Search

Today, machines observe, record the world – not just for us, but sometimes instead of us (in our stead), and even indifferently to us humans. And yet, remain human. Correlationism may not be up to a comprehensive ontology, but the ways in which we encounter, and struggle to make some kind of sense of, machinic sensibility matters. The nature of that encounter is not instrumentality, or even McLuhanian extension, but a full-blown ‘relationship’ where the terms by which machines ‘experience’ the world, and communicate with each other, parametrises the conditions for our own experience. This essay will play out one such relationship currently in the making: the boom in self-tracking technologies, and the attendant promise of data’s intimacy. This essay proceeds in three sections, all of which draw on a larger research project into self-tracking and contemporary data epistemologies. It thus leverages observations from close reading of self-tracking’s publicisation in the mass media between 2007 and 2016; analysis of over fifty self-tracking products, some of it through self-experimentation; and interviews and ethnographic observation, primarily of the ‘Quantified Self’ connoisseur community. The first section examines the dominant public presentations of self-tracking in early twenty-first century discourse. This discourse embraces a vision of automated and intimate self-surveillance, which is then promised to deliver superior control and objective knowledge over the self. Next, I link these promises to the recent theoretical turns towards the agency of objects and the autonomous sensory capacities of new media to consider the implications of such theories – and the technological shifts they address – for the phenomenology of the new media subject. Finally, I return to self-tracking discourse to consider its own idealisation of such a subject – what I call ‘data-sense’. I conclude by calling for a more explicit public and intellectual debate around the relationships we forge with new technologies, and the consequences they have for who – and what – is given which kinds of authority to speak the truth of the ‘self’

What will be the fate of ME in the realm of digital ME-ness?

While the distinction between spiritualism and science was understood affirmatively as a demarcation of true science against pseudo-science, nowadays, after several Science Wars, it is obvious for us that this distinction does not correspond to the actual practices of science but reflects a work of ‘purification’ typical for modernity in the Latourian sense. In the physico-philosophical surroundings of this boundary epistemological foundations are shaped and modern science is constituted as the primary way to knowledge. Referring to studies on the history of the occult in the early modern period, the article shows that in order to understand the stakes of spiritualism and its technical or personal media we should trace back this boundary to a rarely recognized conceptual transformation of the ‘occult’. It shifts between insensible and inexplicable. Following this leading difference, the article traces its function in the emergence of early occultism, the debate between Leibniz and Newton, and the rise of modern spiritualism and its instrumental repertoire.

If television inherited the democratization tendencies of mass media, then digital media circumvented the impasse of politics and psychosis by a momentum that is more closely allied to integration. Beginning with the word “integration” it proves possible to go deeper than the term’s current associations in the headlines and revalorize the newly mediatized prospect of political change. It is an upgrade that becomes uniquely legible – as “alle-gory” – in recent alterations and alternations in media representation of occult and psycho horror.

In the Bavaria of 1775, the popular exorcist practices performed by the catholic priest Johann Joseph Gassner were discredited and superseded by the enlightened, ‘scientific’ system of Franz Anton Mesmers “Animal Magnetism”. As the article argues, this replacement could happen so easily because–below the apparent ideological differences–both procedures were based on the same idea of technical functioning, they relied on the same principle of operation. Gassnerism as well as Mesmerism revolved around the idea of communication, and in both cases this ‘communication’ was not about conveying a message, a meaning, it was a about mediating between two corporeal states which were marked by an imbalance of energy. In the frame of this common operating system, the message was nothing, transmission everything; and so both Gassner’s and Mesmer’s deliberations concentrated on the technical means and media which could allow for such a transport of forces. A hypothesis drawn from this episode is that throughout the early modern period there can be found basically two ways of understanding supernatural communication (and, maybe, communication tout court): One might be called ‘contact paradigm’ and would among others include the practices of Gassner and Mesmer, the second one could be named ‘code paradigm’ and would unite all magical practices primarily based on the interpretation of signs. Perhaps one can find here an origin of the theoretical bifurcations that still govern todays media and communication studies: medium vs. message, channel vs. content, hardware vs. software, presence culture vs. meaning culture.

This article analyzes the late-nineteenth-century stage illusion “The Second Sight,” which seemingly demonstrates the performers’ telepathic abilities. The illusion is on the one hand regarded as an expression of contemporary trends in cultural imagination as it seizes upon notions implied by spiritualism as well as utopian and dystopian ideas associated with technical media. On the other hand, the spread of binary code in communication can be traced along with the development of the "Second Sight," the latter being outlined by means of three examples using different methods to obtain a similar effect. While the first version used a speaking code to transmit information, the other two were performed silently, relying on other ways of communication. The article reveals how stage magic, technical media, spiritualism, and mind reading were interconnected in the late nineteenth century, and drove each other forward.

Viewed from the perspective of the occult, formerly straight and narrow conduits of reason may even begin to resemble irregular relays composed of irregular twists and turns. This essay offers a brief overview of key literature on spiritualism and the occult, some larger reflections on the place of the occult within studies of science and communications, and brief summaries of the essays contained in this volume.

In order to show that technology mediates between man and machine, I will discuss in this text a literally other or alter-knowledge system that also heavily relied on self-writing machines: spiritualism. Contrary to scientific knowledge systems, in spiritualism the unforeseen, the singular, and the disturbance is what counts as, and produces, significance. That is the reason why alter-concepts such as spiritualism, esotericism, or occultism are not typically recognized as innovative agencies in the history of knowledge. Hence, what is needed to raise the question of a non-hegemonic knowledge production is a symmetrical approach in the history of technology.

Spiritualists in the nineteenth century gave much emphasis to the collection of evidences of scientific meaning. During séances, they used instruments similar to those employed in scientific practice to substantiate their claims. However, these were not the only source of legitimization offered in support of the spiritualist claims. In fact, writers who aimed to provide beliefs in spiritualism with a reliable support relied very often on the testimonies of eyewitness that were reported in a narrative fashion. This article interrogates the role of such anecdotal testimonies in nineteenth-century spiritualism. It argues that they played a twofold role: on one side, they offered a form of evidentiary proof that was complementary to the collection of mechanical-based evidences; on the other side, they circulated in spiritualist publications, creating opportunities to reach a wide public of readers that was made available by the emergence of a mass market for print media. Able to convince, but also to entertain the reader, anecdotal testimonies were perfectly suited for publications in spiritualist books and periodicals. The proliferation of anecdotal testimonies in spiritualist texts, in this regard, hints at the relevance of storytelling in the diffusion of beliefs about religious matters as well as scientific issues within the public sphere. By reporting and disseminating narrative testimonies, print media acted as a channel through which spiritualism’s religious and scientific endeavors entered the field of a burgeoning popular culture.

This article contextualizes the conditions of rural “connectivity” in the Canadian Arctic. It examines the emergence of satellites, fibre optic cables, and intranets as modes of social infrastructure at the outset of the twenty-first century. At present, Nunavut, the Northwest Territories, and the Yukon are all at a complicated confluence in that their current and inadequate telecommunications infrastructures are in the process of being renegotiated, re-designed, and re-allotted across civic, governmental, and corporate interests. The article shows how it is at sites of friction that the overlapping if fading legacies of systems-based thinking are emerging: satellites orbiting over fibre optic cable lines; corporate actors competing rather than coordinating with government agencies; and neoliberal rationales of mapping, division, and speed creating disjointed local markets. More broadly, these sites also demonstrate how indigenous forms of “connection” across the globe are increasingly experiencing telecommunications’ lags and temporal disjunctures that are having very material effects on their supposedly post-colonial lives.

The structuring relationship between the material world and the world of culture is variously embodied in the figure of the corpse. To ask how corpses mean as matter is to attend to them as “things themselves”—by bracketing the freighted assumptions and naturally mixed feelings we have when we encounter something that cannot but remind us of our own mortality. Corpses force us to think of putrefaction—and allow us, via a complex system of cultural and representational practices, to just as quickly disavow this unpleasantness. Wherever the corpse appears, then, it brings with it ideas about the relationship between representation and the real, or, more precisely, about the matter of subjectivity. This materiality also crucially constitutes the corpse’s difference from the identity of the deceased, and it is here where the corpse may thus do more than simply reference the past. The end point of the argument, then, is to work towards a vocabulary that allows this difference—this material remainder—to figure meaningfully in practices of grief and mourning that may not point exclusively back towards the deceased (and inevitably a particular version of that person’s legacy) but towards the future and towards polysemic, even conflicting ideas of the responsibility placed upon us by this death. This paper opens a discussion of corpses as “vibrant matter” (to borrow Jane Bennett’s provocative term) whose materiality is an equal partner to their cultural significance. My reading opens a conversation about the very real work of corpses as things capable of organizing diverse affect that in turn may become considered action. Following Bennett’s reading of Deleuze and Latour, I account for the corpse as both deceased subject and material object by framing it as a kind of assemblage. As remains, the corpse is essentially referential, the remains of someone. But remains are also material, matter that functions as an actant in concert with the processes of decomposition, with the interventions of photography and embalming, with the cultural practices of disposal that ritually encounter and resolve this “remaining.” The corpse diversely and dynamically organizes the cultural, the representational, the biological, the subjective and the objective, the ritual and the metaphysical. I argue that lingering with the corpse as a dynamic assemblage allows for the development of a nuanced and materialistic notion of agency. I further suggest that this kind of reading provocatively develops Bill Brown’s question, “What might scholars accomplish through a materialist analysis of media?” Corpses are unique objects in that they already suggest themselves as figures of the material, thus literally embodying the question of what a materialist media studies might look like. Corpses communicate something to us about the flesh; they are the not-so-passive objects of technological, ritual and representational practices; they are the perfect starting point for a materialist communication and media studies.