To Daniel Bougnoux, Maryvonne Arnaud, Philippe Mouillon, Henry Torgue, François Deck, Élisabeth Sénégas, Édith Heurgon and my colleagues at LITT & ARTS who, from Cerisy to Grenoble, so generously provide hospitality for experiments in thought and sociality.
To my doctoral students, whose intelligence and generosity reinvigorate my hopes.
And to my friends at the magazine Multitudes, who do not despair of transforming this medium into media.
polity
First published in French as Médiarchie © Editions du Seuil, 2017. All rights reserved.
This English edition © Polity Press, 2019
This work received the French Voices Award for excellence in publication and translation. French Voices is a program created and funded by the French Embassy in the United States and FACE Foundation (French American Cultural Exchange).
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This work received support from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States through their publishing assistance program.
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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3341-1
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Citton, Yves, author.
Title: Mediarchy / Yves Citton.
Other titles: Médiarchie. English
Description: Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA : Polity Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “We think that we live in democracies: in fact, we live in mediarchies. In this major book, Yves Citton maps out the new regime of experience, media and power that he designates by the term ‘mediarchy’. This comprehensive and far-reaching book examines the multiple complex ways that the media shape our social, political and personal lives today” – Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019001664 (print) | LCCN 2019980854 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509533381 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509533398 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509533411 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Mass media – Influence. | Mass media and public opinion. | Mass media – Political aspects.
Classification: LCC P94 .C5513 2019 (print) | LCC P94 (ebook) | DDC 324.7/3 – dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019001664
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019980854
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McKenzie Wark
In Mediarchy, Yves Citton has produced a really magnificent work of synthesis. Not many people have really tried to bring the separate worlds of German, English and French media theory into dialog. I don’t want to underplay Citton’s own distinctive contributions to media theory – well exemplified by his first book in translation, on the Ecology of Attention – but one of the most impressive things about Mediarchy is its generosity toward the field as a whole and its ambitious attempt to see a common project in media theory.
Let me start by orienting the reader with a condensed account of Citton’s position within media theory: Given the popularity of political theory and its omnivorous claims to explain the world, I think it is worth beginning with media theory’s critique of it. Political theory assumes an immediacy of the political to itself. Democracy just sort of happens, like a magic spell, as if time and space did not present so many material frictions. To media theory, all political spaces are media spaces. The thing to pay attention to is the mediation that intervenes before there can be any ‘general will’.
Of course the absence of a magic spell to harmonize the people’s individual wills is not unknown to political theory. In Hobbes it takes a sovereign, a central point, to keep the people from becoming a rabble. But even here political theory pays little attention to how the sovereign’s will is mediated, or what the marks of that mediation might be.
One way of approaching this is to think about what publics are like when they are mediated. When they are mediated, they are synchronized. A people acts in a way that coordinates its actions, and indeed even its thoughts and feelings. They don’t have to act, think and feel the same thing. They just have to act, think and feel in the same rhythm. That might be the hallmark of a mediarchy. And once we perceive its hallmark, we might then ask about who or what does the mediating to make it so. Our attention shifts from sovereign power on the one hand and people, publics or crowds on the other, to the material and informational means of connecting and coordinating them.
The next step is to realize that power and people do not pre-exist this mediation, but are constituted in and by it. Then we might start to think about how different historical and technical forms of mediation might shape different powers and peoples. Not in a deterministic way, but rather by offering a range of affordances. The synchronizing effects of mediation make ever more vast and complex forms of social coordination possible. Our actions seem to become more and more immediate in their relation to others. But there is always a bit of delay. Immediacy is a kind of illusion. Delay results in echoes and resonances. Mediation is noisy. Attempts to overcome these problems usually just displace them.
Power – that standby concept of political theory – might be more a matter of surfing waves of resonance than of command and control. The paradox of power in mediation is that it cannot really command attention, but has to seduce it. Power is a holding of attention in a resonant and noisy media environment. Power has, among other things, to be rhetorical and persuasive. How does power enchant attention?
What then might be a form of counter-power in our prevailing and even accelerating mediarchy? The key metaphor here is delay. Our (almost, seemingly) immediate responses are habitual ones. What one needs is an art in refusing the habitual response. In that refusal, I have time to pay attention not just to the enchanting information but to the form in which it is mediated to me.
Is a media anarchy to counter mediarchy possible? When I pay attention to the form of mediation itself, I can start to see the hierarchies and protocols built into it, the synchronizing procedure by which it solicits me, and I can then also pause to consider my options. I might opt to respond with noise rather than the habitual response. I might produce variations, elaborations – I might improvise. Mediarchy is so complex that it cannot coordinate everyone to the same marching tune. If it is to work, it has to allow for variation. That provides the wiggle room for a media politics.
One can then think of what is commonly taken as the political sphere as a media sphere, and as one that repeatedly returns to the problem of synchronization and variation. The difficulty of improvising in a complex temporality fuels a desire for strong synchronization, which right-wing demagogues are only too happy to provide. Indeed, there is a lot one can learn about right-wing populisms by thinking of them in media theory as well as in political theory terms. Not the least reason to read Citton is to find a powerful way of tackling this problem.
The main argument of this book can be stated in a single sentence: our shared imaginary leads us to believe that we live in ‘democracies’, while a more nuanced view of the reality of our regimes of power suggests that we live in ‘mediarchies’. The overall aim of my book is to give a precise conceptual and analytical content to the neologism mediarchy, and to convince the reader that an analysis of mediarchy can provide a much more realistic approach to a whole series of troubling problems in which today’s democracies have become mired.
Thus there are two voices in dialogue throughout the book: a political essay and a theory of the media. There are chapters that are more conceptual, more systematic and more voluminous, drawing on recent contributions from media theory: they build up a coherent structure, aimed at providing an overview of the nature of mediarchy. They alternate with briefer interventions, more explicitly political interludes, which at once illustrate and test out the application of theoretical concepts to the analysis of more concrete problems.
The ideas I am putting forward acknowledge the inability of our current political words and deeds to grasp our social, economic and ecological realities – especially in the case of those forces identified with the ‘left’. This inability stems from a twofold illusion inherent in our ideology of democracy. Sometimes we behave as if what governed our sociopolitical destinies were the free will of the sum of individuals composing the demos (the people, or just ‘people’). Sometimes we seem to believe that the alternative to this (neo)liberal individualism would involve recognizing – either to endorse it or to subjugate it – a power inherent in a demos conceived as a supra-individual entity (‘society’, the ‘Republic’, the ‘working class’, the ‘West’, the ‘nation’, the ‘people as Volk’).
The resulting positions cover the entirety of the political spectrum, from a far left intoxicated with the idea of the ‘common’ to a far right propped up by the notion of ‘homeland’, via those who sing the praises of individual freedom, those who are nostalgic for sovereignty, and the objective allies of Uberization. All share the same blindness to one fundamental principle: after more than a century of development in the mass media, and after a few decades of emergence of digital cultures, ‘people’ (and all of us are ‘people’) are always produced simultaneously (and always differently) as individuals and as aggregates, depending on the types of audiences structured by the apparatuses of communication that govern their interactions. In plain and much too simple terms: the media create their public and, for several decades, it has been not different peoples but different publics who have been the bedrock of politics. Is it not curious that while everyone harps on about the way ‘politics’ has now dissolved into the ‘com’,1 there are very few political programmes (on the left) that put the media – the very infrastructure of the said ‘com’ – at the heart of their demands? Our age dreams of feverishly reforming everything (without ever changing anything much) – everything, that is, except the very thing that nourishes the fever for reform. Perhaps our eyes are not sharp enough to recognize what moves us (in every sense of the word).
In all this, there is of course no question of rejecting the very idea of democracy, which, on the contrary, should come out of it all the stronger, having been made more specific, adapted to its own scale, a scale that must be local and convivial. As Rousseau foresaw, an association, an apartment block, a neighbourhood or a city can (and must) respond to the ideals of democracy. Above a certain size, however, the media needed by information, perceptions, affects and meanings to circulate between us play such a central role that we inevitably enter the regime of mediarchy, which it is illusory to imagine as a democracy.
Such is the premise of this book: we will be condemned to political impotence as long as we overcome this blindness to the media, which, on the level of current interactions, structure our collaborations as well as our conflicts, our individualizations and our aggregations. A better understanding of these media (plural, differentiated, superimposed), as well as the mediarchy formed from their interweaving, is a precondition for giving a fresh impetus to new forms of political analysis and practice, which are essential if we are to rise to the challenges posed by the Anthropocene. No one can know what the kind of policy needed to meet these challenges will look like – will it be the end of ‘politics’ as we know it, or the (re)birth of something else? But it is by seeking to find out that we will have a better chance of getting out of our current rut.
Simply stating the need to analyse the present in terms of mediarchy will not get our ideas much further forward. The most important resource – and it will take up most of this book – involves providing ourselves with the conceptual and imaginary tools to learn to see, to understand and to question what this mediarchy consists of.
There is something faintly comic about such a project, for very good reasons. For half a century, hundreds of books, thousands of specialized articles and countless debates have focused on the ‘mass media’. Usually, they have criticized the media. Sometimes they have tried to understand their function and their impact. We all think we know, at least vaguely, what we are talking about when we talk about the ‘mass media’. And yet the empirical studies of mediametricians, the sometimes abstruse formulations of theoreticians, the frustrated denunciations of militants and the constant lamentations about ‘weapons of mass distraction’ all seem to swoosh round and round in watertight silos, without being able to really communicate.
What we need is an overall vision, nuanced and, if possible, all-inclusive, of all these clouds of discourse. A vision that tries to distinguish, and then connect, the different areas of reality and the different levels of meaning referred to when we talk about the ‘mass media’. A vision that is at once philosophical, political, sociological, anthropological and aesthetic, showing why the ‘mass media’ are not only means of information or communication, but forms of experience and, at the same time, multipliers of power.
So I will not so much be describing, analysing or criticizing the ‘mass media’ as trying to map out the regime of experience and power designated by the term mediarchy. This term already has a short history that goes back at least three decades. We find it from time to time in blogs or denunciations of the ‘power of the media’.2 To date (early 2017), a search on Google brings up 540 results, mostly to articles that I myself have published with this term in their title over the last few years.3 Here I will give it a more specific and complex conceptual existence.
The Greek word arche (ἀρχή) has the suggestive property of referring both to a beginning and a command, an origin and a power – whatever occupies the place of both principle and prince. Hence my general argument: the different realms of reality to which we refer when speaking of the ‘mass media’ must be considered as concealing the original principles of our structures of power. Striving to understand mediarchy means trying to unravel what the ‘mass media’ are by reflecting on what they do to us and what they make of us, for we will be looking at both the effects that the ‘mass media’ have on us, but also the becomings that they induce in us. One first intuitive idea is that, even when we denounce the ‘power of the mass media’, we blind ourselves to the mediarchy – and we barely get a glimpse of how much the ‘media’ not only govern us, but also constitute us, individually and collectively.
The presumption of publishing a book (yet another one …) that will (finally) explain what the ‘mass media’ really are would be difficult to justify if it did not result from the sense of political urgency mentioned in the previous section. The hope behind my ambition to develop a substantial concept of mediarchy rests on the intuition that forms of knowledge, tools, theories, imaginaries, stories, DIY jobs and practices really do exist – albeit elsewhere – and can help us identify what, between us and within us, is nowadays preventing us from reorienting our collective destinies, though tomorrow it might make this possible.
The journey into mediarchy proposed by this book attempts to map out this elsewhere that is both unknown and familiar. It often requires us to speak different languages (English, French, Italian and German will mingle together), which we hope to make as comprehensible as possible, without losing the charm of a certain exoticism. My book traces a trajectory across four continents, each of which defines a little more precisely what is generally blurred by the common reference to the ‘mass media’. Each of these continents is given a different graphic form, helping to distinguish between different registers of reality that are often confused.
The first of these continents – media – refers to the various basic properties of whatever helps human beings to record, transmit and process information, discourses, stories, pictures and sounds. The second – mass media – provides us with an opportunity to look at the particular case of the mass media as they have emerged in human history over about two centuries. The third – mediums – invites us to visit the dark and sometimes disturbing corners that have haunted our relationship with the apparatuses of recording and communication ever since the beginning of time, but to which the different ‘communication sciences’ have usually turned a blind eye. The fourth continent – meta-media – is just beginning to emerge along with our ‘digital cultures’, but it is already repackaging everything that can be said about the other three. By digitizing and algorithmizing everything that flows between us and in us, what is known as ‘information and communications technology’ (ICT) pursues, intensifies, diversifies and sometimes splits in two those trends identified on the other three continents. After all, these continents are not simply juxtaposed: they are superimposed on one another, in a terrible tangle – which justifies both the fact that we tend to confuse them and the fact that we need to make the effort to disentangle them.
It is hoped that this transcontinental journey will provide readers with an opportunity to make many discoveries. Not, however, in the sense that it claims to invent anything truly new in the way we describe or analyse the ‘mass media’. The aim here is more modestly that of helping the reader to discover a number of already existing thoughts that are confined to an elsewhere that makes them inaccessible to those of us who are used to thinking from within disciplinary boundaries. From ecofeminism to literary studies, from the sociology of networks to the algorithms of deep learning, from speculative philosophy to the archaeology of infrastructures, from demonology to engineering design, the proposed route defies any claim to disciplinary control, even if it strives to respect the need for disciplined argument.
I claim to be less of an expert in mediology and more of a translatorinterpreter and tourist guide. I hope to know just enough to be able to share with others my desire to go and take a closer look. Is political urgency compatible with tourist curiosity? Such is the wager of this book, presenting mediarchy both as the new frontier of a world that still lies outside – thanks to its anthropological novelty, barely a few centuries old and undergoing a process of constant reconfiguration since its emergence – and as the inner limit that prevents us from becoming what we could be.
Before we embark on this journey, let’s look at an image (Figure 0.1). In it, we see three men completely absorbed in new media; a child sitting on the floor, distracted by his hi-tech camera; three young couples, in each of which one partner seems to be more attentive to his or her new gadget than to his or her lover; and even a monkey who has lost interest in human beings and is gazing entranced at some virtual reality. We have all seen such satirical images proliferating around us, denouncing the abuses of the smartphone, the tablet or Pokémon Go. This particular image, however, is nearly two centuries old, dating from about 1820 and bearing as its title La Kaloïdoscomanie, où les amateurs de bijoux anglais [Kaleidoscomania, or the lovers of English jewels]. The Finnish researcher Erkki Huhtamo dug it up and discussed it in one of the earliest articles on media archaeology, which he named and defined as ‘a way of studying such recurring cyclical phenomena which (re)appear and disappear and reappear over and over again in media history and somehow seem to transcend specific historical contexts’.4
Figure 0.1 Kaleidoscomania, c.1820.
Going beyond the eternal return of the same and the recurrent plaints over the distractions caused by the new media, the most interesting response would be to play on these contrasts so as to reframe our daily preoccupations and examine them from unusual perspectives. The simplicity of kaleidoscopes has little in common with the ‘smartness’ of our smartphones. The former isolate us in an idle, brightly-coloured illusion, while the latter connect us to networks of agents. Many of the technical innovations that came after David Brewster’s invention of the kaleidoscope in 1816 have helped us to know, hear and see reality better (from further away, more quickly, more precisely, more fully). All those innovations have been accused of distracting us from that reality.
Despite its archaism – or perhaps because of it – the kaleidoscope is a powerful conceptual model for illuminating what the media at the origins of power in a regime of mediarchy can be and can do, now as before. Like kaleidoscopes, these media distract us from our immediate environment: their primary function is to free us from the limits of the here and now. Before informing us about reality, they inform our perception of the world by filtering, restructuring, diffracting and multiplying what can be seen in it. Despite the horrors they sometimes show, despite the way their realism has increased over the decades, they remain above all apparatuses made to provide ‘beautiful idea-forms to see’ (kalos-eidos-skopein). Above all, whether they isolate us or connect us, the media sweep us up into the world of fashion and its effects, in waves of imitation and counter-imitation which, seen from a distance, always look rather like a collective mimetic madness, as symbolized by the monkey in the 1820 engraving: any mediarchy draws on mediamania and is part of what Siegfried Zielinski has called a psychopathia medialis.5
This quick portrait of the media as an array of kaleidoscopes, and of the mediarchy as a kaleidoscomanic piece of monkey business, is not intended as a criticism of their defaults: quite the opposite – it is an attempt to depict the source of their true power. This is a power that we are still just discovering, with a constant mixture of wonder and worry; but it is also a power that we absolutely must get to know better, since it is responsible for sweeping us along collectively in a movement that we are still simply tagging along with. And, in its current course, this movement is not necessarily taking us towards our greatest common good.
But this power of the media cannot be gazed at directly, face to face, as it dazzles us and immerses us in its monkey business. It can only be apprehended by means of detours, diffractions, reflections and abstractions. This book hopes to work like a kaleidoscope, as an instrument that enables us to ‘see beautiful idea-forms’, averting our gaze as far as possible from the effects of fascination to which we fall prey when we lock eyeballs with our screens. The archaeological approach provides us with one of these detours, allowing us to revisit the contemporary scene with a gaze refreshed by archaic exoticism. The other approach that will help our ideas take off, since it can overcome the fascination of our gaze for the false obviousness of the present, draws on the virtues of abstraction.
In contrast to sociological generalizations and the semiological categorizations favoured by the sciences of communication, the chapters of this book propose sensory abstractions (folds, strata, cuts, modulations, vibrations, resonances, zombies) that aim to help us imagine what we find so difficult to understand. By overreacting towards a certain platitude inherent in any positivist approach, the route sometimes takes the form of a rollercoaster, alternating in quick succession the panoramas glimpsed from very high up with dives deep down into the singular, in the hope that the new vocabulary mobilized for the occasion (mediarchy, intrastructure, immediality, agential cut, surprenance or ‘overtaking’) will produce more a sense of exotic vertigo than attacks of nausea. A bit of theoretical madness is perhaps the best antidote to the disoriented realism of our common mediamania.
Despite its indigestible size – or perhaps because of it – this long kaleidoscope lays claim to the specificity of that beautiful idea-form, the medium of the book. This one is so designed that you can immerse yourself patiently in it or dip into it rapidly and selectively. Its fourteen chapters offer a steady, systematic progression that attempts to lay the foundations of an overall panorama of the power of the media – because the book as a medium remains the main and still unsurpassed instrument whereby we can be absorbed in a thought experiment that may permanently reconfigure our vision of the world. Like the child sitting on the floor at the bottom right of the 1820 engraving, readers are invited to let themselves be distracted from their immediate environment in order to explore the interplay of shapes, structures, colours and concepts generated by the book-as-medium to imagine the general power of the media. The ten interludes, meanwhile, propose brief returns to the political real, albeit a real reinvigorated by transformative proposals aiming to open up new possibilities within it. Without claiming to reveal a political reality as dazzling as the media that inform it, these interludes will direct the reader’s eyes towards another kaleidoscope, where it will be our political institutions rather than our media landscapes that are given a new shape.
But this big book is also designed so that those of our contemporaries with less free time at their disposal can more quickly draw from it something to tickle their curiosity. Around its many images, it deploys a typography highlighting a few KEY WORDS signalling what is going on as the reader turns the pages. This immodest kaleidoscopic coquetry, which impels it to put forward a few prominent idea-forms, hopes to help each and every reader to identify specific perspectives corresponding more closely to his or her current interests, while a detailed table of contents and an index will help them find their way around. Instead of following the course marked out by the rollercoaster tracks, the book thus also encourages more acrobatic readings, a sort of parkour where the reader can jump from one salience to the next.
Can a medium give us the truth of mediarchy? Of course not, insofar as this truth is eminently multiple, demanding a plurality of perspectives as different as possible from one another. Can a kaleidoscope help us to imagine our kaleidoscomania more adequately? Such is the challenge taken up by this book – which is also something of a kaleidoscope in that it sparkles with the reflection of hundreds of multicoloured remarks, references and suggestions kindly provided by friends of long standing or met with occasionally, and by students and colleagues far too many to mention by name. My thanks, and apologies, to them.6