. In his contemporary culture industry, Benjamin points out a contradictory logic, in which “the desire of the present-day masses to ‘get closer’ to things” is equaled only by a “concern for overcoming each thing’s uniqueness [Überwindung des Einmaligen jeder Gegebenheit] by assimilating it as a reproduction” (105, emphasis in original). Perhaps there is no better description of the narrator’s own desire: simultaneously to “get closer” to things and to assimilate them as reproductions. Conflicting desires and their relation to regimes of mediation, however, are here intimately correlated with the same imperatives that reign in the realm of production. Bernard Stiegler provides a concise conceptual update to the productive conditions to which Benjamin tied his cultural analyses with his notion of hyperindustrialism, which corrects mistaken characterizations of post-fordism as marking a “post-industrial” era. Stiegler’s hyperindustrialism denotes a set of historical homologies in the late twentieth century that were an effect, on the contrary, of intensifying production and its relocation to the Global South. Beginning with the deindustrializing nations, this included the shift from analog to digital technologies that, as Dennis Broe writes, “allowed a kind of hyper-reproducibility and corresponded to the moment of the triumph of neoliberalism, with its attendant unfettered and largely unregulated globalization of capital” (19). Above all, hyperindustrialism names capital’s imperative to “industrialize all things,” including consumption itself.

Hyperindustrialism, hyper-reproducibility, hypermediation. Are these contemporary phenomena merely insensifications of those preceding them, or, as in Benjamin’s assessment, has a change in quantity resulted in yet another new quality? Relating these processes of acceleration to their opposed forms of immediacy, Bolter and Grusin argue that — as expressed by the “wire” of Strange Days — contemporary “culture wants both to multiply its media and to erase all traces of mediation” (5). This would seem to suggest that contemporary culture is in fact no different from the one Benjamin registered as inciting a desire both to “get closer” to things and to “assimilate” them as reproductions. In Remainder, however, culture seems to “want” something slightly different, and can therefore offer a seemingly small revision whose larger implications will be traced in conclusion. The narrator’s pursuit of supposedly unmediated experience leads him to construct progressively more complicated means for remediating those memories. In order to go about recreating these moments, the narrator goes to great lengths, employs a number of people, and spends large sums of money. With his assistant, Naz, the sets, the consultants and actors, the trappings of the auratic moment are reassembled, but at the cost of destroying what made it auratic in the first place. Paradoxically, it is only by a proliferating mediatory apparatus that anything resembling the immediacy of experience can be achieved, but in fact it is only when this apparatus breaks down (the fold in the carpet, or more disastrously in the novel’s conclusion, the reemergence of the performance’s underlying reality) that it comes anywhere close to achieving it. Remainder’s plot, having begun in media res, never recovers the origins from which it drives forward and which can only with the foregoing reflection be recognized as a desire for something like immediacy. More significantly, however, it adds the caveat that hypermediacy itself is a product of this same desire. In fact, the repetition of the events as “reenactments” takes on a logic reminiscent not of desire but of what Freud termed the “drive” (Trieb), whereby the inability to fulfil one’s desire is transformed into a form of pleasure in its own right. To translate this back into the logic of media: what is observed in Remainder is not the enjoyment of “the opacity of media themselves,” per Bolter and Grusin, but the transformation of their non-opacity into something enjoyable (22).

Though it was suggested above that Remainder’s reenactments follow a logic of the aura, it is again Jameson’s “singularity” that seems to be the more apt description. Jameson in fact names the reenactments of Remainder as exemplary of such a logic in which “the postmodern event or non-event comment[s] on the narrative events of another, modernist era,” leaving only “a pure present without a past or a future” (“Aesthetics of Singularity” 112-13). Singularities being unified form-contents, Remainder’s form participates in the construction of such a non-event. Unlike Fame, it does not reflect upon its own condition as narrative. If there is a sense of reflexivity to the novel, it remains implicit within a narrative style that foregoes such formalization. Instead, its realism does not rely so heavily on remediation in order to construct a sense of immediacy.

Again, unlike Fame, Remainder does not foreground its various modes of mediation through diegetic puzzles. But the narrator does, like the characters of Fame, find himself wrapped up in schemes, the workings of which he cannot access. From the beginning of the novel, the narrator admits that “about the accident itself [he] can say very little,” except that it “involved something falling from the sky” (3).^[5] The memories that come back to him are bodily instantiated in “tingling feelings” that come to him while “standing there, passive, with [his] palms turned outwards, feeling intense and serene” (9). This description places the narrator in the position of the medium in the word’s original sense, an individual serving as a conduit for the supernatural or unexplainable. In the case of the accident, its legal aftermath, his memories, and his desire to recreate them — in all these cases the event arrives with no explanation, and the narrator is at the whim of forces that seem external. This phenomenon is recognizable from, among other places in his work, Marx’s description of money economies in his notes on James Mill. Alienation is there described as the reversal by which what once mediated between social agents takes on a life of its own, and social agents begin to mediate on behalf of it: “Hence man becomes the poorer as man [sic], i.e., separated from this mediator, the richer this mediator becomes” (“Notes on James Mill”). The narrator of Remainder is already the mediator of a reality to which he does not have access, prior even to that reality’s instantiation through money.

A similar reflection on the narrator as a “medium” is noticeable in the unified form-content of Rachel Cusk’s Transit. The narrator-author, named once by another character as Fey, acts as a medium (again in the old sense of the term) for others’ stories. Her querulous neighbors, the Polish contractor renovating her home, her distant cousin, and others provide the content that she filters without comment. Like the medium-narrator of Remainder, Fey’s role is more like that of a recording camera, or better still, an editor, leaving the meaning of the narrative to be sought in their curation, rather than in a presented interiority or even a style, which, though present, is self-effacing. Like in the logic of remediation, by moving toward an effacement of the narrator as such in order to “immediately” convey the workings of the outer world, Cusk paradoxically makes all the clearer the necessity that this world pass through the narrator, that it be filtered through some such point of view.

In both Transit and Remainder the narrator’s status as medium is contingent on the immediacy such a medium is supposed to provide. Both novels employ the narrator as a medium in two senses: first, in the old sense of the term, as individuals caught in an immanent scheme which appears to be transcendently arranged; second, in an effort to provide an immediacy typically associated with various versions of realism. To describe this contemporary realism of which the narratorial logic of Remainder and Transit is exemplary, however, is not a formal task divorceable from the foregoing account of changes in the mode and relations of production, realisms themselves being, among other things, various attempts at grasping the novel social conditions such transformations bring about. It should already be clear that what was missing from the foregoing discussion of “updating” Benjamin today is, of course, digitization — the capitalist technological innovation responsible for many of the most profound changes that beget any socioeconomic periodization of “the contemporary” (post-1973, post-1990, even post-2008). Under these technological conditions the very category of reproducibility seems at once extended (“hyper-reproducibility”) and outmoded. Like the reenactments of Remainder, though infinitely “reproducible,” today’s “work of art” instead seems to approach the “total” art of the singular installation, of an expansive digital simulation, or of the immersive experience — that is to say, of a false immediacy whose technological milieu is unique to the late capitalism of the twenty-first century.

In his suggestion at the beginning of New Philosophy for New Media that something like Benjamin’s aura could be said to have reemerged in such a technological milieu, Mark Hansen brings about another basis on which to revise the aura. Against McLuhanites like Bolter and Grusin, Hansen argues for an understanding of the body’s persistence in the digital framing of a world characterized by “the pure flow of data unencumbered by any need to differentiate into concrete media types, or in other words, to adapt itself to the constraints of human perceptual ratios” (3). This leads him to suggest that “[one] might even characterize this properly creative role accorded the body as the source for a new, more or less ubiquitous form of aura: the aura that belongs indelibly to this singular actualization of data in embodied experience” (4). In terms of cultural politics, this “singular actualization,” which is simultaneously “more or less ubiquitous,” as much propels us forward to “singularities” as it does to return us to foregoing theories of the all-encompassing spectacle (Debord) or the becoming-simulation of consumer society (Baudrillard), each of which is an attempt to name the proliferation of images (what Debord called the highest form of commodity reification) that has become at once personalized and “ubiquitous.” Anxieties about the perfection of such techniques through digital technology are only more prevalent today than they were in the nineties of The Matrix, The Truman Show, and Strange Days. But given the inadequacy of any of these concepts for grasping the totalizing and immersive character of this new commodified immediacy, Jameson suggests that a different concept from Benjamin’s reproducibility essay sustains its relevance in an age of techno-economical integration and the overcoming of reproducibility itself: “aestheticization.”

Opposed to politicization, aestheticization was for Benjamin allied with fascism. As Jameson puts it, aestheticization names the state in which “reality is a pre-prepared illusion from the outset,” “transform[ing] our consumption of information itself,” leading today to the “reappearance of tribalisms that have a family likeness to the traditional fascisms” (The Benjamin Files 155-56).^[6] Though aura has no opposite (187), Jameson points out that it does have its positive and negative faces, and aestheticization stretches to include the reversal “in which aura is part and parcel of that immense cultural swindle that compensates the commodified poverty of industrial ‘ever-sameness’” (189). Aestheticization thus names another false immediacy: the false immediacy of fascist politics. As in Remainder, the dialectical irony of such immediacies is that they can only be brought about by such an advanced form of mediation that, if we are as hopeful as Galloway, “proves its own virtuosic presence as technology thereby undoing the original erasure” (62).

Ultimately the realism peculiar to these novels seems to be wrapped up in a preoccupation with the immediacy that the hyperindustrial world is at pains to produce. It morphs their formal categories (genre in Zone One and Uncertain Manifesto, the narrator in Transit and Remainder), and informs the anxieties of their content. Immediacy hence emerges from them as a term adequate to the technological conditions of contemporary capitalism and that cuts across various other models (aura, remediation, singularity, aestheticization) to allow us to conceive of a unity across such historical difference. But these novels just as presciently warn that if “immediacy” is to be of any use today, its meaning must be diligently safeguarded against solidifying into its own form of false immediacy.

 

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