SPECTRAL MEDIATIONS: RHETORIC, PHILOSOPHY, AND THE THINKING OF ORIGINARY TECHNICS by KENNETH RUFO (Under the Direction of Kevin Michael Deluca) ABSTRACT Rather than talk about what mediation is and what it does or does not entail, this dissertation is concerned with the strategies by which mediation has been theorized and what those strategies mean politically and philosophically. This dissertation takes for granted that experience, reality, thought, communication and whatever else have been mediated from the beginning, and argues that we must begin to interrogate how the different responses to this mediation have manifested, how mediation has historically rejected and denounced, as well as celebrated and glorified. And we must begin to think how these different theoretical strategies for dealing with mediation continue in the discussions of media today. Finally, and most importantly, we must begin to ask about the very serious costs of maintaining these different ways of thinking the technics of mediation, something this project attempts by looking at texts from Plato and Lacan, the writings of Derrida and Heidegger, as well as the fiction of Kipling and the virtual reality of The Matrix. INDEX WORDS: Rhetoric, Philosophy, Originary Technics, Media Ecology, Mediation SPECTRAL MEDIATIONS: RHETORIC, PHILOSOPHY, AND THE THINKING OF ORIGINARY TECHNICS by KENNETH RUF0 B.A., Wake Forest University, 1998 M.A., University of Georgia, 2000 A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY ATHENS, GEORGIA 2004 © 2004 Kenneth Rufo All Rights Reserved SPECTRAL MEDIATIONS: RHETORIC, PHILOSOPHY, AND THE THINKING OF ORIGINARY TECHNICS by KENNETH RUFO Major Professor: Kevin Deluca Committee: Michelle Ballif Celeste Condit Bonnie Dow Tom Lessl Richard Menke Electronic Version Approved: Maureen Grasso Dean of the Graduate School The University of Georgia August 2004 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This project progressed via a pretty tortured route. What began as an explication of certain tropes in contemporary discourses about cyberspace morphed into a work about philosophy, or more precisely how different philosophical positions respond to the problem posed by mediation. The project ended moderately well, even if it carries with it some substantial failures. More could have been done, in pretty much every capacity – preparation, research, thinking, writing, and so on. Still, as difficult and time-consuming as a dissertation may be, it is still just a dissertation, and as such, I will accept the failures while trying to remain more than a bit pleased with the successes contained therein. Those successes are due in very large part to a number of people, and I want to take this space to thank them. First and foremost, I am indebted to Kevin DeLuca, who has been my adviser since the beginning of my doctoral program, and was immensely helpful in providing assistance and direction for this project. He is an exceptional reader, a characteristic that is invaluable in this line of work. My committee—Michelle Ballif, Celeste Condit, Bonnie Dow, Tom Lessl, and Richard Menke—provided a diverse and impressive array of insights and inspiration. This dissertation would have amounted to little without their support and guidance. I would like to thank my parents, who have offered material and emotional support when needed, and who never thought it was poor form that I alone among my family chose to avoid the trappings of the legal profession. My graduate peers are also without parallel, forcing my best work, and providing needed feedback on a myriad of issues, directly and indirectly related to my work. I would like to thank iv Ashli Quesinberry and Christina Morus, who made the years at Georgia enjoyable and challenging, and who are also exceptionally good friends. Kristan “Tex” Poirot has been my best friend in my time in Georgia, has read and commented on my work, and has had a huge influence on my progression as a scholar and as a person. I am in her debt. Without reservation, I also want to thank Christine Harold. Her kindness and affection have been muse-like, and this dissertation would never have been completed if not for her support. I cannot thank her enough. Oh, and I want to give a shout-out to her two cats, Blue and Sebastian, and her dog Sammy, who slobbered and slept and ate in marginally amusing ways. Finally, I need to thank my own cat, Ezekiel, for letting me live with him. A can of wet food is coming your way, buddy. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS............................................................................................................iv LIST OF FIGURES....................................................................................................................... vii CHAPTER 1 A PREFACE OF SORTS...............................................................................................1 2 EXERGUE: REFLECTIONS IN/ON PRINT..............................................................27 3 ORIGINARY TECHNICITY: THE DEATH OF MEDIATION.................................38 4 SOULJACKER: REREADING PLATO'S PHAEDRUS.............................................78 5 GHOSTS IN THE MEDIUM.....................................................................................116 6 THE MIRROR IN THE MATRIX OF MEDIA ECOLOGY...................................... 157 7 AN AFTERWORD: THE POLITICAL IN THE TIME OF TECHNICS..................194 ENDNOTES................................................................................................................................ 207 vi LIST OF FIGURES Page Figure 1: Sample from The Telephone Book................................................................................. 31 Figure 2: Another sample from The Telephone Book.................................................................... 32 Figure 3: Sample from Breaking Up [at] Totality.........................................................................33 vii Chapter 1 A Preface of Sorts: Technics, History, and a Preambulatory Case Study Jacques Derrida, writing in the foreword to Dissemination, notes the strange conditions of a preface. Anticipating his own reading of Hegel's “Preface” to the Phenomenology of Spirit, Derrida takes objection to the strange structure that governs what is called the “preface:” A preface would retrace and presage here a general theory and practice of construction, that strategy without which the possibility of a critique exists in fragmentary, empiricist surges that amount in effect to a non-equivocal confirmation of metaphysics. The preface would announce in the future tense (“this is what you are going to read”) the conceptual content of significance... of what will already have been written. And thus sufficiently read to be gathered up in its semantic tenor and proposed in advance. From the viewpoint of the fore-word, which creates an intention-to-say after the fact, the text exists as something written—a past—which, under the false appearance of a present, a hidden omnipotent author is presenting to the reader as his future. Here is what I wrote, then read, and what I am writing that you are going to read.1 Thus the conventions of a preface: to forecast what has already come before, and to transform the past act of writing into the present (and future present) act of reading. This is why Derrida finds the recouping of metaphysics proper in the operations of the preface; the preface repeats and confirms the structure of presence and the myth of transparency that drive the ontotheological belief in knowledge. 1 As conventions, these conditions are not strictly necessary, but they are functionally indispensable. Conventions are both derivative from and constitutive of—in other words, a “preface” would not be knowable as a preface if not for the conventions associated with it. It is as much identified by its techniques as it is by its title; indeed, should semantic push come to titular shove, one suspects that the labeling of a preface matters much less than the fore-wording of what is to come. This fore-wording, governed as it is by convention, becomes sedimented, stable, and predictable. But this is not the end of the story. At some point, conventions had to be convened, and each rearticulation of those conventions, each repeated convening, also carries the seed of the conventions' undoing. As conventions become regular, and consequently regulated, they simultaneously become all the more apparent. And once these norms rise visibly to the surface, they are open to examination, reformation, and play. Derrida's discussion of the preface to a work through the preface of his own work calls attention to the textuality that makes possible a preface and thereby unbinds the act of writing his foreword from the norms of writing a preface, opening both act and norms to critique. The result: one begins to think about the conventions of the preface, to be sure, but one also begins to consider the more original, more anterior conventions of writing and of reading in general, the normative patterns of metaphysics, and the connection that those metaphysical formations have to the seemingly disconnected conventions of inscription. In a book like Dissemination, given over to nothing but the discussion of this connection, Derrida's preface approaches the productive aporia of unhinging the preface while doing exactly what every preface must: performing the what-is-to-come of the text. This brief discussion