Excommunication T H R E E I N Q U I R I E S I N MEDIA AND MEDIATION ALEXANDER R. !"##$%"& EUGENE '(")*+, MCKENZIE -",* ! e University of Chicago Press Chicago and London ALEXANDER R. GALLOWAY is associate professor of media studies at New York University. He is the author of four books on digital media and critical theory, most recently, ! e Interface Eff ect. EUGENE THACKER is associate professor in the School of Media Studies at the New School. He is the author of many books, including A# er Life, also published by the Univer- sity of Chicago Press. MCKENZIE WARK is professor of liberal studies at the New School for Social Research. His books include A Hacker Manifesto and Gamer ! eory. ! e University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 ! e University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2014 by ! e University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2014. Printed in the United States of America 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 1 2 3 4 5 "#$%- 13: 978-0-226-92521-9 (cloth) "#$%- 13: 978-0-226-92522-6 (paper) "#$%- 13: 978-0-226-92523-3 (e- book) &'": 10.7208/ chicago/ 9780226925233.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Excommunication : three inquiries in media and mediation/ Alexander R. Galloway, Eugene ! acker, McKenzie Wark. pages cm — (Trios) ISBN 978-0-226-92521-9 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-92522-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-92523-3 (e- book) 1. Communication—Social aspects. 2. Communication—Psychological aspects. I. Galloway, Alexander R., 1974– Love of the middle. 2013. II. ! acker, Eugene. Dark media. 2013. III. Wark, McKenzie, 1961– Furious media. 2013. IV. Series: Trios (Chicago, Ill.) HM1166.E93 2013 302.2—dc23 2013022635 o ! is paper meets the requirements of )%#"* %"#' +39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper). INTRODUCTION $%$&'()*$ +$,-( Alexander R. Galloway, Eugene ! acker, McKenzie Wark It was otherwise a very fi ne conference. Except that, once again, we were put on the panel about “new media.” In this case, “new media” was juxtaposed with “literary theory,” although it could have been “new media and” pre, y much anything else. New me dia and the novel, new media and education, new media and cul tural studies, or new media and philosophy. One thing the trio of us share is a desire to cease adding “new media” to ex- isting things. Media are transformative. ! ey aff ect conditions of possibility in general. Mediation does not merely add some- thing to the existing list of topics that scholars study. It changes the practice of study itself. A question: do media always have to be “new” to be an object of a theory? Is it even possible to think about new media with- out thinking about media in general? Likewise is it possible to think about media without thinking about the temporality of media, about why they are labeled new or old? ! e moment we hear the call for new media, we off er the response of Friedrich Ki, ler: “What’s new about new media?”¹ Much of the so-called new media are not, a/ er all, particularly new. Writing about the phonograph, Lisa Gitelman shows how old the “new” media ex- perience is. And in Remediation, Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin 2 "%01'&230"'% show how media are constantly translating old forms into new.² So let’s have no more talk about “new media”—as if we already knew everything about old media. Instead let us try to think about media and mediation as conceptual objects in their own right. What do media do? And what does it mean to ask the ques- tion? Ki, ler has shown, with considerable brilliance, how dis- course networks have changed over three centuries: how the typewriter, the gramophone, and fi lm have disaggregated and mechanized the component systems of sense- making, and how in turn the digital began recomposing the circuits of subject pro- duction once again.³ His is a powerful argument for the relative autonomy of media as a conceptual object, and an indication that “the literary” might not be the only thing produced through the act of reading. In other words, Ki, ler is an exemplary reader of texts, but when such “texts” come in the form of diverse arti- facts such as physical machines or even mathematical formulae, can such texts still be classifi ed as literature? ! e literary is thus not the sole object to be found when reading. For the text may be read backward into its mediatic status, just as it may be read for- ward into its hermeneutic status. Each approach may fi nd gold hidden in the cracks between the le, ers. In this way, media force us to think less about things like send- ers and receivers, and more about questions of channels and protocols. Less about encoding and decoding, and more about context and environment. Less about writing and reading, and more about structures of interaction. ! ese other issues do not disappear, of course, but must now be tackled within a slightly diff erent set of considerations. To ask the media question is to invoke orders of materiality, and a certain basic familiarity with these orders of materiality is required, a certain technical fl u- ency. For example, Ma, hew Kirschenbaum asks the question of when and how the word processor enters literary production. “How is writing made?” he asks, articulating what is most essen- tially and emblematically a media- theoretical question.⁴ Execrable Media 3 So just as we detach the idea of “new” from media, let us also detach the idea of “literary” from theory. ! ere can be no literary theory of new media other than as a subset of something more primary, namely, media theory. Media theory without qualifi ca- tion. So in parallel to Kirschenbaum lies another line of inquiry. Consider these word processing machines from another point of view. Besides producing a class of objects already designated as literature, did they, or can they, produce other things, which may or may not be literature, and which may be even more in- teresting than literature? ! e question of media theory, then, should not be “is this literature?” but rather a prior question: “is this a text”? It would therefore concern itself with how texts are extracted from media before concerning itself with how the lit- erary is extracted from texts. Having removed the qualifi ers from new media and literary theory, we are le/ with media theory. But what would media en- tail if not the literary? It might entail data sets, as in Franco Mo- re, i’s “distant reading,” which uses computation to study liter- ary genres.⁵ It might entail games, algorithms, or procedures, as Ian Bogost demonstrates in his work.⁶ Or, as Lev Manovich writes, it might entail an a, ention not just to discrete media objects, but to media as meta- media.⁷ Peter Krapp constructs a prehistory of the database through an examination of index cards.⁸ And Roland Barthes, we know, was an avid user of index cards, with some of his books being selections from such cards. So perhaps even the great advocate for the pleasures of the text enjoyed another kind of pleasure, the pleasure of the database, which is not so much a text as a media machine for making texts. Perhaps here the Owl of Mi- nerva casts its shadow over the media. Perhaps media become thinkable precisely because they are passing away. ! us, in a counterintuitive sense, to engage in media theory o/ en requires questioning whether or not there is even such a thing as a media object, at least in its more familiar iterations of text or image. But it is not simply the object of study that has shi/ ed. So too 4 "%01'&230"'% the practice of investigation itself modulates under the media- theoretical model. More, i’s deviation is not just the deviation of data, but of data processing. When Gilles Deleuze writes about complex systems, he deploys a method of writing equally com- plex, at times schizophrenic. Likewise, media theory requires not only a reconsideration of the object in question but also an upheaval at the level of method. In other words: not just a theory of the rhizome but a rhizomatic theory; not just a treatise on col- laboration but a collaborative treatise. What would it mean to write theory that is itself algorithmic or procedural? Kenneth Goldsmith—whose works Day and Soliloquy relent- lessly interrogate the boundary between text and data—sug- gests we think about writing as an “uncreative writing.”⁹ Simi- larly, while masquerading as “fi ction,” Stewart Home’s Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie is a nice example of procedural writing in the way it takes spam seriously as a textual machine.¹⁰ ! ese are serious undertakings and we three cannot pretend to emu- late them in this book, even as we have each a, empted to do so at other times and in other media. For writing this book, three was already a crowd. What, then, are the key works of media? What are works that identify key phase shi/ s or points of transition? Just as we speak of ! e Magic Mountain, or “! e Call of Cthulhu,” or Fear and Trembling as literary objects, shall we not speak of things like the King James Bible, the Oxford English Dictionary, or Wikipedia as media objects?¹¹ Indeed, what if we took Wikipedia to be the great media work of our time? And if so, what kind of history will help us grasp and anticipate such a claim? ! e Fluxus move- ment, for example, might loom large, not just within art his- tory but within media history—indeed it is within Fluxus that a concept of intermedia was thought and practiced.¹² Christiane Paul has already explored the extension of those methods into the realm of media art practice in the late twentieth century.¹³ On the theory side too, our roster of precursors might change.