Mass Mediauras: Form, Technics, Media (review)

Academic cultural criticism today is rarely problematic. We are far more used instead to studies of modern and postmodern culture that have a problematic—to articles and books that address themselves to what is already conceived of as, say, a certain aspect of postmodernism. Starting in this way, the academic criticism we are used to then often seems little more than the assembling of pre-fabricated parts, selected from some catalogue of “theory,” to a postmodern problematic. An alternative to such work is offered by Samuel Weber’s Mass Mediauras: Form, Technics, Media. While perhaps appearing both to take up topics very much at home in contemporary cultural studies (technology and mass media, for example) and to bring to bear on them often-cited “theorists” (Benjamin and Derrida, for instance), Weber is in fact up to something quite different from what we have come to expect.

We do not have to look far for indications of this difference, but we must look closely. It is evident in the beginnings of Mass Mediauras, which, we are informed on the first page of the introduction, is the “result” of “the idea” (not, it is suggested, the author’s own) “of collecting various talks and discussions into a volume” (1). These talks and discussions—uncannily lucid lectures and interviews held in Australia in 1992—were, the introduction goes on, occasions of “intense and exhilarating exchanges” among interlocutors “willing and able to put themselves, their projects and their premises into question” (1). With this brief account of how the book came about, we are already in the middle of things, as Weber makes clear when he turns in the next sentence to what might be called the question of questions that is a major theme in Mass Mediauras:

This [putting into question of selves, of projects, and of premises], however, is easier said than done. For questioning is never innocent. No question can ever be asked without some sort of answer being anticipated. One can, however, distinguish between questions asked primarily to reach an answer and a questioning that is after something else, something that can not be measured in strictly cognitive terms. Such is the questioning that traverses this book. This might not be immediately evident.

(1)

What kind of questioning is primarily after something other than an answer that can be measured, or perhaps that has already been measured, in cognitive terms? This is the question pursued in this volume with respect to the media. Here, it turns out, it will be a question not just of “the media,” as commonly understood, but also of questions as media. This, Weber points out, “might not be immediately evident,” but, as we can see from this passage, it becomes more so when we pay close attention to the medium of Mass Mediauras.

Weber is truly concerned here not with what is usually conceived of as “the media,” but rather with the ways in which modes of “inscription”—including television, radio, film, as well as writing—are media, that is, the ways their linkage extends across what have come to be viewed as certain boundaries in and around such media, “infiltrating” the lines of demarcation by which they are traditionally defined and thereby exposing them as “inscribed in, and as, a network” (3). This “mediatic articulation,” as Weber precisely names it, has consequences that reach farther than one might immediately recognize. It means, for example, that the concatenations of “mediatic articulation” cross the border that is supposed to separate the modern mass media from what has come before, “upsetting” and “dislocating,” as Weber says, the commonly held notion of their “radical distinctiveness” (2). Instead of seeing television as rooted firmly on this side of a radical historical break with earlier forms of representation, Weber argues that watching television involves an engagement with a “technological novelty [that] must be understood both as the consummation of a very old tradition and at the same time as the heightening of its internal ambivalences” (123). This is the tradition of “inscription,” one that...