Introduction: Medium and Mediation

Matt Tierney (bio) and Mathias Nilges (bio)

As we were composing the introduction to this special issue of Postmodern Culture, a Missouri grand jury delivered its decision not to indict a white police officer, Darren Wilson, for the killing of an unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown. This decision, baffling to many, was announced in a press conference by Robert McCulloch, the prosecuting attorney for St. Louis County. McCulloch considered the grand jury’s deliberation to have been difficult, but not because the jury was distraught over the racism built into most forms of American policing, and not because the jury knew that there would be public outcry no matter what choice it made, and certainly not because the prosecutor’s office had made any mistakes in presenting the case against Wilson. Indeed, it was never in question that Wilson had fired the gun that killed Brown on August 9, 2014. In spite of this, McCulloch professed: “The most significant challenge encountered in this investigation has been the 24-hour news cycle and its insatiable appetite for something, for anything to talk about. Following closely behind were the nonstop rumors on social media.”¹ News media and social media thus bore the blame for any difficulty in the grand jury’s decision because, immediately after Brown’s death, “neighbors began gathering and anger began growing because of the various descriptions of what had happened.” Any conflict that followed the shooting was, in McCulloch’s eye, due to the contradictory and mediated “descriptions” of the shooting, and not to the shooting itself. The media, both news and social, had spread “speculation and little if any solid, accurate information.” By McCulloch’s logic, it was the inaccuracy of reporting and the media’s formal insolidity, rather than the actual death of Michael Brown, that had led to widespread anger and protest.

The effort in this special issue is both to refine and to broaden the conceptual language of “media” and “medium,” so that we may reduce some of the distance between its scholarly employment within theory and its popular use to describe culture. This is a matter of terminological precision, not populism. McCulloch’s traffic in the language of “media” is both banal and troubling. Banal because McCulloch’s use of the word is too mundane to merit further notice. Yet troubling because the word’s flexibility is what allows McCulloch to perform an insidious rhetorical move, draping a single heading over a broad array of cultural forms, from television to print and from cellphones to the Internet, and then blaming that whole array, in one triumphant gesture, for having impeded justice in the death of Michael Brown. “Media” is just a word, it could be argued. But in this case, it is a word and an idea that, no matter how much it was touted in the struggle against reactionary social forces, had come to belong as much to the reactionary forces as to the struggle. Whatever truth-telling capacity may survive in the fourth estate, it could be said, this capacity vanishes as soon as the press is dismissed for its “insatiable appetite” and “inaccurate descriptions.” And whatever countervailing common voice might be heard in the texts and images of Twitter and Facebook, this voice is hushed by the accusation of mere rumormongering. There may be a great deal of liberation latent in the specific techniques of protest and knowledge called “media” in their plurality and “medium” in their discrete character. It is difficult to tell. As long as these words allow the techniques they name to be so easily lumped together and then marginalized, those techniques might not liberate much of anything. Conversely, we insist, as long as these words may be sculpted by someone like McCulloch, they might also bend to other hands.

What do we mean when we say the word “media,” and is there any chance that its refinement might facilitate, or even communicate, an ameliorative language? This question stands fittingly at the beginning of the introduction to this issue, since it is the fundamental question with which each essay in the volume grapples. We also begin here because it is precisely this question that gave rise to our inquiry. Why, then, are we confused about definitions and nomenclature when dictionaries are so readily available? We agree with Siegfried Zielinski’s argument in his 2011 book [… After the Media] that “it is possible to create a state with media” because “media are an integral part of everyday coercive context” and therefore “no longer any good for a revolution” (19). He continues: “Media are an indispensible component of functioning social hierarchies, both from the top down and the bottom up, of power and countervailing power. They have taken on a systemic character” (19). Indeed, in the case of the St. Louis County prosecutor, it seems that exactly those platforms or devices that might share or show events, or exhibit a common will, can summarily be dismissed as nothing but media. This leaves to us the development of a method and an alternative set of terms: a method by which to describe media as ever in use, never neutral, sometimes liberatory, often not, and always suspect; and a terminology of “medium” and “mediation” that will both acknowledge the ideological problem of “media” and make an effort to move beyond it, to situate it and unthink it through non-systemic, partial, and processual notions of art, history, communication, and culture.

Our confusion over the language of media is not ours alone. The more one reads into past and current work on the concept of media, the more one has the impression that the concept remains always one step ahead of any attempt to stabilize it by describing it. And while one could argue, in loosely Adornian terms, that this is always true of concepts, nevertheless the confusion surrounding the concept “media” arises to no small degree out of what we take to be precise historical and structural conditions. As Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska point out in their 2013 book, Life After New Media, much recent work on media tends to understand the term in a way that is connected either to what we commonly understand as “the media,” no doubt the most ubiquitous use of the term, or to primarily technological definitions like those encountered in the field of New Media studies. Media here acquires a distinctly material quality, without losing its capacity to be involved in a more conceptual analysis. Media is technology, then, and most often computational technology: the stuff that such studies take as their object, the stuff to which a lot of other dimensions—say politics, thought, or social structures—can be attached. Although much work is being done to illustrate that the secondary dimensions of media are not truly secondary but are instead more deeply and fundamentally attached to a medium’s history and ontology, the insistence upon the new in media technology still proliferates. What remains is an all-too-often reified notion of medium that is externally and not immanently defined.

To be sure, a critique such as ours risks collapsing back into a purely immanent concept of medium, such as the one that underlies the Greenbergian notion of medium specificity. Universal and transhistorical, and relying on the idea that there might be ideal employment of a given cultural or artistic medium, such a notion might be understood as one key factor in the disciplinary constitution of contemporary archives for critical work. Yet the lapse into medium specificity is but one risk—the reverse is no better. In re-theorizing medium apart from Greenberg and apart from narrow disciplinarity, the critic seems invariably drawn to the supposedly “sexy archive,” that is, to the archive that includes not one but several media. In our view, however, pluralization only mirrors the neoliberal fetishization of multiplicity over the not-so-sexy singular. We follow Kember and Zylinska’s argument that media studies has relied on a large set of restrictive binary oppositions, such as new versus old, and to which we would add singular versus multiple. These oppositions restrict and impoverish the ability to understand what is truly meant by “medium” at a given moment in history. For us, it is important to ask how concepts of medium may be bound up—and not just on a secondary level but far more immediately—with the ideological or linguistic norms of a given moment. Stuck here, between the rock of specificity and the hard place of the multiple archive, the primary dimension of the medium remains uninterrogated. This special issue asks how analysis would change if it were to interrogate the history and presence of each individual medium, to isolate that medium without accepting it as given, precisely by studying it as a nexus of contact and tension, similarity of and difference between media. Having said this, advocating a mode of attention to the individual medium need not imply a logic of separation and medial autonomy that is no longer tenable, particularly in light of recent work in the field.

As Kember and Zylinska so persuasively illustrate, whether we understand our moment as one guided by “intermediation” (Hayles) or “remediation” (Bolter and Grusin), the terms of critique remain defined largely by an “essentially McLuhanite emphasis on the connectedness rather than isolation of media,” which in turn “has led some commentators to propose that we are currently living in a ‘media ecology’” (12). If one dimension of our critique rests upon the overly capacious account of media (the direct commitment to technological innovation on one side and the refusal of modernist singularity via the plural archive on the other), it is important to point out that the historical difference between a commitment to “media” over and against “medium” does not signify an actual conceptual difference, as if the terms alone could announce a commitment to plurality over and against singularity. Any perceived difference has arisen, we believe, from an under-theorization of both terms. Any given medium is always already plural, as recent work on intermediality, remediation, and intermediation illustrates. But it is from this conceptual and material plurality that we derive the specific understanding of any given medium. And while the title of this issue harkens back to Baudrillard (the articulation of the logical relation between simulacra and simulation, of a relation between the terms that in not at all post-Marxist fashion provides us with a fundamentally Hegelian understanding of mediation shared by many contributions to this issue), we focus on “medium” over “media” in order to illustrate that any medium is simultaneously immanent and external plurality. Between the static singularity of the notion of medium that attaches to medium specificity and the capaciously defined inverse notion that attaches to media studies, our issue begins its intervention. As an ontological term, medium names the heterogeneous specificity of particular mediations. As a term of critical method, it names the starting point from which to study the variegated history and momentary specificity of a cultural form that neither transcends nor reduces to its parts.

But let us step back and unfold this logic in order to illustrate the ways that the essays in this issue aim to contribute to current critical discourse. In rejecting the singularity of medium specificity and the flattening plurality of media, we follow recent work on the concept of medium by, among others, Rosalind Krauss. Krauss traces this simultaneity in the “post-medium condition” of conceptual art, and recounts that her first impulse was to sidestep the term altogether and to reframe the conditions of the debate: “at first I thought I could simply draw a line under the word medium, bury it like so much critical toxic waste, and walk away from it into a world of lexical freedom,” because “‘Medium’ seemed too contaminated” (5). Krauss notes a troubling relation between conceptual art and the concept of medium, but she is aware that the way forward cannot lie in a renewed attention to modernist definitions of medium or in a pluralizing commitment to post-mediality. The notion of medium specificity must, Krauss argues, remain intrinsic to any discussion of medium. How, then, might we speak of the specificity of a medium in ways that develop the heterogeneity of that term? Can we retain the demand for specificity (which Krauss says cannot be avoided anyway) without falling into the traps of ahistorical or nostalgic modernism? Might we explore the specificity of individual media without indulging in the secondary reductions so often attached to the notion of specificity? How might we talk about a medium in any detail and with any conceptual rigor in an era in which the medially heterogeneous archive, for better or for worse, has become the new standard? The term medium has, in art history, experienced a critical flatness that mimics the infamous flatness in Greenbergian accounts of painting. One could point toward a similar flattening of the term in literary and cultural studies, where it is increasingly reduced to a technophiliac dimension. We consider this technophilia to be directly connected to efforts to insist upon the continued relevance of literary and cultural study by empiricizing it. We consider this empiricization, in turn, to be reminiscent of the formalist project of the early and mid-twentieth century, when formalism arose not primarily as a way to develop the understanding of the category of form, but instead as a way to make literary study relevant and acceptable by lending it a scientific character and method.

In this context, then, this special issue aims both to concretize and to open up the concept of medium. To be sure, this is not to suggest that there is no value in the technological side of the study of media. Recent books have studied important political consequences of new media.² Yet, there are, this issue proposes, a variety of other ways to conceive the political dimension of a medium. One way of doing so is by restoring the focus on the immanent and specific processes of mediation that concretize the ontology and function of discrete media. Such a line of inquiry neither reduces the ontology and function of a medium to its mere technological properties nor does it seek to formulate a medial ontology that rests upon transhistorical universals. Instead, this inquiry asks what worldly exposures might variegate the medium, as well as the idea of medium. Such an approach also aims to sidestep well-known accounts of a medium’s essence—the reduction of painting to flatness is likely the most notorious example of this. What emerges instead is the ability to examine the specificity of media as a process. By historicizing the specific processes of mediation that provide an individual medium with its content, function, and developing ontology, this issue seeks to arrive at an appreciation of medium as a developing concept that arises in part precisely from its non-fixity and from the interaction between discrete media. Here, the notion of medium specificity is an account of the process of mediation by which an artistic medium establishes specific relations between itself and the material, the social, the historical, the political, or the technological. Hence, medium specificity conceived this way also seeks to foreground the specificity of relations and conceptual bases that are often obfuscated in the context of a sexy archive along with the different forms of mediation that occur not only between discrete media and lived reality but also between media themselves.

The essays that make up this issue pursue the specificity of relations and processes. The different ways in which cinema or literature—or even a medium such as debt, as one of the essays in this issue illustrates—mediates a given object or socio-historical context is fundamental to a detailed effort to understand the ontology, function, and history of a medium. The history of a medium can on this account be mapped as the often discontinuous processes of hyper- and remediation that become medially and historically specific precisely via their constitutive processes of mediation, which are always simultaneously external and contextual as much as they arise immanently. Avoiding the reduction of different media both to simple notions of text, ideology, or language and to mere matters of technology, and instead developing a multi-medial archive in which the specific relations and differences between media matter and are allowed to develop in all their complexity is, we would argue, the way to arrive at the sexy archive. The specificity of the medium that allows us to speak to processes of mediation that establish clear connections and causalities and that concretize our efforts at speaking to matters of ontology and function, politics and history, is what truly brings sexy back to the archive in contemporary cultural and literary study.

There remains the evident promise of the media on behalf of radically egalitarian social change. In spite of Zielinski’s claim that “media are no longer any good for a revolution,”³ we still hear myriad voices to the contrary, claiming that there is nothing but revolution and mediation at work in the efforts of WikiLeaks, Anonymous, or the diverse movements lumped together under the designation Arab Spring. This returns us to the events with which this introduction began, and the murder of Michael Brown by the white policeman Darren Wilson. At the same time that the prosecutor dismissed the news and social-media narratives, Brown’s family released their own brief and moving statement to the press, concluding that: “We need to work together to fix the system that allowed this to happen. Join with us in our campaign to ensure that every police officer working the streets in this country wears a body camera” (“‘Profoundly Disappointed’”). The Browns’ call to action is righteous, and was quickly embraced by representatives of the Executive Branch of the US government.⁴ Effectively, it also offers a practical détournement of surveillance technology, redirecting a basic technology of policing against the police by whose hand their son was slain. One week after the Wilson decision, however, a separate but symmetrical decision was delivered by a grand jury in Staten Island, New York. As in Missouri, the facts of the case were not in question. A white police officer, Daniel Pantaleo, had killed an unarmed black civilian, Eric Garner, with an illegal chokehold, as Garner whispered the now famous words, “I can’t breathe.” This time the visibility of events was not at issue. The whole event was captured, in vivid audio and video, by a bystander with a cellphone. Still, the legal results were identical: a refusal by the grand jury to indict the admitted killer, Pantaleo. Before protests from the Missouri decision had cooled, or even slowed, an identical betrayal had occurred half a continent away, but this time without even the possibility that it could have been solved through the use of digital, news, and social media—which indeed had spent months airing and re-airing the audiovisual recording of Garner’s murder. As race theorist Tricia Rose posted on Facebook and Twitter: “Body cameras can’t end racism. Rodney King, cameras, Tamir Rice, cameras, #EricGarner cameras.” Following Zielinski and Rose, we agree that the tools that “create a state” (19), along with the state’s racist apparatus of legal judgment and enforcement, are not the tools that will bring justice to Mike Brown and Eric Garner.

How does this statement impact method, so that it is to be worked out differently by the contributions that follow in this issue? For Zielinski, marginalizing the revolutionary aspects of media does not mean diminishing their influence in the world. Instead, it means differentiating between what he names “media-explicit and media-implicit discourses” (173). In a media-explicit discourse, such as those that often obtain in media studies, but that can even be seen in the St. Louis County prosecutor’s press release, “individual media or a random collection of media or the media in the strategic generalization expressis verbis are the subject of [the] exposition” (173). By contrast, a “media-implicit discourse” is an “exact philology of precise things” as they compose social processes. In any method that pursues media-implicitness, Zielinski argues, “media phenomena are integrated as subjects of research in wider discourses or epistemes. They are thematically incorporated into other foci or overarching contexts, such as history, sexuality, subjectivity, or the arts” (173). Our contributors’ discussions of debt, communication, cinema, aesthetics, and form are bound together by such an incorporation—by the conviction that to talk about medium and mediation must mean to sideline the media themselves, at least a little bit, so that their place in the world, and their relations to each other, are what rise into the field of theoretical vision.

In terms that resonate with our “media-implicit” approach, the late novelist Joanna Russ wrote in 1978: “Technology is a non-subject … is the sexy rock star of the academic humanities, and like the rock star, is a consolation for and an obfuscation of, something else. Talk about technology is an addiction” (27). Russ saw that it was folly to ignore the concrete effects of media change upon artistic and political ways of responding to the world. But she also saw, as an equal error, that any engagement in the science or being of technology, whether favorable or unfavorable, must risk making communication or computation into the object of a creative or scholarly myopia. She concludes: “The technology-obsessed must give up talking about technology when it is economics and politics which are at issue” (39). In the present moment, although not in the present volume, it is media in its technological character, and in its supposedly essential links to the possibility of freedom, that preoccupies many scholars and policy-makers, no matter their vast differences in political motivation. Our contributors instead focus on procedures of medium and mediation, in their particularity and interpenetration, so as to draw out of media discourse its made qualities, its cultural and political qualities, and its malleability in a moment that calls for just such a hands-on molding.

The issue begins with Timothy Bewes’s “A Sensorimotor Collapse?,” which forcefully articulates the stakes of examining the relationship between medium, mediation, and what Deleuze calls “the mediator” for the study of cinema. If film history is, as Deleuze claims, defined by a “sensorimotor break” that separates the classical cinema of the movement-image from the modern cinema of the time-image, a break that marks the breakdown of the elements constituting the movement-image—perception, action, and affection—then how, Bewes asks, might we consider the historical status of this transition? What really is the role of cinema in what appears to be a larger historical development in the way that humankind imagines the relationship between self and world? Does cinema merely register and represent this break that is to be understood as a historical shift in consciousness? Or does cinema take on a direct role in facilitating this shift? Offering a rigorously historicized and diligently argued account of the notion of a sensorimotor break beginning with Bergson and concluding with Rancière’s critique of Deleuze, Bewes illustrates how detailed attention to the question of the mediator and mediation allows us to foreground the ways in which cinema relates to an event that is elsewhere understood as centrally informing the departure from realism and the turn toward modernism or the aesthetic shift from modernism to postmodernism. By tracing the often surprising lines of congruence between Deleuze and Rancière, Bewes shows that the shift from the movement-image to the time-image in cinema does nothing less than make thinkable the historical event of the sensorimotor collapse. The particular ontology and function of cinema as a medium in this regard, Bewes shows, lies in its ability to make some of the fundamental historical shifts of the twentieth century accessible to thought.

Next we turn to Nicholas Brown’s essay, “Musical Affect, Musical Citation, Music-Immanence.” The essay opens with a consideration of a curious distinction between painting and music in Hegel’s Aesthetics. Instances in which painting contracts into pure form, Hegel claims, cause non-formal content to be present but “indifferent.” When music contracts into pure form, however, content falls by the wayside and the result is a display of “mere … skill in composition.” What this illustrates, Brown argues, is that Hegel “has no concept of a purely painterly or purely musical idea.” Hegel’s perplexed relation to music, Brown argues, is a result of a problem that is urgent for us today: what defines music as a medium in opposition to other arts is its ability to produce affective reactions in listeners. But, Brown suggests, if this is true, then it raises a second problem, namely that this feature would disqualify “music from the arts even more strongly in our day than in Hegel’s,” for any such provoked reaction is “always already a commodity.” Brown’s essay explains why the fundamental commitment of music as a medium to the ability to generate affective responses would disqualify it from being considered art, and why the ability to “produce music whose aim is not to produce an effect” becomes not only a crucial question for music as an artistic medium today, but also allows us to foreground some of the fundamental aspects of the current status of the work of art. In much the same way that Bewes’s account of cinema allows us to understand better the ontology and function of cinema as an artwork in the context of some of the defining historical changes of the twentieth century, Brown’s courageously argued essay illustrates how a detailed examination of the current status of music as a medium also allows us to understand some of the profound challenges that the artwork faces now.

In ways that echo some of the fundamental concerns and approaches of the first two essays, Michael D’Arcy’s contribution engages with the status of critical attention to the category of medium in general and the problem of medium specificity in our time. If we consider Adorno’s reflections on cinematic medium as crucially depending upon the suggestion that medium-specific aesthetic analysis has become obsolete, then, D’Arcy suggests, we may be able to put Adorno’s work on medium into productive conversation with the form and language of the novel to develop forms of “aesthetic rationality.” What this means, D’Arcy suggests, is that such attention to medium allows us to formulate aesthetic rationality as a discrete category of reason that is distinct from and that allows us to aesthetically and politically critique our era’s more general, prevailing social condition of technological advancement. Like Bewes and Brown, D’Arcy believes that our current moment requires attention to the category of medium if criticism wants to be able to speak to the status of the artwork. However, we must develop a way of doing so that moves past outdated notions of medium specificity. An alternate critical approach, D’Arcy illustrates in detail in his essay, may be found in a form of critical attention to “a history of linguistic medium that exceeds the specificity of art forms.” Adorno’s analysis of novelistic-filmic language, D’Arcy argues, registers that medium-specific aesthetics may have become “fatally disabled.” At the same time, however, D’Arcy maintains, this line of argument and analysis in Adorno also contains a continued investment in the notions of art’s uneven development and of the waning of our ability to distinguish art from technological forms in their social context. Adorno’s examination of the cinematic medium allows us to understand the collapse between artistic technique and technology as it presents itself in current artistic production (and as it is discussed in critical commentary that examines medium as technology); D’Arcy shows that by studying the disappearance of art’s critical distance from reigning forms of social totality that become legible through film, we can highlight the medial abilities of novelistic language in order to better understand the material, social, and political function of the medium.

Krista Geneviève Lynes addresses media in its aesthetic sense as well as its computational sense, while moving beyond the reflexive celebration of social media’s world-making capacities. Lynes remains skeptical of Facebook or Twitter as revolutionary tools, but insists that their legitimating rhetorics have provided a shared affective mode for some radical collectivities. She argues that even though the political effects of social media may differ broadly, these media nonetheless aid in “binding communities of protest, if not in a common language, at least in the dream of a common purpose.” To provide an account of this binding force, yet without recourse to the totalizing image of a “global village,” Lynes turns to the Belgrade artist Milica Tomic. Tomic, for Lynes, provides a picture of “worldedness, in the interest of forging sites of solidarity and resistance.” Movement politics thus coincides with the politics of art, which in turn produces a revised image of the world. Therein lies Lynes’s urgent materialism, in its development of a theory of art and technology at once, and of the struggle to transcend media even while putting media to use.

Finally, Leigh Claire La Berge and Dehlia Hannah advance the most direct argument in favor of a materialist understanding of the category of medium. La Berge and Hannah argue that it is possible to understand debt as a medium. They show it should be very clear in our historical moment that debt itself becomes one of the principal forms that mediates the relationship between capitalism and its social dimension. A structured yet evanescent form of violence it surely is. However, for La Berge and Hannah, as for the visual artist Cassie Thornton, debt also founds a regime of aesthetics. The authors find Thornton’s practice unique in that “its radical departure from traditional media leads us squarely back to the problem of the medium itself.” Moreover, in their account of Thornton, debt aesthetics can expose the “never completed but embodied and experiential concretization of capital’s dimension of abstract labor.” La Berge and Hannah locate debt, or indebtedness, as a modified form of modernist self-reflexivity that in Thornton’s work eludes reification. Insofar as one may understand the attention to medium and mediation as the antidote to collapsing a complex social relation into the pure thing-ness of a reified relation, La Berge and Hannah show, there is much at stake in foregrounding the function of debt as medium for art today, a medium that art itself is in turn able to make legible and to inflect politically in a radically different way.

Postscript

In many ways, it is too soon to write about the episodes of police violence with which portions of this introduction have been concerned. It will likely always be too soon to theorize them. But at the same time, theory cannot pretend to be impervious to a world of legitimated power abuses. Such a world is barbed and hot, and must change theory by destroying it or by setting it in motion before its time. To this end, as this special issue is going to press, we note that another pair of killings has put pressure on its conclusions. These events must not be put to use by theory, or be absorbed into an existing scholarly project. They may however derail such a project—thus derailed, we risk the following. On April 2, 2015, Eric Harris was shot and killed by Bob Bates, a full-time insurance executive and part-time reserve sheriff in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Three days later, on April 5, Walter Scott was shot and killed by Michael Slager, a patrolman in North Charleston, South Carolina. Both law officers are white, both victims were black, and both killings were recorded on video.

The shooting of Eric Harris was captured by a body camera that was carried by a second officer, not Bates. In the video, when this second officer tackles Harris, he holds him down, the camera presses onto the pavement, and viewers must rely on audio alone. We hear rapid footsteps, presumably those of Bates. We hear a pistol report, followed by the words “I shot him. I’m sorry.” We hear Harris plead, in words too reminiscent of Eric Garner, “I’m losing my breath.” And we hear the second offer reply, “Fuck your breath.” Without question, the body camera has failed to save Eric Harris’s life. Yet also without question, the body camera has produced a record, and therefore a circulable document, that would not otherwise have existed, and that can now be exhibited through a variety of online video streaming services. Any media theory of body cameras in policing must account for the difference between a version of events in which the killing of Eric Harris is recorded and a version in which it is not recorded. Yet only a media-implicit theory of racialized state violence can even begin to account for the fact of Harris’s death in spite of those cameras, or for the persistence of a nearly unaccountable object, that recording of an actual human voice that is capable of saying “fuck your breath.”

The killing of Walter Scott was captured by a bystander’s cellphone. The phone is in motion, but it is held at a great enough distance from the scene that the entire sequence of events is visible. In the video, Scott runs from Slager, Slager raises his pistol, the pistol fires five times, and Scott falls to the ground where he lies on his stomach as Slager cuffs his wrists. Responses to this murder have been vocal, as have responses to the other killings mentioned in this introduction. Among responses to Scott’s death, the most pertinent is that of Jay Smooth, the public intellectual and Internet personality. In an edition of Smooth’s YouTube series, entitled The Illipsis, he tells his listeners that the news of Scott’s death had interrupted his plan to cover a quite different news story about the release of a new music streaming service called Tidal, founded by the hip-hop mogul Jay-Z and promoted with language of social-movement formation and community building. Confronted with the cellphone video of the events in South Carolina, says Smooth, “I can’t see that and then go back to watching people talk about movements and taking stands in reference to an Android app that keeps giving me errors.”

Rather than speak about Tidal and its co-opted rhetoric, Smooth imagines a digital and social medium that, unlike Tidal, would be appropriate for this world-historical conjuncture. Addressing himself to the “superstars” behind Tidal, Smooth opines:

What you should do next is take some of the money from this imitation of Spotify and put it into another app called Copify that lets us press a single button for unlimited hi-fi recording of police misconduct while also automatically live-streaming and uploading to our special Copify cloud-storage, so they can’t just snatch our phone and delete it. What we need right now more than delivering FLAC files to our homes in lossless quality is something that somehow helps us deliver black lives to their homes in lossless quality.

For Jay Smooth, the language of new media can be writ large only under erasure, in the form of an extended metaphor that remains a metaphor, as well as a protest, rather than a concrete proposal. He concludes that it is not enough to disseminate videos like those that record the shootings of Eric Garner and Tamir Rice and Eric Harris and Walter Scott, and yet: “until we upgrade this whole operating system, and get the systemic changes we need, it seems to be all we’ve got.” For Smooth, and for us, there is no use, and no good, in imagining a world stripped of its digital media. Moreover, there are limited advancements of justice toward which such media might be directed. But only a discourse that foregrounds politics, in the way that Joanna Russ uses that word, can “upgrade” the societal “operating system.” It is such a discourse, based on a politics of culture in which media are full of legible content, and implicit rather than centered, that we mean to acknowledge and build upon with this special issue.

Mathias Nilges is Associate Professor of English at St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia, Canada. His essays have appeared in collected editions and in journals such as American Literary History, Callaloo, and Textual Practice. With Emilio Sauri, he is the co-editor of Literary Materialisms (2013) and with Michael D’Arcy of The Contemporaneity of Modernism (2015). He has recently completed a monograph titled Still Life With Zeitroman: The Time of the Contemporary American Novel.

Footnotes

1. A transcript of McCulloch’s decision is available from CNN, and a video is available on YouTube.

2. See for instance Bessant and Fuller and Goffey.

3. This claim in fact graces the back cover of Zielinski’s [. . . After the Media].

4. For instance, in remarks on December 1, 2014, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder announced that, “this Administration will continue to strongly support the use of body cameras by local police,” and promised the federal provision of “more than $200 million to support a three-year initiative that will invest in body-worn cameras,” as well as training and other resources.

Works Cited

• Bessant, Judith. Democracy Bytes: New Media, New Politics and Generational Change. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Print.
• Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding the New Media. Cambridge: MIT P, 2000. Print.
• Byers, Dylan. “Ferguson prosecutor blames the media.” Politico. Politico LLC. November 25, 2014. November 25, 2015. Web. Fuller, Matthew, and Andrew Goffey. Evil Media. Cambridge: MIT P, 2013. Print.
• Hayles, Katherine N. My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2005. Print.
• Holder, Eric. “Attorney General Eric Holder Delivers Remarks During the Interfaith Service and Community Forum at Ebenezer Baptist Church.” Website of the United States Department of Justice. December 1, 2014. Web. January 7, 2016.
• Kember, Sarah, and Joanna Zylinska. Life After New Media. Cambridge: MIT P, 2012. Print.
• Krauss, Roland E. A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition. New York: Thames and Hudson, 2000. Print.
• McCulloch, Robert. “No Indictment: Brown Family Profoundly Disappointed; Pres. Obama To Speak Soon About Grand Jury Decision; Prosecutor: There was a full investigation.” Transcript. Anderson Cooper 360. CNN.com. 24 Nov. 2014. Web. 31 Jan. 2016.
• ‘“Profoundly Disappointed’: Michael Brown Family Reacts to Lack of Indictment.” NBC News. NBC News. November 24, 2014. Web. November 20, 2015.
• Russ, Joanna. To Write Like a Woman: Essays in Feminism and Science Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995. Print.
• Smooth, Jay. “On Walter Scott: ‘Why do they never try to save them?’” YouTube. YouTube, LLC. April 8, 2015. Web. November 30, 2015.
• Zielinski, Siegfried. [. . . After the Media]: News from the Slow-Fading Twentieth Century. Minneapolis: Univocal, 2013. Print.