beyond media therapy

8/12/2019 Beyond Media Therapy

1/4

http://tvn.sagepub.com/ Televi sion & New Media

http://tvn.sagepub.com/content/10/1/130The online version of this article can be found at:

DOI: 10.1177/1527476408325098

2009 10: 130 originally published online 19 September 2008Television New Media Arvind Rajagopal

Beyond Media Therapy

Published by:

http://www.sagepublications.com

can be found at:Television & New Media Additional services and information for

http://tvn.sagepub.com/cgi/alertsEmail Alerts:

http://tvn.sagepub.com/subscriptionsSubscriptions:

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.navReprints:

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.navPermissions:

http://tvn.sagepub.com/content/10/1/130.refs.htmlCitations:

What is This?

- Sep 19, 2008OnlineFirst Version of Record

- Dec 18, 2008Version of Record>>

at COLUMBIA UNIV on February 14, 2013tvn.sagepub.comDownloaded from
http://tvn.sagepub.com/http://tvn.sagepub.com/http://tvn.sagepub.com/http://tvn.sagepub.com/content/10/1/130http://tvn.sagepub.com/content/10/1/130http://tvn.sagepub.com/content/10/1/130http://www.sagepublications.com/http://tvn.sagepub.com/cgi/alertshttp://tvn.sagepub.com/cgi/alertshttp://tvn.sagepub.com/subscriptionshttp://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.navhttp://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.navhttp://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.navhttp://tvn.sagepub.com/content/10/1/130.refs.htmlhttp://online.sagepub.com/site/sphelp/vorhelp.xhtmlhttp://online.sagepub.com/site/sphelp/vorhelp.xhtmlhttp://tvn.sagepub.com/content/early/2008/09/19/1527476408325098.full.pdfhttp://tvn.sagepub.com/content/early/2008/09/19/1527476408325098.full.pdfhttp://tvn.sagepub.com/content/10/1/130.full.pdfhttp://tvn.sagepub.com/http://tvn.sagepub.com/http://tvn.sagepub.com/http://online.sagepub.com/site/sphelp/vorhelp.xhtmlhttp://tvn.sagepub.com/content/early/2008/09/19/1527476408325098.full.pdfhttp://tvn.sagepub.com/content/10/1/130.full.pdfhttp://tvn.sagepub.com/content/10/1/130.refs.htmlhttp://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.navhttp://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.navhttp://tvn.sagepub.com/subscriptionshttp://tvn.sagepub.com/cgi/alertshttp://www.sagepublications.com/http://tvn.sagepub.com/content/10/1/130http://tvn.sagepub.com/


2/4

130

Television & New MediaVolume 10 Number 1

January 2009 130-132 2009 Sage Publications

10.1177/1527476408325098http://tvnm.sagepub.com

hosted athttp://online.sagepub.com

Beyond Media TherapyArvind Rajagopal

New York University

The media are named over and again as if they could be isolated as con-veyers of information. But when all perception is mediated, how can theybe separated in this way? Invoking the media is like bringing black and

white magic together; they are the problem and the solution both, like Platos phar-makon , as if the trouble they created could only be cured through the media them-selves. If this is correct, it describes a move from media studies into media therapy.How did this happen?

Consider the kinds of pedagogy media studies tends to offer. A characteristic nar-rative of media history would proceed as follows. After various rudimentary symbolscame the alphabet, which typically means the phonetic alphabet. A more than mil-lennium-long lull followed until the print revolution in EuropeChina inventedprint but apparently failed to do much with it. With the long-awaited cocktail of theProtestant Reformation, the phonetic alphabet, and the printing press, modernity wasborn, and there was no looking back, except to confirm that history is destiny.

Marshall McLuhan appeared to challenge this teleology, prophesying a retribal-ization of the world with electric medias tactile effects. Perhaps despite himself, hemade available a plan for the mediatic colonization of the worlds cultures, incorpo-rating their different sensory ratios as variations within a scheme. Thus, he arguedthat older media are subsumed as content within the form of new communicationtechnologies; thus, oral media become the content of print, while print is renderedcontent in electronic media and so forth (McLuhan 1994). Implicitly, nonmoderncultures with their multisensory modes of involvement could similarly be absorbedand transcended by a culture that had passed through the phase of print-inducedabstraction and come out on the West the other side, enhanced by the experience,and now reaching out and in touch with itself and other cultures, thanks to electricmedia. Such an account appears to acknowledge other societies and histories butends up enfolding them within a formalist account of media development.

Unlike say Egyptian sarcophagi or Byzantine icons, the modernity of modernmedia, in the usual understanding, is believed to lie in their immanent power, that isto say in their physical and technical properties, rather than deriving their signifi-cance from any external or transcendental authority. 1 The influence that the outerworld sanctions, for example, on the printed book as a document of factual truths orthe moving image as capturing reality, is understood to be contingent and onlyreflective of a capacity internal to the technologies in question. Thus, print canabstract truths from the world, the camera can mirror events, and so on.

http://tvn.sagepub.com/http://tvn.sagepub.com/http://tvn.sagepub.com/http://tvn.sagepub.com/


3/4

Rajagopal / Beyond Media Therapy 131

In other words, in addition to changing sense ratios, modern media index the shiftin a second ratio, of transcendental to immanent authority, or external to inherent

power. For example, the Reformation challenged the Churchs overriding right to inter-pret the Bible; the book was supposed to speak for itself thereafter, mediated by lan-guage and nation rather than by clergy. The kernel of such formulations (and McLuhanis hardly alone in his view) is nothing less than a theory of secularization and a dis-covery of the world as it really is (Chadwick 1975). Religion, church, and monarchyall fall by the wayside, as reason, science, and democracy show us the wayforward.

But such an account treats secularism as an accomplished and settled fact and reli-gion as part of a history that scarcely needs mentioning. This gets the story backward.Religion never went away, and in various forms, it is today resurgent everywhere. The

spread of print in Europe was accompanied by a crisis of faith, by the rise of Protestantism and a series of Inquisitions. Cassette and television culture have been amajor force in the politicization of religions worldwide. The expenditure and attentiongiven to media technology today resembles magical enchantment or religious devo-tion, although organized mainly by the market and by interest groups, and combinesworship of technology together with its rapid obsolescence. Meanwhile, it is secular-ism whose existence is precarious and ill understood, usually circulating as an awk-ward neologism in translation, avowed by no more than a minority in most societies.

The radical interpretation of the print revolution tended to naturalize the new external

authorities of the nation-state and national language and to assume that the power of thepress was inherent to it and portable, like a turn-key technology, and that its results(e.g., secularization) could be replicated. In fact, print mediated the formation of nationallanguage and culture and religious as well as secular forces. Strangely, however, printinstitutions were usually claimed to be bulwarks of state-approved secularism.

By focusing not just on media but on modes of mediation, McLuhan sought todisplace a technology-centered history. He showed how observing the formal work of media makes implausible a theory of technology-dependent change. But he didnot consider how sensory mediation itself is not direct and immediate but is shaped

by socialization and by prevailing cultures of perception. For example, the press inChina was incorporated into the working of the imperial bureaucracy there, whereasin Europe it grew amid the breakup of the Holy Roman Empire and the feudal estatesand came to be correlated with a very different set of effects.

Change across societies is not synchronous with the development of technologies.In fact, historical change is typically uneven and nonsynchronous and encloses mul-tiple temporalities: Think of the Amish and the Arapaho alongside other Americans,or the so-called three worlds, interlinked but developing differently.

The extensive diffusion of print and electronic media throughout the world has

led to an explosion of creative engagements with underacknowledged or underap-preciated pasts. Part of the complexity of mediation is that multiple temporalitiesintersect in a given mediumas in a book, for example. Historicity is not simplyimposed on us but also something we negotiate reflexively as we learn the facts of past events. The result is that history becomes less of an orthodoxy and more of a



4/4

132 Television & New Media

battleground, as conventional histories are challenged by other accounts. 2 In theresulting proliferation of viewpoints, however, the question of history risks becom-

ing aestheticized as a kind of personal choiceyour media preference versus mine.3

Space requires a summary closurewe can return to the beginning. In the begin-ning was the word. Then, there was a message, and the medium was the message.The incantatory revelation from McLuhan echoes the oracular quality of the biblicalsaying. But there is now (apparently) no reality that transcends the media itselfandas a result, it is the media that acquire a fetishistic powerand when media studiesis practiced as media therapy, the idea is to use the spell, not to break it.

Notes

1. Part of what renders modernity identifiable is the way in which this distinction between immanentand transcendent is sustained through an appeal to the everyday, and, as a recent study has argued, is

joined together in the idea of economy (see, e.g., Mondzain 2005; my thanks to Allen Feldman for thereference).

2. For an argument about the production of history as the attempt by ruling elites to continue their classstruggleand race strugglethrough narratives told from the perspective of the state, see Foucault (2003).

3. Or as a problem for other societies that even a critical theorist can ignore. For an interestingexample where historical alterity becomes a kind of surplus to be ignored, see Deleuze (1992, p. 5).Deleuze acknowledges how societies of control must coexist with, and rely on, older forms of disci-pline and punishment than debt, if three-quarters of humanity are to be managed. Deleuze relies on aneat spatial division of the world to give his control theory its pristine appearance. Implicitly, the ThirdWorld (Deleuze 1992), the only part of the world named in his essay, is characterized by its distinct andunyielding context. Meanwhile, modes of domination can be subtly reshaped and calibrated with the lat-est forms of technology in the unnamed part of the world, that is, of course, the subject of Deleuzes essay.For discussion, see Rajagopal (2005).

References

Chadwick, Owen. 1975. The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century: The Gifford Lectures in the University of Edinburgh for 19734 . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Deleuze, Gilles. 1992. Postscript on Societies of Control. October 59: 5.Foucault, Michel. 2003. Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College de France, 197576 . New

York: Picador.McLuhan, Marshall. 1994. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Mondzain, Marie-Jos. 2005. Image, Icon, Economy . Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Rajagopal, Arvind. 2005. Imperceptible Perceptions in Our Technological Modernity. In Old Media, New

Media , edited by W. Chun and T. Keenan, 27585. New York: Routledge.

Arvind Rajagopal teaches media studies at New York University. He is author of Politics After Television: Hindu Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Public in India (Cambridge, 2001), which wonthe Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Prize from the Association of Asian Studies in 2003, and editor of three volumes, including The Indian Public Sphere: Structure and Transformation (Oxford, forthcoming).In 20062007, he was a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington,D.C. He is completing a monograph on postcolonial political culture in India.


beyond media therapy

Documents