Eco-Aesthetics and the Politics of Mediation

While formally aligned to the discipline of media and communications, and working in universities across the UK, Canada, Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, and now based at Goldsmiths University of London, Sean Cubitt has never been a conformist. Eclectic in his intellectual tastes, Cubitt has roamed with seeming comfort across cultural studies, postcolonial theory, media arts, and film studies. This kind of disciplinary curiosity is also on display in Finite Media: Environmental Implications of Digital Technologies, a book that as much as anything is an exercise in transdisciplinary experimentation even as it focuses on the conceptual question of how to think media environmentally and the political problem of how to live with the consequences of mediation predicated on resource extraction.

Three decades of media-theoretical research and art practice on technologically constituted worlds have now, at least conceptually, rendered obsolete the distinction between culture and nature, technology and environment. However unfashionable it may be, we can give to this series of transitions a name: postmodernity. Distinct modes of production and subjectivation accompany this historical experience and material condition—immaterial and symbolic labor, cognitive and communicative capitalism, the general intellect and the multitudes. In Finite Media, Cubitt acknowledges such operations and socialities as constituent forces within contemporary capitalism while asserting a core argument and theoretical precept that the materiality of media and communicative forms hold primacy insofar as individual and collective capacities to transform the world will always have to reckon with the limit horizon of materiality that refuses abstraction and precedes the artifice of human intervention. A focus on materiality provides a point of departure for the book's many genealogical detours and investigations that effectively reengineer media as transhistorical objects, processes, and situations whose combined effects determine the instantiation of mediation.

Central to the book's framing concept of finite media is a quasispiritual and maybe even Hegelian investment in aesthetics as the substrate with which to think and experience a world as an event of history. The contours of aesthetics as sensation and perception are in dialectical struggle with the materiality of media whose elementary particles always threaten to subtract the possibility of aesthetic experience. When film stock begins to deteriorate, the spectacle of cinema is reduced to the archive of its historical enunciation. When technical malfunctions occur in data centers, a flash crash ensues, social media lives are disabled, governmental procedures lose control. The finitude of media is also the condition of escape, notwithstanding the perpetuity of mediation as the bedrock of ecological life, whether human or nonhuman. As Cubitt writes, "Every element of an ecology mediates every other" (4). And while communication and mediation are, as noted by Cubitt, distinct practices and processes, they occasionally hold a coeval status as connections replete with signification: "Mediations are not communications (though all communications are mediated)" (3). It is on this basis that Cubitt defines ecopolitics as "the assertion that our environments are not only capable of communication, but are constantly communicating" (177). In developing the foundations of environmental media criticism, Finite Media explores the tensions inherent to communication when the materiality of media underscores an ecology of disconnection, of severance and termination. These are some of the variations of possibility that attend the limits of media that bind a planet in mourning.

Despite all the attention in recent years to climate change and the Anthropocene in scientific research, mainstream news media, and the occasional arts and technology festivals (Berlin's transmediale comes most immediately to mind), there are only a handful of books that address the relation between environment and media. Cubitt's Finite Media is one of them, building on and extending his earlier books, essays, and coedited collections that for over a decade now have been establishing the foundations for environmental media critique. Over the past few years this subfield has seen notable contributions from Richard Maxwell and Toby Miller and their book Greening the Media (2012), which...