10 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p h y 1 6 9 ( S e p t e m b e r / O c t o b e r 2 0 1 1 )
Ontogenetic machinery
Lorenz Engell
Media, as considered by media philosophy, are not
what you expect them to be. In the first place, they
have almost nothing to do with information, or transmission,
or communication, or storage. They do not
as such produce sense or distribute meanings. If they
do so, it is as a side effect or a secondary function.
In the first place, media are complex assemblies of
material objects, and operations, and handlings, mostly
technical apparatuses and gestures, but not exclusively.
But not only do media base themselves on, or
integrate, physical or biological matter in operations
and actions. The sociology of the so-called ‘actornetwork’
as developed by Bruno Latour, John Law,
Michel Callon and others states that the inverse is as
true: any physical practice, any relation to objects, and
any making and producing of things is dependent on
mediating processes, such as reference, or transformation,
or translation. Since reference and translation are
in their turn based on material media, we might say
that through media things cooperate in the production
and reproduction of things. Specific media then
could be seen as specific sets of material operations
by which the things involved in one medium produce
things, reflect and represent things, and reproduce
themselves as material collectives. Hence, media function
as operators by which the material world which
surrounds us is generated in the first place. Media are
ontogenetic machines. To put it simply, they are operative
things that produce and assemble and reproduce
things, including themselves.
And what is most surprising about media, and
what distinguishes them from pure tools, is that they
themselves know all of this. This is what makes a
medium a medium, and not only a technical device. So,
if you want to find out what media are, or what they
want, or what they in fact do, just ask them. They bear
the answers. With the help of one tiny, most modest
example, I would like to demonstrate this.
In his 1967 film Playtime, French genius film-maker
Jacques Tati reaches for a further development of his
cinematic reflection on the material world, which he
had begun with his first film. In his previous comedies,
Tati had already advanced a critique of things as
counterparts and instruments of human action and a
critique of objects as submitted to designation, to sense
and to meaning. Now, in Playtime, he pushes forward
to a more general critique of materiality as such. And,
moreover, he investigates the assembly of objects and
operations that a medium is: in his case, film. By doing
this, he gives us some very useful hints at what media
are as ontogenetic machines.
Seats
Everything starts very simply. After some Hin und
Her, Monsieur Hulot is led to a waiting room. Here
he discovers the seats. Their upholstery can be transformed,
as if made of a soft modelling material: they
keep the mark of an impact for a little while and then
very slowly get back to their former, regular shape
and volume. Doing so, they produce softer or louder
sounds; they breathe, hiss, sob, sigh and plop. Their
seemingly autonomous regaining of the original shape
bears the character of the delayed reaction with which
we are familiar from slapstick movies, from Laurel and
Hardy films, for instance. This leads us back to the
tradition of the ‘will of things’ in the moving image.
Monsieur Hulot’s being surprised corresponds to the
more or less sudden appearance of the seat acting as
if on its own accord. As solid and defined objects, and
even instrumental devices, the seats nonetheless have
dynamic and plastic qualities. Doubtless, the seats are
residing in space and resistant to time. At the same
time, they are more or less formless matter, prepared
to being shaped and to bear marks, physical media. As
objects, they are functional parts of the system, related
to the world according to necessities and affordances.
As media, they bear and offer an indefinite number
of possible alternative forms and statuses they can
themselves produce. They constantly oscillate between
these two poles, and Hulot is fascinated by watching
this movement.
Another example of Tati’s oscillating conception
of things is the sound design. In classical Hollywood,
sound as the language of things is clearly contrasted
to human language. In Playtime, the contrast is wiped
out. There is a fluent, continuous transformation from
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the background humming of the building itself, via the
more distinct traffic noise, via people mumbling, muttering
and babbling, to overlapping fragments of verbal
utterances in different languages. Moreover, it seems
that some sounds are far more clearly defined, sharper
and easier to grasp than all spoken language. So sound
and language change place, the latter appearing less as
defined form and more as a source of sound material,
the former as clearly articulated. Together, again, they
figure somewhere between mere raw material, on the
one hand, and a well-defined acoustic object, on the
other.
Next, we must mention the glass window. The
window pane in Tati is marked by two boundaries. The
first one separates (or bridges) the instrumental device
and the object of perception. For any physical action,
the pane is a solid and impenetrable counterpart, an
object which cannot be transcended. The hand does
not go through, for instance to pass a match to the
smoker. For perception, though, at least for the gaze,
the pane is not an object, but completely permeable and
as such non-existent. It is not an object of perception.
Nonetheless it is once again an instrument of perception.
It makes something invisible visible – namely the
outside. And here, the second boundary is articulated.
It separates the view through the pane from the reflection
on its surface, the mirror function. Assuming the
mirror function, the window makes an object visible
at some place where it is not. The object seen in the
mirror visually – and virtually – changes place.
Tati arranges the two windows in the office building
in such a way that the two men, Hulot and the clerk,
can see each other as an object of perception in one
place and at the same time as an object of reflection
in another. On top of this, each man watches the other
watching him, and tries to attract his attention by
making gestures. Thus it is no longer clear who sees
whom, and where in space. Each is the effect of the
double presence of the other, which itself is an effect
of the transparent pane at the same time serving as
a reflecting mirror. Two visual spaces, or topologies,
as John Law puts it, interfere and generate objects of
vision. This comic interplay, with all its inner relations
and effects, is made visible not for the characters but
for us, with the help of the moving image. So, after the
transparent pane and the reflecting mirror, there is a
third object, which is the moving image itself, the film.
Being an instrument of perception and reflection,
as well as their object and their material cause, the
moving image is presented here as the main object
of the whole sequence. The construction of pane and
mirror could be read as an allegory of the cinematic
situation. The clerk and Hulot cannot interact physically,
but only look, such as we can only look at them
without being able to reach them. This has been
studied at length by theories of cinema. But here we
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have not only to deal with allegory and significance,
but with physical presence and operation. As object of
physical involvement, the moving image is integrated
in this sequence through geometry of space. The
camera does not stay outside the space made visible by
the camera itself, but takes a precise place within this
space. The camera, too, although invisible, is mirrored;
to be more exact, it assigns a place to itself and hence
to our imaginary viewpoint. Doing so, the camera
articulates itself as a three-dimensional object in a
three-dimensional space of the action it depicts. The
image itself is present as condition for the presence of
the objects to be seen in the image.
So, to summarize, Tati points at the thingness of
things: first, at their tactile quality, in the upholstery
sequence; second, at their acoustic quality in the relation
of sound and speech; and, finally, in their visual
givenness by playing with the window pane and its
complicated spatial structure. He explores the relation
of these three, especially the relation of the visible and
the audible. In this very difference of sight, light and
sound, Tati finds the difference of space and time, and
he defines the overlapping of both differences as what
makes film possible.
Let us examine another shot. Hulot, waiting in the
corner, can only hear, not see, the clerk coming closer,
in contrast to us and the camera. The perspective
shortens the depth of the image space, so the clerk
seems almost to stay in his place while walking. His
steps, audible and easily visible by his arm gesture,
give a precise time measurement. But measured time
here does not fit the action, with the effect that the
clerk seems to approach and not to approach at the
same time. For a certain amount of time, he seems not
to be able to leave his place in space, and time seems
not to be able to leave him. Our gaze is paralleled
within the picture by the gaze of the
concierge. Hulot’s not being able to
see is the source of the comic effect,
when he is getting more and more
impatient and standing up a couple
of times because he thinks the clerk
is arriving.
So, in this sequence, the object
constituted is the constitution of
the object. The constitution of the
object – the approaching clerk –
owes itself to the non-homogeneity,
to the difference and even disturbance
between different modes of
constitution, the visual, the acoustic,
time and space. They overlap and
interact here, but stay incongruent;
and the effect of this incongruency is… the approaching
clerk. So, since cinema can easily be defined as a
specific form of organization of these four physical
media – sound, light, time and space – the object here
is a mediatic effect. For theorist John Law, objects
appear at intersections and interferences of different
topologies. In Tati, not only different topologies, but
different media such as space and time, light and
sound, intersect and interfere to make things possible.
With Tati, and extending Law, we can get an idea
of how complicated this process can be. To create
an object, we need not only one medium, but two or
more media, which interfere with each other. In the
course of such an interference, two or more ways of
organizing matter – in space and time, in vision and
sound – get into conflict. What we call a ‘thing’ or an
‘object’ derives, according to Tati, from such a conflict.
And we shall never forget that Tati, the film-maker and
author, is of course no one else but Monsieur Hulot
himself, the very effect created by this interplay of
media. Cinema, again according to Tati, is nothing else
but a special place, where the crossing and intersecting
of different media are systematically organized, and
observed and explored as if it were a laboratory. The
emergence and appearance of things – and of authors
– on film could be seen as by-product or side effect of
these experiments. As a medium, film is a continuous
processing and experimenting with the intersection and
mutual disturbances of light, sound, time and space.
Media other than film may, and will, operate differently,
but, following Tati’s approach, the hypothesis
goes that what we call media in general are nothing
less than a complex reified operator which creates and
generates what we might look upon as perceptible or
physically given reality.