Saturday, November 4, 2006
Fuller, Media Ecologies
Fuller, Matthew. Media Ecologies. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005.
That the twenty-three quotations listed below are just the tip of the iceberg should serve to remind me to return for a more careful reading of Fuller. Every damn sentence in this book is like a compressed coil; in combination, they make for an exciting if exasperating string of pithy insights into methods and sites/objects of media ecology.
Two themes open the book (which is a "media ecology made of bits of paper"): 1.) media systems interact by interacting and so the method is radically situated; such interactions must be lived out rather than observed in a control sample, and 2) media systems should be understood as materialist in their constitution (which does not lead inevitably to instrumentalism or positivism) (1).
In the introduction, Fuller accounts for three connotations to "media ecology": 1.) concerns the "allocation of informational roles in organizations and in computer-supported collaborative work" (3); 2.) a kind of answer to tech determinism that emphasizes systemic balance--media environment equilibrium (Postman, McLuhan, Mumford, Innis, Ong, and Ellul); and 3.) concerns "discursive storage, calculation, and transmission systems" (4) (Hayles, Kittler, and Tabbi). Chapter summaries appear on pages 5-12.
Fuller's method is best described as the "indexing of multiplicities" (52) among "conjunctive media." Inventories and lists (15, 44) play a significant part in this approach to understanding more fully the situated interrelations of media and standard objects. Fuller makes use of D&G's machinic phylum--"materiality, natural or artificial, and both simultaneously; it is matter in movement, in flux, in variation, matter as a conveyor of singularities and traits of expression" (17)--to comb through the amalgamation of media involved with pirate radio. In chapter two, he also involves Gibson's theory of affordances (44-47), noting that it is especially adept for the study of media ecology because it hinges on "potential or activated relations" (45). Finally, in studying these live systems, Fuller notes that layerings (up and down scales) are neither visible nor reciprocal (176).
Defined
Hylomorphism (18): a model of the genesis of form as external to matter,
as imposed from the outside like a command on material which is thought inert or
dead
Feedback defined (25): the property of being able to adjust future
conduct by past performance
^What would a machinic phylum of composition look like? Rel. p. 23,
machinic phylum of radio.
Note of critique for Nardi and O'Day's Information Ecologies because its
scope is "insufficient to challenge standardizations of either [technologies or
people]" (179).
Key terms: fabrication (2), ecology (2), media ecology (3), information ecology (3), scale and dimensionality (10, 132), reflexive (12), zone of experimental combination (13), lists and "infinite patchwork" (14), hegemonic manyness (15), the aesthetic of multiplicity (15), disequilibrium (16), permutational fields (16), technical standards (16), machinic phylum (17), tacit knowledge (18), hylomorphism (18), hyle (20), Markov chain (29), dub (30), crooning (33), peritextual apparatus (35), hype, redundancy and information (36), earlid (38), translation (42), visible speech (42), affordances (45), conjunctive media (47), clots of association (51), indexing of multiplicities (52), technical ensembles (61), standard object (93), relations of dimensionality (131), fleck of identity (148).
"Parts no longer exist simply as discrete bits that stay separate; they set in play a process of mutual stimulation that exceeds what they are as a set" (1).
"Crucial to such an approach is an understanding that an attention to materiality is most fruitful where it is often deemed irrelevant, in the 'immaterial' domain of electronic media" (2).
"How can words, concepts, quotations, footnotes, the mechanics of a book, and the writings and accounts that evade them themselves be nailed down or glued to a page in a way that makes them reverberate?" (11).
"Children make their way around the world by responding with a ceaseless 'why' to every explanation or grunt offered them. This chapter [4] perhaps betrays the effect of the main methodological influences in my life at the moment, but I hope it benefits from the rather childish insistence on being able to take every path in a labyrinth simultaneously" (11).
"The accretion of minute elements of signification into crowds, arrays, and clusters allows a reverberation of these cultural particles between them and together, the connotations of one into flying off the lick of another" (14).
"Parataxis (a sequence of this and that, 'ands') always involves a virtuality that is hypotactic (concepts and things, nested, meshed, and writhing). It puts into play a virtual syntax" (15). ^Networked image?
"Multiplicity is induced by two processes: the instantiation of particular compositional elements and the establishment of transversal relations between them. The media ecology is synthesized by the broke-up combination of parts" (16).
"Pirates operate without such prescriptive demands, working instead with their inverse: at what level of cheapness will things still run?" (16).
"Phyla are replaced or added to by other systems of reference, such as clades, analytical tools produced by emergent tools and discourses, such as genetic databases, which provide access to dimensions and interpretations of evolution other than those simply available to the interpretive eye" (17).
"Electricity scratches the vitalist itch precisely because it involves the operation of matter on itself" (19).
"The machinic phylum of the radio in this sense is that of the creation of flow among dense population, an expanded form of phyla that at once multiplies the domains in which it is traced by it also produced in the attempted or actualized imposition of hylomorphic patterning--law, the state, or the technologies of capture employed by it" (20).
"Speech and its reception becomes Law, each syntagmatic accretion another node solidifying along the alveoli of power" (26).
"We need now to pay close attention to the particular material qualities of these technologies as a means to accessing such layers. If we are to take the elements of these lists as being at one scale a whole, an object--perceptual effects, which will be discussed throughout the following chapters--we can also begin to take them apart. While such an element might provide, as for Whitman's poet detained in love, a door to a new universe of relationality in which we can lose ourselves, each component provides a chance to get smaller, to get molecular, to get material, while at the same time getting more massive. Details count here" (45).
"The advantage of [Gibson's] work is that it takes up the possibility of detailed exploration of the material qualities of things-in-arrangement, rather than of their essence" (45). ^Strong discussion of Gibson, affordances, and relationality here and on 46.
"Taking up from where he suggests Foucault leaves off--according to Kittler, Foucault's work, being primarily concerned with textual material, largely cuts out at the point where modern electronic media emerge, between 1860 and 1870--his procedure for organizing the recognition of discursive practices makes a substantial and profoundly useful expansion of what is understood to be constitutive of discourse" (61).
"Each of these first lists also provides a route into a specific approach to the combination of media systems: memetics, a set of theories in which cultural elements and processes are proposed as being recognizably 'evolutionary'; seamlessness, the condition of an uncomplicated confluence of media systems; and surveillance, the medial drive to spot, name, and control" (110).
"At this point, it is useful to make clear the conjunction of the two terms meme and fleck of identity. Under the rubric of monitorability demanded by meme theory as an epistemology--that it requires an identifiable isolate, the meme--we can say that the processes of constituting control make a similar demand. They require identifiers, tags. Within the society of control, the meme is transduced as a fleck of identity" (149).
"All standard objects contain with them drives, propensities, and affordances that are 'repressed' by their standard uses, by the grammar of operations within which they are fit. (This 'repression' should not necessarily be construed negatively. It is likely itself to arise as the result of a previous or immanent recombination, disassembly, or adaptation)" (168).
"Discourse and language arise as both tabulatory, isolatable object, the maker of lists, and as visceral reality-forming means of escape from the grid" (170).
"To the side of every line of text is a nonrecorded chaos of life, of deleted words, gibberish, a health improper to record among the thin lines of carefully non-nonsensical findings and leavings" (171).
"The machinic phylum is also produced in the dynamic and nonlinear combination of drives and capacities that, stimulating each other to new realms of potential, produce something that is in virulent excess of the sum of its parts. Indeed such parts can no longer be disassembled; they produce an ecology. Not a whole, but a live torrent in time of variegated and combinatorial energy and matter" (171).
"A media ecology is a cascade of parasites" (174).
"The book has adopted a method that works on the basis of a relatively detailed grounding in specific media elements in order to draw out what is, one hopes, a more accurate and hence useful account" (175).
Posted by Derek Mueller at November 4, 2006 10:17 PM to Visuality and New Media