“Reconstituting the senses though and beyond media” – Elissavet Kardami

Frank Kessler’s lecture brought forward several questions about the role of the media in daily life and its potential to transform the way we perceive and describe our daily experiences. For example, I started reflecting on the ways that cinema has reconfigured the senses and shaped our experience of the world, and how it has infiltrated the way we would describe events of our life. In this short reflection, I would like to focus on the importance of the medium to reconfigure the senses, its relationship with the object that it is presenting and its potential to restructure our understanding of the world by connecting some of Mc Luhan’s points with theories from other fields of research.

McLuhan’s understanding of the medium as a message reminded me of Karen Barad’s critique on representationalism and her proposal to move beyond this framework through the concept of agential realism. According to Barad, the developments in the field of quantum physics have brought forward new ways of perceiving, experiencing and understanding physical phenomena. The affordances of new technological apparatuses have the potential provide new forms of perceptions, that can influence the way we understand to world around us. Within the framework of media studies, we could argue that there can be no clear separation between the message and the medium. The message, whatever form it has, cannot function separately from the medium that it uses to manifest its self. Meaning can be redesigned based on the medium with which its being expressed. Ultimately, the message is being shaped by the medium and vice versa.

At the same time, the nature of these phenomena alters the relationship between the observer, the apparatus and the phenomenon. For McLuhan, “the very structure of electronic media is such that it transforms the human sensorium so that it is no longer capable of being detached and alienated, as it was under the rule of mechanical and literate media”^[1]. This implies an altered form of engagement through the senses, which is facilitated through the use of electronic media. Similarly, Barad’s analysis of the concept of intra-actions implies that the relationship between the subject and the object move beyond dualistic accounts. There is a sense of interdependence and interconnection between the subject, the object and the medium, in Barad’s case the apparatus, which suggest a different form of engagement between these three elements. In other words, our senses and our understanding of the world need to be re-adjusted in order to interact with technological apparatuses and different media that have the ability to uncover previously inaccessible states of matter, physical phenomena and cultural phenomena.

[1] Bivar, Venus. “Senses.” The Chicago School of Media Theory (web log). https://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/mediatheory/keywords/senses/.

Bibliography

• Barad, Karen. “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28, no. 3 (2003): 801-31.
• Bivar, Venus. “Senses.” The Chicago School of Media Theory (web log). https://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/mediatheory/keywords/senses/.
• Friesen, Norm. “Education as a Training of the Senses: McLuhan’s Pedagogical Enterprise.” Enculturation A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture, November 7, 2011. http://enculturation.net/education-as-a-training.