Heidegger and the Media by David Gunkel and Paul A. Taylor (review)

The present study makes a passionate case for Heidegger’s relevance for contemporary media studies, in self-conscious opposition to critics like David Dwan who have dismissed Heidegger’s commentary on technology in the contexts of mass communications as “banal” or arcane (43). While Gunkel and Taylor remain sensitive to Heidegger’s idiosyncratic language use, they deem it an expedient means to pave the way for alternate interpretations of our relationship to the new media that govern our various life-worlds.

The red thread running through the four chapters of this volume is Heidegger’s central claim that “the essence of technology is by no means anything technological” (1; cf. 21, 135, 165). The authors unreservedly accept this dictum and turn it into a license to steer clear of any case studies. “We therefore unapologetically focus on the essential aspects of media that, somewhat paradoxically, are better understood when one moves away from specific media examples and instead concentrates upon the broader implications for a society pervaded by mediated objects and techniques of objectification” (5). This approach rests on the assumption that there is a basic homology between the pervasiveness of language and the pervasiveness of technology in shaping our experiential encounter with pretty much everything.

Due to their ubiquitous revelatory character, both language and technology emerge as a “meta-medium” (24) from which there is “no escaping” (58). In essence, then, technology is just as unavoidable as language. Thus, the omnipresence of technology raises the question whether humans have any freedom in how they may respond to technology’s way of mediating all meaning. The authors hint that “Heidegger does not stop at a mere endorsement of your standard, run-of-the-mill technological determinism” (21). Yet further treatment of the lurking specter of “fatalism or even nihilism” (123) is postponed until the last chapter (cf. 147), as is any exposition of Heidegger’s notion of “en-framing [Gestell]” which is mentioned for the first time on page 85.

Bearing out the aforesaid homology between language and technology, Chapter One examines Heidegger’s adage that “language speaks us” (25). To gauge the implications of this pronouncement, the authors attend to two theories of language. The first account comprehends language in instrumental terms, namely, as a tool for communication that serves human agendas. Such instrumentalism undergirds the influential sender/receiver model by Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver which, according to Gunkel and Taylor, still dominates (too) much of contemporary media studies (33–35). While the authors may be right about this, there could have been some acknowledgement of those communication scholars who have sought out sophisticated alternatives since the 1980s, including Lawrence Grossberg’s 1997 anthology Bringing It All Back Home.

The second view characterizes language as profoundly constitutive. Spelled out with reference to Kenneth Burke, James Carey, and Mark Wrathall, this view holds that language is not something we can use to talk about some pre-existing reality. Rather, as Gunkel and Taylor put it, language is “what shapes and makes this reality possible in the first place” (28). Accordingly, Heidegger can be read to advocate a defensible form of “anti-realism” (53) “without necessarily resorting to a form of linguistic idealism” (52). Though this is not made explicit, the authors seem to understand linguistic idealism in the extreme sense such that language users can spontaneously speak things into existence, without being constrained by extra-linguistic conditions or language-independent facts. Presumably, Heidegger’s brand of anti-realism is not that extreme. Rather, the preceding illustration of a US presidential debate that is “cover[ed]” differently by “conservative” and “liberal” media outlets (51) suggests that Heideggerian anti-realism does allow for some kind of proto-reality which, however, gains its distinct worldly contours only in the course of different language games.

If so, Heidegger’s anti-realist does not deny a single reality at all. Instead she will insist that this proto...