Heidegger and the Media

David J. Gunkel, Paul A. Taylor, Paul A. Taylor

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780745661261
  9780745661254
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780745671925
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The most significant philosopher of Being, Martin Heidegger has nevertheless largely been ignored within communications studies. This book sets the record straight by demonstrating the profound implications of his unique philosophical project for our understanding of today's mediascape. The full range of Heidegger's writing from Being and Time to his later essays is drawn upon. 

Topics covered include:
- an analysis of Heidegger's theory of language and its relevance to communications studies
- a critical interpretation of mass media and digital culture that draws upon Heidegger's key concept of Dasein
- a discussion of mediated being and its objectifying tendencies
- an assessment of Heidegger's legacy for future developments in media theory

Clear explanations and accessible commentary are used to guide the reader through the work of a thinker whose notorious reputation belies the highly topical nature of his key insights. 
In a world full of digital networks and new social media, but little critical insight, Heidegger and the Mediashows how a true understanding of the media requires familiarity with Heidegger's unique brand of thinking.

1

WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT MEDIA

INTRODUCTION: SPEAKING OF MEDIA

To write about media is to raise the question of what gives writing the presumption to speak for other media. Language presents itself as the meta-medium to contain all past and future media.

Adilkno 1998: 7

In what way does language occur as language? We answer: Language speaks.

LAN: 190

To say anything about media, we inevitably find ourselves needing to use some form of media. We are, therefore, already engaged in and with media. In this endeavour, language has a privileged status. It is, as Adilkno – the Dutch foundation for the advancement of illegal knowledge – points out above, the meta-medium in which all other media, past or future, are contained, reflected and represented. For this reason, language is widely considered the first medium of human communication, ‘first’ in chronological terms in so far as it was the initial means of providing for human information exchange and communicative interaction that went beyond the gestural.¹ ‘First’ also in terms of status in so far as every other medium – writing, print, radio, film, television, internet, etc. – is subsequent to, serves to extend the reach of and is dependent upon the facility of language. So far so good; all of this seems uncontroversial. Heidegger, however, asks a further penetrating question about how language actually occurs and suggests that, whilst we assume it is we who speak language, it is language that also speaks us.

This seemingly counter-intuitive formulation is an example of what we repeatedly argue throughout the subsequent chapters is a central feature of Heidegger’s importance as a thinker – the persistence with which he fundamentally questions conventional assumptions of the most basic sort. It is therefore fitting that this first chapter initiates our exploration of the way Heidegger’s work challenges those taken-for-granted assumptions we make about media by using language to go right to the root of all media. Heidegger undertakes an inquiry into the essential nature of language, ‘by means of a relentless pursuit of whatever it is that our path’s formula indicates when it says: To bring language as language to language’ (WTL: 399). In this pithy but puzzling formula one sees a good example of why Heidegger’s mode of thought is so useful for, pace McLuhan, understanding the media. In his analysis of language, Heidegger directly reflects on how we conceptualize the very thing we use for the act of conceptualizing. This chapter, therefore, shows how this reflexive mode of thinking about language as a medium is a particularly useful conceptual resource for better appreciating what we normally take for granted about the media because it happens so unobtrusively and ubiquitously.

The conclusion that language constitutes the principal means or fundamental instrument of human expression and communication seems to be entirely correct. In fact, the very effort to articulate this point already supplies what looks to be ample and seemingly irrefutable evidence of the claim itself. It is so clear and has been so widely accepted that it appears to be beyond question or in need of argumentation. Who would ever deny this? Who would ever question these things? Who would ever say that language is not first and foremost a means by which to say something? Well … Heidegger for one. He not only contests the conventional understanding of language as an instrument or medium of human expression but also rejects the seemingly incontrovertible evidence that it is human beings who solely possess and use language. ‘In accordance with its essence,’ Heidegger writes, ‘language is neither expression nor a matter of human manipulation. Language speaks’ (LAN: 197). Like the previous notion of bringing language to language as language, the idea that “language speaks” represents a distinctly Heideggerian quality to which we will keep returning – Heidegger’s ability to use his own language to encapsulate and convey seemingly puzzling ideas that encourage and help us to reflect upon the nature of media and acts of mediated representation in their most essential sense.

THE MEDIUM OF REPRESENTATION: INSTRUMENTAL AND CONSTITUTIVE LANGUAGE

I want to suggest, to play on the Gospel of St. John, that in the beginning was the word; words are not names for things but, to steal a line from Kenneth Burke, things are the signs of words. Reality is not given, not humanly existent, independent of language and toward which language stands as a pale refraction. Rather reality is brought into existence, is produced, by communication – by, in short, the construction, apprehension, and utilization of symbolic forms.

Carey 1989: 25

Language is the house of Being in which man ek-sists by dwelling.

LOH: 213

Language, in one way or another, was, and continued to be, one of the principal concerns of Heidegger’s thinking, from the period before Being and Time (1927) to the Le Thor and Zähringen seminars delivered just a few years prior to his death in 1976. The theme’s persistent presence, however, should not be taken to mean that Heidegger had a single univocal view of language that remained unchanged from the beginning to the end of his philosophical career. Although language was a crucial issue for Heidegger’s thinking, what he thought about it evolved and developed considerably. Charles Guignon, for example, argues that Heidegger’s view of language in Being and Time appears to be pulled in two apparently opposite directions – an instrumental versus a constitutive viewpoint.

The instrumentalist view, exemplified in the work of Wilhelm Dilthey, considers language to be a kind of tool or instrument of human expression:

From the instrumentalist’s standpoint, our ability to use language is grounded in some prior grasp of the nonsemantic significance of the contexts in which we find ourselves. It is only because we have first understood the nature of reality that we can then come to comprehend the meaning of words. Language is seen as a tool for communicating and ordering this prior grasp of reality. (Guignon 1983: 117–18)

The constitutive view, or what has also been called ‘linguistic constitutionalism’ (Wrathall 2011: 122), represents an opposing position. According to this interpretation, language is not a tool or instrument that is used to communicate information about some pre-existing reality; it is what shapes and makes this reality possible in the first place. In other words, words do not merely represent things as some derived and pale reflection of what is. Instead, words constitute the reality of things. Or as James Carey cleverly describes it by way of Kenneth Burke, ‘words are not names for things but … things are the signs of words.’

Understood instrumentally, language is determined to be a set of available or ready-to-hand words, the totality of which would be contained in a dictionary and which can be organized and combined in order to say something intelligible about the world – a world that presumably exists and had been presented prior to its becoming re-presented in language. In other words, there is a real world – the way things really are – and then subsequent to this there is language, which is a tool that enables us to say something about this world by formulating representations of it in words that are more or less accurate. This common and seemingly intuitive understanding of language matches an equally common conceptualization of media as an instrument of communication. According to this way of thinking, it is assumed that there is an independent pre-existing reality of things, people and events. This real world is then subsequently re-presented, literally made present again, by various kinds of media – newspapers, books, photographs, radio transmissions, television documentaries, internet documents, video recordings, etc. – which are, on this account, a kind of secondary and derived image of what was initially present in the ‘real world’.

Philosophically speaking, this view was first articulated and developed in the final book of Plato’s Republic, where Socrates proposes an image by which to examine and explain the nature of representation. The image consists of three kinds of artisans and their products, in this case, home furnishings, specifically couches. At the apex, Socrates locates the εἶδος (eidos), the real and true form that is originally created by a deity. Subordinate to this, he situates a first-order representation, which is produced through the artistry of the craftsman. The craftsman, Socrates reasons, produces his creation by looking to and following the information provided by the form of the original thing (Plato 1987: 596b). The derived product of the craftsman is subsequently copied by the painter who creates not a couch per se but the mere appearance of a couch (Plato 1987: 596e). Although the craftsman copies the original εἶδος, the name ‘imitator’ or ‘copier’ is reserved for the painter, for as Glaucon, Socrates’ interlocutor, argues, ‘he is the imitator of the thing which the others produce’ (Plato 1987: 597e). For this reason, imitation is situated in a phenomenal product that is at least three removes from the true and original reality of things.

According to this schema, the value of an image – whether it is made up of descriptive words, oil paint on canvas, or, for our more contemporary purposes, a rapid succession of individual photographs, or 3-D images on an HD monitor screen – comes to be assessed on the basis of its attention to, and ability to re-present the real, or its ‘realism’. Relying on this illustration, Socrates eventually proposes two alternatives for dealing with mediated representation. Either the image and the various image-makers need to be expelled from the city, for, as he proposes, ‘it is a deception and corruption of the mind’ (Plato 1987: 595b), or this effort must be carefully used and regulated as a tool capable of serving and representing the real and true nature of things as they really are. To put it in today’s terminology, this means either outright censorship or a kind of professional practice that espouses the standard journalistic values of ‘objectivity’ and ‘fair and balanced’ representations.

The constitutive view of language inverts the instrumentalist perspective. Instead of representing an independent and pre-existing real world, language and other forms of communication produce what we understand as our world and initially bring it into existence. In this case, the question is not, to borrow a statement Heidegger makes at the end of the Beiträge (CTP: 393), ‘how does language relate to being?’ but ‘how does being relate to language?’ Although this may sound counter-intuitive, it is a notion that has gained considerable traction in the latter half of the twentieth century. In the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, for instance, Ludwig Wittgenstein (1995 [1922]: 5.6) famously argued that ‘the limits of my language mean the limits of my world.’ In other words, the world I know and operate in is shaped, formed and contained by the words that I have at my disposal. Similar positions are advanced in what linguists call the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which in its strong form argues that the language one speaks determines one’s social reality (Sapir 1941 [1929]: 162); in Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality (1966), which proposes that language and other symbolic forms construct the reality in which human beings live and operate; and Jean Baudrillard’s Simulations (1983 [1981]: 1), in which he famously argued (by way of reference to a short story by Jorge-Luis Borges) that ‘the territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory – precession of simulacra – it is the map that engenders the territory.’

In Being and Time, Heidegger mobilizes and differentiates the instrumental and constitutive views of language by distinguishing between what he calls language and Rede, which has typically been translated as ‘talk’ or ‘discourse’. For Heidegger, discourse is the more fundamental aspect; it is the ‘existential-ontological foundation of language’ (BT: 203). Formulated in this way, talk has a constitutive function. It is not an instrument useful for making representations of the world; it is the principal mode of the world’s disclosure, that by which entities come to show themselves in the first place. Language, by contrast, is how discourse gets expressed. It is, as Heidegger describes it, ‘a totality of words [and] as an entity within-the-world, this totality thus becomes something which we may come across as ready-tohand’ (BT: 204). This means that ‘language’, at least as far as Heidegger uses this term in Being and Time, is considered to be an instrument for expressing what had been initially disclosed in and by discourse.² If, as Guignon argues, the earlier Heidegger was pulled in two different directions regarding this issue, it is his use of Rede or discourse that designates the constitutive interpretation and language that indicates instrumentalism.

The constitutive/instrumental distinction is not just an academic insight that is of interest to a small number of philosophers, linguists and sociologists. It is something we all know and understand from our everyday experience and encounter with media – whether the one-to-many form of traditional mass media or the many-to-many model of the internet and social media applications on our mobile devices. Many of the things that occur in our world, like a violent street protest on the other side of the globe, are not available to us in some immediate and direct form. What we know of these events and what we can say about them is something that is initially formed, shaped or determined by the mediated representations that come to us through stories and information published in newspapers, reports presented on television news programmes, or user-produced information accessed over the internet by way of Twitter, Facebook or other Web 2.0 applications. In these cases, we might think that these media are merely representing events on the other side of the world, but they are, in fact, creating for us the very reality we think they merely represent.

COMMUNICATION AND DISCOURSE

‘There is nothing outside the text.’ That does not mean that all referents are suspended, denied, or enclosed in a book, as people have claimed, or have been naïve enough to believe and to have accused me of believing. But it does mean that every referent, all reality has the structure of a differential trace, and that one cannot refer to this ‘real’ except in an interpretive experience.

Derrida 1993: 148

Derrida himself takes issue with the common misreading of his now (in)famous statement, il n’y a pas de hors-texte (there is nothing outside the text) (1976 [1967]: 158). He makes explicitly clear that this statement does not mean that everything is contained in a book such that the ‘real world’ of existing things is nothing more than a fiction. Rather, he is pointing out that linguistic signs and the other means of communication are not some secondary phenomenon that are added onto a more primordial and immediate experience of things. Il n’y a pas de hors-texte means that language and mediated representations of all kinds are inextricably bound up with how reality is disclosed to us. World disclosure [Erschlossenheit] is a related Heideggerian concept that emphasizes the extent to which our experience of reality is inevitably context-dependent rather than being a simple case of direct correspondence between the observer and neutral, objective phenomena (a theme developed in detail in chapter 2).

In specific relation to language, this point is further underlined by considering how it is already encoded and manifest in the very material of the words we use to describe it. ‘Immediacy’ is the term that is typically employed to identify that kind of direct experience of things outside language and beyond the influence of mediation. We say, for example, that there is a direct and immediate encounter with things prior to and in advance of our making mediated representations of it – first in language and then via other media. It should be noted, however, that the word ‘immediacy’ is formed by adding the negative prefix ‘im-’ to the root word ‘media’. So in terms of the very word itself, ‘immediacy’ is derived from ‘media’ and understood as its negative counterpart. Mediation, in other words, is the original and normative state of things and the immediate is only formed by way of negating what is always and already available by way of mediation. This means that what is said about language in Being and Time does not necessarily result from Heidegger being torn between instrumentalist and constitutivist perspectives as Guignon argued. Instead, what Heidegger describes (in and by language) is the fact that what is called ‘language’ can be seen and must be properly understood according to both instrumentalist and constitutivist viewpoints and this necessitates a much more complex and nuanced understanding of communication than is normally allowed for within Communication Studies.

Since the groundbreaking work of Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver during and shortly after the Second World War, the dominant characterization of communication has been one of a dyadic process by which a message selected at an information source, or sender, is encoded and convey...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 We Need to Talk About Media
• 2 Mediated Truth
• 3 In Medias Res
• 4 The Dasign of Media Apps
• Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Index