Media in Mind by Daniel Reynolds (review)

Media in Mind is a stimulating and mostly philosophical exploration of mind-body dualism in the context of films and video games, using John Dewey's concept of transactionism as an analytic thread. The book aims to address what Daniel Reynolds perceives as a shortcoming in media theory—namely, that the prevailing dualist orientation neglects and obfuscates essential aspects of embodiment and agency in perception. A transactionist approach views perception as a continuous whole, erasing or at least subjugating the distinction between subject and object. To quote Reynolds, "Media use is not an interaction in which two discrete things, a medium and a mind, come into contact with and act upon one another, but instead a transaction within a continuous field of matter that produces the intertwined phenomena that we (always contingently) may call 'media' and 'mind.' "¹ Reynolds proceeds to develop this central idea by way of examples of video games and films, supported by numerous references to philosophers and film theorists, including Robert Bresson, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Gilles Deleuze, Germaine Dulac, Mark Johnson, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Christian Metz, Hugo Münsterberg, Alva Noë, Alfred North Whitehead, and of course John Dewey. With a cast of characters like this (and others), you would assume that the argument is easily buried in philosophical lingo, but Reynolds keeps the text readable and never loses sight of his original idea.

The book is laid out in six chapters, along with an introduction and conclusion. Reynolds begins with Dewey's concept of transactionism, as expressed in the book he coauthored with Arthur Bentley, Knowing and the Known, and argues for transactionism's relevance in the context of media studies, tying it into more contemporary theories about embodied cognition and active perception by philosophers Mark Johnson and Alva Noë.² We are also introduced here to the first video game: The Unfinished Swan (Giant Sparrow, 2012), a game Reynolds classifies under the rubric of "first-person shooter" games in which protagonists normally move through their environment while firing away at menacing objects and beings.³ The Unfinished Swan upends this activity, however; through the act of throwing paint, the player discovers a world rather than destroys it. Reynolds describes this action as "an allegory of the ways people create perception and knowledge by inhabiting and moving through the world. From birth, we embark on a series of differentiations, dividing light from dark, soft from hard, loud from quiet, object from nonobject, available from off limits, food from nonfood, threat from nonthreat."⁴ Reynolds extends this idea with an analysis of Robert Bresson's L'Argent (1983), in which "Yvon [the protagonist] and the film itself seem to want to feel something about the world, to touch its material surfaces. Bresson's camera lingers on details of scenes in unconventional ways, taking in events from uncommon and at times confounding angles, such as a car chase filmed almost entirely in static shots of automobile pedals and a side-view mirror."⁵

These two examples, a video game and a film, set the tone for the rest of the book. As with any philosophical text, the strength of the argument lies in the supporting examples, and Reynolds has chosen these carefully The subsequent range of films discussed includes How It Feels to Be Run Over (Cecil Hepworth, 1900), La souriante Madame Beudet (The Smiling Madam Beudet, Germaine Dulac, 1923), Le quatre cents coups (The 400 Blows, François Truffaut, 1959), The Conversation (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974), Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986), and Ni na bian ji dian (What Time Is It There?, Tsai Ming-liang, 2001). In addition to The Unfinished Swan, video games such as Tetris (Alexiey Pajitnov, 1984), Katamari Damacy (Namco, 2004), and Don't Look Back (distractionware, 2009) are used to expound on what it means to move beyond interaction to the more enveloping sense of transaction.

In ensuing chapters, Reynolds examines the idea of active perception by invoking Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's concept of "flow...