This book has emerged slowly, some might say sluggishly, over several years. My colleagues at the Department of Communication and Journalism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have sustained me throughout with continual friendship, good humour, inspiration and intellectual fellowship. I cannot think of a better, warmer, more stimulating and supportive place to work. I am particularly grateful to Nik John, Zohar Kampf, Ifat Maoz, Amit Pinchevski, Limor Shifman and Keren Tenenboim-Weinblatt for their insights and comments on different sections of the book: yes, you are mainly to blame. I am also indebted to the organizers and participants in a variety of forums where the book's ideas, in different stages of gestation, were ruthlessly inflicted on the innocent: the Freie University of Berlin, Haifa University, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the University of Leeds, the London School of Economics and Political Science, the University of Mainz, the University of Michigan, Northwestern University, the Open University (UK), the Open University (Israel), the Sigtuna Foundation, Stockholm University and Tel Aviv University, as well as in various panels at the annual conferences of the International Communication Association. My editors at Polity have been paragons of patience, encouragement and efficiency (virtues which do not always easily combine). I would especially like to thank Mary Savigar and Ellen MacDonald-Kramer, for their exemplary stewardship of the manuscript into publishable form, and the reviewers for their enthusiasm and extremely helpful suggestions.

I would like to thank several individuals and organizations for permission to reproduce their images: Guardian News and Media (Figure 3.2); Yedioth Ahronoth (Figure 3.3), with particular gratitude to Yacov Netzer for his help; Murad Osmann (Figures 5.1 and 5.2); Noa Jansma (Figures 5.3 and 5.4); and the USC Shoah Foundation (Figures 6.1 and 6.2). An earlier version of chapter 2 appeared as ‘Indifferent Looks: Visuality, Inattention and the Composition of Strangers’, in G. Rose and D. P. Tolia-Kelly (eds), Visuality/Materiality: Images, Objects and Practices (2012), Ashgate: Farnham, pp. 171‒90; of chapter 5 as ‘The Gestural Image: The Selfie, Photography Theory and Kinaesthetic Sociability’ (2015), International Journal of Communication 9: 1607–28; and of chapter 6 as ‘The Mouse, the Screen and the Holocaust Witness: Interface Aesthetics and Moral Response’, New Media & Society (2018) 20(1): 351‒68.

Last, but really first, there is family. Caroline: my closest companion, love of my life. It would be boring, and lonely, and far too chaotic without you. Gefen, Tomer and Nitzan: my sources of delightful distraction, deepest pride, cool cynicism (mainly about the signified's relation to the signifier) and occasionally useful information (see the notes). This book, you may have noticed, is dedicated to you all.

Night-time in a child's bedroom. When I was very young, I occasionally believed, like many other children, that there were monsters under my bed. I would be safe from their teeth and claws, I imagined, if only I could keep my limbs from extending into the darkness beyond the edges of the mattress until morning, by which time the monsters would have left, dissolving into the daylight. Curled into a ball which I was too young to describe as foetal, I would spend what felt like hours, but was really only a matter of minutes, furiously wishing away the fearsome phantoms I had conjured out of the night of my own bedroom, hardening my body against the unseen dangers of the dark even as it relaxed into sleep and dreams.

Marcel Proust and Maurice Sendak jointly minister over this scene, shaping its emotional structure as a modern cultural trope.¹ Proust's famous ‘Overture’ to In Search of Lost Time does not describe monsters lurking in a child's imagination but rather the experience of being on the brink of sleep and the oscillation between waking and slumber, world and bedchamber, consciousness and memory, that links the sensations of the adult narrator with the child's bedtime anxieties on being separated from his mother. Maurice Sendak's illustrated classic Where the Wild Things Are lovingly depicts the dreamlike metamorphosis of a child's room – as with Proust, following the hero's temporary removal from his mother's affection – into an entire world of monsters; like Proust's wakeful sleepiness, the experience involves the mutation of physical space far beyond the bedroom's boundaries, performing spatial and sensory transformations that Gaston Bachelard (1994), in his analysis of the ‘poetics of space’, calls ‘intimate immensity’. Beyond and against these works is another, older image of darkened inner space ‒ Plato's famous parable of the cave, which is Proust and Sendak's archetype as well as their inherited critique: we are deceived by the worlds we conjure, even as we are undeniably moved by the reality we grant them.²

Yet perhaps the richest contemporary elaboration of this scene of world transformation is accomplished by a less canonical text: Pixar Studio's animated film Monsters, Inc. (2001). Monsters, Inc. vividly dramatizes the power of human imagining; but it also tethers that power to modern media, in particular to their ‘poetic’ capacities, their ability to disclose and produce worlds. Night-time in a child's bedroom comprises the film's opening sequence ‒ a sequence that utilizes the familiarity of childhood experiences and their dissemination through folk culture and literature, only to confound the expectations of viewers several times as it unfolds.

The scene begins, like Proust and Sendak, with separation from parental protection and affection, as the off-screen voices of a child's mother and father say goodnight, the light is turned off and the bedroom door is closed. The parents’ footsteps recede, and the camera pans down slowly from a shelf full of toys to a sleeping boy in his bed, followed by a series of shots of the moonlit interior, the wind wafting the curtains, the clock ticking, and other suspenseful vignettes. The boy wakes briefly and sees the cupboard door ajar. An arm emerges from it; but he returns to sleep when he realizes that it is only his bathrobe stirring in the breeze. A shadow passes across the bed covers. The camera pans down again towards the floor, below the bed. Two eyes glow there, glaring out of the darkness. And here is the first surprise for viewers: for there is a monster under this child's bed and, as it rises, many-tentacled, to its full height by the bedside, the child wakes, sits up and screams.

Immediately, there is another surprise: the monster becomes infected with the boy's terror. Responding to his fear-distorted features, the monster screams in turn, wheels away in panic, falls backwards over a ball and finally tumbles – rump first ‒ onto some sharp-edged toy jacks on which it bounces for several startled seconds of pain and distress. Horror gives way to slapstick.

Then follows the most radical blow to viewers’ expectations: we hear the shrill sound of an alarm, the lights go up, and an astonishing scene is disclosed. Not only is the monster confirmed as diegetically real – real within the world of the film and not a figment of the boy's imagination at all ‒ but the human child is shown to be artificial: a mechanical upper body lying in a bed, watched in turn by other monsters, all situated in some kind of laboratory-cum-studio. The narrative explanation for this revelation is marvellously inventive. We, the viewers, are not onlookers in a child's bedroom after all but are observing a special facility designed to train monsters in the apparently perilous art of scaring children.

The mechanical child and his artificial bedroom are part of a general apparatus of simulation and training set in what we later discover to be a central power station (owned by the eponymous power company, Monsters Incorporated), itself located in a conveniently English-speaking monster world: the city of Monstropolis. Indeed, given the implied location of our viewing situation, we observe the scene as monsters, peering, with our compatriots, over the shoulder of the trainer at the control desk and through a glass barrier into the simulated child's bedroom. The scene is comic and engaging not just because of the way it confounds our expectations – thereby establishing the existence of a monster world as a given fact of the narrative – but also because it subverts conventional human emotions and attitudes towards monsters. It turns out that as well as not being ‘naturally’ scary (since they need to be trained to scare humans), monsters are in fact terrified of children and have to overcome their fear in order to be any use as ‘scarers’. It further turns out that the reason they need to risk their safety to scare children is that children's screams are the primary energy source used for powering ‘Monstropolis’.

The sequence I have described is what W. J. T. Mitchell (1994: 25), borrowing from Geoffrey Hartman, might call a ‘recognition scene’: a theatrical scenario of encounter which underpins, distils and concretizes a theory, enabling that theory to become amenable to reflexive knowledge (re-cognizing it) and making it visible not only within the particular text that presents it but as a point of reference and discussion for subsequent thinkers and texts. The recognition scenes discussed by Mitchell are enacted within theoretical or scholarly works: his key examples are Panofsky's encounter with a man raising his hat in his exposition of iconology (Panofsky 1972 [1939]: 3‒5), and Althusser's ‘theoretical theatre’ (1984: 48) of a man being ‘hailed’ in the street in his account of the ideological interpellation of the subject (Plato's cave might be another recognition scene, albeit one that evocatively dramatizes human misrecognition). The Pixar sequence, in contrast, is the distillation of a theoretical premise conveyed by a work of popular fiction. The premise, in a nutshell, is that media are systems for the production and disclosure of worlds. Media are poetic infrastructures: they are generators and conduits of poesis as an existential power. The commonplace ideas that media create overtly fictional worlds, while at the same time constructing our sense of the real world, society, community and the body politic, are rooted in the poetic capacities of media.

Monsters, Inc., in fact, is a manifesto for media poetics. It is a ‘manifesto’ in a deeply poetic sense of the word, since one of the meanings of poetics ‒ which I will outline in the introduction and variously explicate and demonstrate in subsequent chapters – is the making manifest of layers of representation, signification and existence, their palpable disclosure in the encounter with a particular message, text, artefact or device. Monsters, Inc. makes manifest fundamental media processes of world-production and world-disclosure.

What is it in particular that is made manifest in the scene that I have described, and how is it ‘re-cognized’: made available again for reflection and rethinking? The first level of recognition is of the power of the imagination as a poetic force, and its generality across individual, social and species dimensions. The resonance of the scene for viewers is built upon the privacy of this experience of childhood fantasy and fear, its occurrence in childhood expressly when one is alone – in one's intimate solitariness on the darkened brink of sleep – as well as its familiar commonality, at the very least through fable and folklore, among most or all children in contemporary western societies and the adults they become. We recognize the visual ‘existents’ of the depicted world – the slant of the moonlight through the window in the darkened bedroom, the breeze catching the corner of the robe and momentarily making it resemble an arm – as exemplary expressions and projections which resemble our own memories, and through these projections we simultaneously enjoy the sharedness of our intimate recollections. What is recognized, then, is the imagination as a general poetic capacity that we all personally share.³

The second level of recognition concerns poesis and the unreal. Put simply, what the scene shows is that the child is not alone with his fears in his bedroom. The monster is real; or, at the very least, the monster has been imagined into existence. The same can be said of ‘Monstropolis’ and its inhabitants later in the film. Imagined beings and entities populate our world. They are connected to it, energized by it, present in it, disclosed as part of it. It is their habitat, and they cannot be confined to detached realms of fantasy and fable. They are even, some would argue, forces that drive our world's most fundamental psychological, social and political processes, among them religious worship and national sentiment.⁴

The third level of recognition concerns our relationship to the unknown: between ourselves, our familiar environments, and beings and worlds which are radically different or ‘other’ – so different that when they do appear as possibilities, they seem monstrous. The key moment of recognition is the reaction of the monster to the screaming child: the monster is depicted as a mirror-other, one whose response to the presence of humans – fear and panic ‒ is an exact replica of our own feelings about monsters. There are in fact two intertwined moments of recognition in play at this level: the monster recognizes the human child as an ‘other’, as a member of a class of beings of extreme difference and great menace, whom it has previously regarded as monstrous and consequently learnt to fear. Monstrosity is therefore a product of imagination, and it turns out later in the film that the prejudicial perception of humans as monstrous is as widely disseminated and institutionally inculcated and legitimated (including by state authorities and the police force) in monster society as fear of monsters is in the human world. Yet the film also ‘re-cognizes’ this prejudicial perception and apprehension of the other as monstrous: since we viewers know that we are not monstrous, by implication our own parallel construal of monsters as frightening becomes reflexively available for evaluation and critique. The very processes whereby we perceive and envisage others – and develop categories of otherness (such as monstrosity) ‒ are disclosed to us for reflection and reformation. Absurd as it perhaps sounds, given the great difference in genres and registers, this recognition of the other as a similarly construed being to ourselves echoes another recognition scene well known in recent media studies. This is the opening to Roger Silverstone's Media and Morality (2007), where he recalls hearing an Afghani blacksmith interviewed on BBC radio explain the war going on in his country as a consequence of al-Qaeda having killed many Americans and their donkeys and having destroyed some of their castles in the 9/11 attacks. Silverstone calls this man not simply an ‘other’ but also a ‘double’ of ourselves, and the challenge he presents to our own poetic capacities and routines is particularly powerful: ‘But can we imagine him imagining us? What will he have seen or heard about the attack? And can we imagine ourselves to be his strangers?’ (2007: 2).

The fourth level of recognition foregrounds the power of illusion, a key element of media's world-producing capability. This is the recognition, dramatized by the film as a rupture and demystification of the opening segment in the child's bedroom, that the world we have been hitherto viewing, have momentarily taken on trust, is a technologically manufactured fabrication: a simulation of a child's room, and indeed of a child, which has successfully taken us in because of its crafted verisimilitude, its correlation to our expectations about the look of reality and to our personal and collective childhood fantasies. In the startling revelation of a training centre for monsters, the film takes viewers ‘behind the scenes’ of technologies and corporations, the source of organized illusions and deceptions, which humankind – still apparently lingering unregenerately in Plato's cave (Sontag 1977: 3) – mistakes for the truth. The power of poetic world creation so quickly established in the very opening sequence is transformed into the disclosure of a prior power, and a different world: the capacity of media technologies to create credible scenarios, however incredible and unreal we may know them to be.

Such media ‘world-making’, however, is more than simply a theme of Monsters, Inc.'s narrative, one among many topics of its discourse. It is a key activity of the film itself, the act that it performs in the experience of the viewer. Every scene and each character, every word of dialogue and soundtrack element, each pixel – from the most imposing visual features of the character's bodies to the most inconspicuous background components ‒ is the result of intense and systematically organized work, the labour of creation by Pixar animators that brings the world of ‘Monstropolis’ into being, however fully-fledged and replete that world seems when it appears before viewers.⁵ Moreover, for the duration of the film as seen by viewers (and possibly beyond), the self-sufficiency of its world is itself perpetually performed, accomplished in the ongoing interaction between the senses and faculties of viewers, the perceptual and symbolic structures of the film, and the technologies which enable it to be screened. The world of the film, like the film which creates it, is not an autonomous object or entity, but the result of an unfinished process of becoming, not least (though not only) because this particular technology – screened animation – depends upon technically enabled optical and psychological illusions which persuade us that there is a ‘film’ there in the first place, rather than a structured ensemble of rapidly shifting dots and lines flashing indiscernibly across a screen.

World-making activity is not of course restricted to this particular film, or to animation as an art form, though the etymological connection between animated film and ‘animation’ as the bestowal of life (the anima as soul, spirit or vital principle) should give us pause. Nor is the film by any means alone in extracting comedic profit from the reflexive depiction of the generic conventions which make its construction and comprehension possible: this has become something of a staple banality of ‘postmodern’ entertainment. Nevertheless, the power of Pixar's version of the scene of childhood imagining and the entire narrative of the film which follows go beyond both the performance of its key premises and its conspicuous and enjoyable pastiche.

For the film presents poesis not simply as a psychological faculty or as an aesthetic accomplishment but as a perpetually circulating social and existential energy. This is the central conceit of the narrative: that Monstropolis depends for its continued existence on the energy supplied by children's fear, and the conversion of their screams into power.⁶ Later in the film, it is revealed that there is an even more efficient way of tapping into children's poetic energy: by making them laugh and capturing their laughter. Notwithstanding the change in the character and amplitude of the response and the power it generates, the idea here is clear: world-making and its associated emotions generate realities. Moreover, poetic energy can be elicited, captured, manipulated and redistributed. In other words, it can be subjected to processes of extraction, management and diffusion through the combined use of institutional practices (such as industrial routines) and technologies.

Within the story-world of the film, poetic energy is extracted and exploited by the physical and social interaction of animated beings – childish and monstrous – from two parallel and adjacent worlds, human and monster. The beings from these two worlds are brought together through a large institutional and technical apparatus: the power company Monsters Inc. Transferred to the level of discourse, however – the level of Monsters, Inc. the film rather than the fictional corporation ‒ poetic energy is also produced and exploited through the interaction between beings from two interlinked worlds: in this case the world of the film and the world of its viewers. The encounter between these beings and their environments is also enabled and structured by a set of institutional and technological arrangements. Only here it is the industrial-aesthetic apparatuses of cinema and video that constitute the ‘power company’ extracting and managing poetic energy. Among the outputs of these encounters are the experiences and entertainment value generated for viewers, and the monetary value and reputation captured by producers, all of which can be further extracted, transferred, processed and circulated. Indeed, they were (though with less financial and critical success), twelve years after the release of the original film, in the sequel Monsters University (2013).

Finally, the film presents poetic processes in a way that allows us to ‘re-cognize’ contemporary mediated experience. For the film depicts the relationship between the human world and the world of Monstropolis as one of interlinked adjacency: the worlds exist in parallel, permanently alongside and connected to one another. This relationship of conjoined adjacency, of connected side-by-sideness, is strikingly emphasized by the great symbolic and narrative weight that the film gives to doors. Doors are the entry points between the human and monster worlds: the doors, mainly opening into children's bedrooms, not only connect the physical spaces of the human world but also magically open onto the factory floor of the power company Monsters Inc. Doors are thus not only everyday mechanisms for entering or exiting through walls, as Bruno Latour (1992) describes them, but are metaphysical thresholds and portals linking disparate worlds. As Simmel says, ‘life flows forth out of the door from the limitation of isolated separate existence into the limitlessness of all possible directions’ (1997 [1909]: 173). They are ‘communicating doors’, symbolic of the communicative possibilities of being ‘next door’ ‒ and of its terrors and joys. When the children on the human side of the door are felt to be potentially harmful, the door is labelled ‘bad’ and destroyed: one of the last acts of the film is the reconstitution of a ‘bad’ door that, the viewers know, is really good since it links the hero of the film, the monster Sully, to his human-child friend Boo. Even if he can't see Boo, the very existence of the door as a sign of her adjacent presence is a source of emotional and even existential security.⁷

How does this theme of connected adjacency, of parallel presence, illuminate contemporary experiences of mediation more generally? The very ubiquity of media in our everyday lives, increasingly conveyed by the metaphor of ‘saturation’, means that poetically generated worlds are not simply before us but are continually alongside us and with us: they keep us company. Such worlds and their entities need not be fictional (just as Sully and Boo are not fictional to one another): indeed, the chapters of this book explore media poetics through contemporary practices and objects that are not chiefly oriented to fiction, and that are in many cases routine and unremarkable, but that disclose the worlds we inhabit and their continual production. Furthermore, the company we keep with these worlds is often different from the direct relationship with imagined others constructed through dialogical, spectatorial or otherwise ‘frontal’ encounters with media texts, or from the organized technical and institutional imagination through which elevated observational viewpoints ‘from above’ are envisioned (and effaced). Adjacency translates into neither the intensity of spectatorship nor the instrumentality of observation but into the mediate and sociable relationship of companionship, of being-with. Little theorized or explored in communication studies, this adjacency of mediated entities to our lives is often conveyed as a peripheral and background intuition, an embodied registration of ambient co-habitation rather than a direct epiphany or passionate engagement with others.

Ultimately, then, Monsters, Inc. suggests that poesis needs to be taken seriously within media and communication studies as an intellectual project for understanding, explaining and potentially shaping our mediated lives. Media are generators for constructing and revealing worlds – including the ‘actual’ world that we imagine we live in and possible worlds that we propose as alternatives or refuges ‒ and thus for their existence, maintenance and disclosure. It takes a world to make a world, as Nelson Goodman (1978) affirmed: the ‘poetics of media’ is an attempt to reflect upon how contemporary media perform this work as a matter of routine, and what the implications might be for our lives.