Media Studies After Mediation: Faisal Devji

At the very beginning of media studies stands a formulation that refuses its plain meaning. Marshall McLuhan’s “the medium is the message” puts mediation into question in at least two ways. His cliché repudiates the separation of form and content in communication. And as a consequence, it rejects the dualistic relationship of sender and receiver, or that of author and audience. Drawn by philosophers from the world of markets and assemblies, as well as of theatre and literature, these categories, McLuhan suggested, were no longer
definitive for understanding mass media. Indeed, he saw media as being annulled by its very operation, in the sense that it made possible a kind of communicative immediacy that was signalled in another one of his stereotypes, the “global village” produced by media’s
compression of time and space.

McLuhan was not interested in this immediacy as a kind of false consciousness resulting from some ideological manoeuvre. For this would simply reinstate the dualisms of form and content as much as of sender and receiver that he wanted to question, with their traditional invocation of other binary relationships including the surface and depth of meaning or transcendent and immanent import, all venerable metaphysical categories. What concerned him, instead, was the phenomenological transformation produced by mass media which, by seeming to explode time and space, as if in some quotidian experience of Einstein’s space-time continuum, ended up dismantling the standard dualisms of communication. It was as if, in some version of Zeno’s Paradox, the arrow of meaning had no spatial or temporal trajectory, and so no author and audience.

The political implications of this novel experience were likely to be immense, because its radical intimacy required refashioning ideas and perceptions of identity and difference as well as of agency and responsibility more generally. Is this perhaps one reason why these
terms became so important for Euro-American thinking in the age of mass media? What if Emmanuel Lévinas’s phenomenological exploration of the face of the other, whose looming proximity prevents its easy categorization, refers not to the old-fashioned relations of
individuals he invokes but the intimacies of mass media? Perhaps the political response to such experiences was to lend time and space the extension they seemed to have lost and so to remake those relations of distance and hierarchy that had once defined the violence of
communication.

The crisis of conventional notions of communication, in which the relations between selves and others had been given both their autonomy and hierarchy in spatial or temporal terms, goes well beyond the narrow definition of media to include Cold War technology as a whole. Hannah Arendt, for example, was by no means the only thinker of the time to note that the atom bomb had created a global present that cancelled out centuries of historical, political and even geographical forms of mediation between selves and others. For the possibility of a nuclear war meant that every country had suddenly become the neighbour of every other, since they would all be drawn into and effected by its destruction even in the absence of any links with the belligerents and their respective causes. Such a war would be more like a natural calamity than a part of human history.

Arendt argued that it was the prospect of universal destruction that gave humanity such reality as it possessed in the wake of the Second World War, if only as the perpetrator and victim of its own devastation. Drawing upon philosophical ideas about how our sense of
mortality is what makes us human, she noted that this strangely posthumous experience now provided the singular basis for our sense of human solidarity. Ecological and environmental concerns in our own time have adopted this posthumous sense of human
solidarity, whose imagined experience of annihilation gives it an identity otherwise repudiated by all political institutions despite the profuse deployment of humanity in international law. Some have moved beyond humanity to envision the solidarity of all
species, though this is still the unilateral responsibility of our own. The questioning of mediation, however, was not entirely a product of the Cold War but has been invoked in criticisms of liberalism since the nineteenth century. For the idea of mediation that continues to dominate our views of mass and now social media, with its separation of agent and audience, time and space, has come to us from the working of liberal institutions such as courts, parliaments and the press that are founded upon the representation or mediation of interests. Critics of liberalism like Mahatma Gandhi were deeply suspicious of this institutional order, which he thought received its purest form in the colonies. In a place like British India, after all, the state made a liberal virtue out of its own alien character by presenting itself as a neutral third party there to adjudicate between the rival interests of Indians and thus hold the country together in the only way possible.

Rather than disputing colonial perceptions of India as being made up of irreconcilable interests unable to govern themselves, Gandhi suggested that such interests were not natural but themselves creations of a third-party state whose task was precisely to disallow
any unmediated relations between different castes and communities. Mediation through the state, however, could only be accomplished contractually, and this required that its parties had to be transformed into formally equivalent interests defined by claims over
property. Whether it was land and goods or rituals and identity, in other words, all the claims that interests could make were envisioned as being about various forms of ownership. But Gandhi thought that such relations were impossible because property in India could not be generalised so as to define all social relations.

Interests, in other words, could only be formed when Indians came into direct contact with the colonial state, and were thus both partial and restricted. Yet they very often perverted the continued prevalence of disinterested relations in Indian as in every other society, so
that forms of altruistic and sacrificial action could be turned to violent as much as peaceful ends. Despite his grave misgivings about the parliamentary and more generally political forms of representation that defined mediation in liberal terms, however, Gandhi treated
them as a necessary evil to be limited by the expansion of what I am calling disinterested and unmediated relations in social life. These he saw as anarchistic in nature, because untied from a neutral third party that gave them meaning.

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Gandhi’s experiments in nonviolence replaced interest with sacrifice and contract with friendship, neither presuming any shared belief or formal equivalence between the parties concerned. He disparaged the power of communication, urging Indians to manifest their
ideas in silence and by living up to them. He went so far as to make nonviolent relationships between human beings and animals into the model of all moral relations. They were, after all, conducted without communication or at least in ignorance of one another’s motivations.
In this sense such relations responded to each other without being reciprocal in the way of contracts or sharing any meaning. At least on the part of their human agents, in other words, these relationships were unilateral and made possible out of moral duty without any
expectation of agreement and reciprocity. They were unmediated even by language.

From liberalism and imperialism to the Cold War, technologies of power have put into question the very processes of mediation upon which they depend. If Gandhi was critical of the mediating function played by parliament, the press and machinery, Heidegger pointed
out that technology transformed its own instrumental role by destroying the subjects who were meant to deploy it. This means that it is no longer possible to naturalise the existence of such subjects and their mediations, all of which must be seen as participating in
reactionary efforts to recover a vanished world of subjects, objects and instrumentalities. Insofar as media studies invokes this world of dualisms mediated by third parties, whose most sophisticated version is of course Hegel’s dialectic, it participates in this conservative
enterprise.

All debate about the perils of representation in media, which relies upon the old binary of form and content for its common sense, belongs in this reactionary project, as does all discussion of free expression in a marketplace of ideas. For like contractual interests, the
contents of free expression are understood as equivalent because they receive meaning from the market as a neutral third party. While they still define legal relations, then, such narratives no longer bear much relation to social experience but rather seek to force it into
established patterns of thought. What does privacy, another category that is part of the dualism of form and content or inside and outside, mean in the age of reality television, social media and webcams in which its spatial distinction from the public has been
fragmented and virtualised?

Perhaps the dematerialization of property and the economy itself has ended up undoing the interests that had once served as the basic social as well as political units of liberalism. Is this why the political parties that are meant to represent them have been hollowed out and
taken over by adventurers the world over? Can a working class exist in a society dominated by service rather than manufacturing? Do the Muslim militants of Al-Qaeda and ISIS possess virtual identities that are all form and no content, which is what allows for their rapid
“radicalization”, itself the successor to the Cold War “indoctrination” that required so much more time and effort? How are their messier and increasingly incoherent non-virtual lives fragmented by the ones conducted online? These and other questions can only be asked by
media studies after mediation.

Faisal Devji is Professor of Indian History at the University of Oxford.