Excommunication

Three Inquiries in Media and Mediation

Alexander R. Galloway, Eugene Thacker, McKenzie Wark

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780226925226, 9780226925219
• eBook ISBN: 9780226925233
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Always connect—that is the imperative of today's media. But what about those moments when media cease to function properly, when messages go beyond the sender and receiver to become excluded from the world of communication itself—those messages that state: "There will be no more messages"? In this book, Alexander R. Galloway, Eugene Thacker, and McKenzie Wark turn our usual understanding of media and mediation on its head by arguing that these moments reveal the ways the impossibility of communication is integral to communication itself—instances they call excommunication.

 

In three linked essays, Excommunication pursues this elusive topic by looking at mediation in the face of banishment, exclusion, and heresy, and by contemplating the possibilities of communication with the great beyond. First, Galloway proposes an original theory of mediation based on classical literature and philosophy, using Hermes, Iris, and the Furies to map out three of the most prevalent modes of mediation today—mediation as exchange, as illumination, and as network. Then, Thacker goes boldly beyond Galloway's classification scheme by examining the concept of excommunication through the secret link between the modern horror genre and medieval mysticism. Charting a trajectory of examples from H. P. Lovecraft to Meister Eckhart, Thacker explores those instances when one communicates or connects with the inaccessible, dubbing such modes of mediation "haunted" or "weird" to underscore their inaccessibility. Finally, Wark evokes the poetics of the infuriated swarm as a queer politics of heresy that deviates from both media theory and the traditional left. He posits a critical theory that celebrates heresy and that is distinct from those that now venerate Saint Paul.

 

Reexamining commonplace definitions of media, mediation, and communication, Excommunication offers a glimpse into the realm of the nonhuman to find a theory of mediation adequate to our present condition.

DARK MEDIA

Eugene Thacker

ALONE AT LAST

It is said that the shortest horror story ever written is Frederic Brown’s story “Knock,” published in the December 1948 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories. The story, in its entirety, is as follows:

The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door . . .

A variation on the story appeared few years later, in the July 1957 issue of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. There Ron Smith published “The Horror Story Shorter by One Letter Than the Shortest Horror Story Ever Written”:

The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a lock on the door . . .

While they differ only by a single letter, each story encapsulates within itself a very different kind of horror—the horror of an unknown mediation that is about to happen, and the horror of the absence of mediation that has already happened. Who—or what—is it that could be knocking at the door? Who—or what—has put the lock on the door? How should one answer a knock from beyond, and where is the key to a lock that at once shuts one in and shuts some other entity out? Which is the greater horror, the something that wants to come in, or the impossibility of ever going out, that something unknown that is locked out, or that something all-too-familiar that is locked in?

However, what both stories have in common is that they present to us situations in which communication is impossible. This is one sense of the term excommunication—the impossibility of communication, that is nevertheless presented or “communicated” as such. In these stories, communication is impossible because we are dealing with the last man on Earth, one of those imaginary end-of-the-world scenarios so popular in the genres of horror and science fiction. When there is only one, communication serves no purpose; at best one speaks to imaginary others or, what amounts to the same thing, one speaks to a redoubled self. Only delusion, glossolalia, and madness can result. Just another day, this same room, the same chair, the same daylight or darkness, and the enigmatic door, suspended in ambiguity. Sooner or later, some sort of communication must take place—the knock must be answered, the lock must be removed. In fact, a life without communication seems unthinkable, if not unlivable. It is as if there is a communicational imperative that haunts every possibility of solitude, refusal, and silence; it is as if communication must have its say, even if it necessitates the dissolution of the subject it is meant to reaffirm and bolster.¹

It is for this reason that these two little stories are of interest. They encapsulate an impossibility of communication that is at the heart of the communication concept itself. But notice that this initial impossibility of communication—being the last man on Earth—immediately fails. In the first story, it turns out that either one is mistaken (one is not the last man on Earth, another is knocking at the door) or that one is correct (one is the last man on Earth, yes, but there are other beings that await, perhaps impatiently, just outside the door).

Something similar takes place in the second story, except here the ambivalent promise of solitude is interrupted by a different sort of gesture. It is not the affirmative gesture of a knock that interrupts, but the more negative gesture of a lock that prevents passage. Here, as in the first story, either one has put the lock there themselves (but what is there to fear, since there is no one else outside?), or someone or something else has put the lock there, and without first asking permission.

The end result of both stories is the same. In both, the solitude implied by being the last man on Earth is immediately interrupted by the communicational imperative. But this is a communication that can never really take place, for how can one communicate with someone—or something—that is presumably beyond the pale of all human notions of communication? And how can communication take place when the only gesture of communication—a lock on the door—forbids it? In both instances the form of communication remains intact, though its content either exceeds it or withdraws from it. A communicational imperative is expressed, but one either confronts an otherness beyond all possible communication, or communication’s possibility is enigmatically foreclosed and withdrawn.

In the preceding chapter, we saw how Alexander Galloway invoked excommunication across three different modes of mediation. Each mode shows how communication encounters its own impossibility. Tied as Hermes is to the idea of hermeneutics, excommunication comes to be understood as an always contentious and often confrontational testing of the limits of communication. Hermes is the messenger who is a deceiver, the wayward guide, the trusted courier whose own words involve entanglement. At the same time, the luminous communication of Iris presents a different window onto excommunication. Rather than the threat of excommunication into foreign lands, Iris represents the reverse threat, that communication will cease entirely as the communicational structure collapses into itself, resulting in pure immediacy. Finally, there is a third mode, the swarming exemplified by the Furies. The Furies are a flat assemblage, and as such lapse into the absolute vacuity of a kind of non-communication.

By contrast, in the chapter following this one, McKenzie Wark proposes another approach to the excommunication concept. Rather than taking excommunication as the alwaysnegotiating, always-critical in-between (where both signal and noise uneasily co-exist), Wark suggests that excommunication be thought of in relation to massively distributed forms of communication that exceed normative—and human—forms of communication. Either the nonhuman punctures normative human communication in an excommunicational rupture, or communication itself is so radically transformed and alien that to speak of communication at all makes little sense.

Proceeding from this, we can add another dimension to the notion of excommunication, and that is the way in which excommunication collapses the two extreme poles of mediation—that of pure immediacy and that of total opacity. It seems that there is always the communicational imperative, even if it is to respond by saying no, refusing, or ignoring the imperative. This is a more melancholic form of mediation, a mediation that seems to have already failed before the drama has even begun. In this sense, communication cannot be thought of apart from its own annulment, even though, in this possibility of annulment, one always seems to return to the knock or the lock on the door. We can thus propose another definition: excommunication is a double movement in which the communicational imperative is expressed, and expressed as the impossibility of communication. In excommunication, the very possibility of communication is annulled. Excommunication employs a logic of negation, a logic that dreams of an absolute negation, though the truth is that this negation is always shadowed by an engimatic residue—the message that says “there will be no more messages.”

THE REALISM OF THE UNSEEN

In the sections that follow, this double movement of excommunication will be traced through cultural examples drawn mostly from the genre of supernatural horror, examples that are expressed through a variety of media, including literature, film, television, and the graphic novel. These examples will eventually take us into the shadowy corners of medieval mysticism, particularly that branch known as apophatic mysticism (from apophanai, “saying away,” or speaking by negations). The aim is to undertake a sort of experiment—to think about communication, media, and mediation less in terms of technical artifacts or technical processes, and more in terms of the capacity of media to at once mediate between two points, while at the same time negating this very same form of mediation. This means understanding media as not simply defined by on/off states or the obligation to stay connected, and not simply as technical conductors for a vitalistic, communicational flux and flow, but understanding media as embodying a basic paradox: mediation as those moments when one communicates with or connects to that which is, by definition, inaccessible. I will be calling this enigma—the mediation of that which cannot be mediated—dark media. Dark media are, in a way, the consequence or the effect of excommunication. And, if excommunication precedes or conditions every communication, we might likewise say that dark media precede or condition every mediation.

One example of dark media is given at the birth of cinema—which also coincides with the birth of the horror film. Georges Méliès, known to many for his innovative use of special effects in early cinema (and generally credited with the first horror film), gives us three interesting examples of mediation that combine a fascination with new technologies while also evoking a sense of the supernatural.

In the film Long Distance Wireless Photography (Photographie électrique à distance, 1908), a young bohemian inventor demonstrates to his benefactors his unique invention—a machine that captures the living, animated image of a person on a screen. The invention itself is a hodge-podge of steampunk-like devices, including a mirror-like “camera,” a large cinematic screen, and an assembly of gears and turbine engines driving it all. At first, the machine faithfully captures still images, which then take on a life of their own on the screen. But something goes awry, as the benefactor and his wife sit to have their images “animated” on screen. The benefactor’s wife has her rather pudgy face magnified into contorted, grotesque expressions, while the benefactor himself is transformed on screen into a monstrous, clown-like monkey. A minor riot ensues, culminating in the overheating and destruction of the machine itself.

Another Méliès film, The Mysterious Retort (L’Alchimiste Parafaragamus ou La cornue infernale, 1906), depicts an aged alchemist who attempts to use magic from a grimoire to call up angels, demons, and other unnamed creatures. The lab itself features a large glass container set atop a brick alchemist’s stove. The glass container itself is centrally displayed like a screen, within which we see a sequence of figures (a mythical female figure bearing gold, a monstrous spider with a human head, and finally the Devil himself).

Finally, in the film The Black Imp (Le diable noir, 1905), a bourgeois lodger at a hotel is perplexed when furniture in his room suddenly disappears. Chairs vanish just as he is about to sit down; tables and wardrobes suddenly move as he is about to unpack. When he tries to put everything back in place, the furniture magically multiplies out of control. Eventually a demonlike figure becomes visible as the trickster behind it all; a chase ensues and eventually the entire room is destroyed, leaving only the laughing demon behind.

Like many of Méliès’s films, these films can be read as allegories of the “new” medium of cinema, a medium as magical as it is technological. Taken in sequence, these three films give us three views of media and mediation. In Long Distance Wireless Photography, mediation takes place via media, in the sense that we understand “media” to be commensurate with technological devices and the machine apparatus. While Méliès has fun with the baroque complexity of the machine in the film, it also serves a kind of pedagogical function as to the inner workings of cinema itself, as we witness first the proper mediation from the thing itself to its (animate, living) representation, and then the accidental or unexpected mediation of the benefactor and his wife into grotesque monsters. But between the thing itself (the living body in a space) and the mediated image (animate on the screen), there is the medium of the machine, the apparatus, the device. In a sense Long Distance Wireless Photography is the encapsulation of media in the era of industrial capitalism, at once transparently mediating between the thing and its representation, while also providing some value added, either in terms of enhancement or synthesis.

But the next two films, while they still take up the issue of mediation, do something different. The Mysterious Retort, borrowing as it does from Renaissance alchemy and the Faust myth, analogizes modern industrial technology in terms of another “technology,” that of magic, alchemy, and the occult. Instead of cameras, turbine engines, and cinematic screens, we see a grimoire, magical potions, and an alchemical glass. Again, both the expected and unexpected happen—the alchemist does get his gold, but he also gets more than he bargained for, as the alchemical lab—like the technological lab in Long Distance Wireless Photography—is eventually consumed in smoke and fire. Importantly, the alchemist—like the inventor in Long Distance Wireless Photography—is rarely in control of the medium or of the process of mediation. In The Mysterious Retort, the Devil seems to be coordinating everything we see in the alchemical glass, while in Long Distance Wireless Photography it seems to be the machine itself that generates the surprising images of its own accord.

The third film, The Black Imp, effaces mediation altogether, at least in the traditional sense. There is no machine or device, no book of spells or alchemical lab—simply a devious and unseen demon arbitrarily causing things to appear and disappear, to magically move or suddenly multiply. There is also no screen or glass upon which or within which the products of mediation appear, separating their “virtual” reality from that of the real characters themselves. The demon and the vanishing/appearing furniture are just as much a part of a shared reality as is the unsuspecting hotel lodger. Indeed, in The Black Imp, Méliès only shows the demon to us the viewers at the beginning and the end of the film. Otherwise the demon is invisible to both the character and viewers—we as viewers do have the added advantage of knowing that the demon is invisibly present in the room, but we also are left to fill in the relations of causality that we subsequently witness, in effect speculatively inserting the demon—as a mediator—into the supernatural events of the vanishing table or multiplying chairs.

These, like many of Méliès’s films, appropriate the vernacular of supernatural horror (monsters, ghosts, spirits, demons, magic, and the occult), but they do so not without a good deal of humor. The apparatus always breaks down and consumes itself, the inventors or magicians always lose control, and in the end it is the demon that has the last laugh. Méliès’s films chart the enigma of media and mediation, an enigma at once technological and theological: how to make something present that is absent, how to make something alive that is dead, how to create something out of nothing. In spite of Méliès’s overt humor, there is always something that recedes into a shadowy, unspoken region: the machine that shows us more truth than we are prepared to see, the magic that calls up forces beyond human comprehension, or the everyday apprehension of an invisible nexus of causality, behind the veil of what can be seen and heard and felt. Méliès’s “horror” films are not only pedagogical moments of mediation, but they also point to the shadowy absence at the core of all mediation. In any given moment of mediation, there is always a minimal separation, a differential, a gap, lacuna, or fissure . . . a blind spot. This is both what conditions and what undermines mediation, but it is also the reason why the media that fully succeed are also the media that fail. The most perfect mediation comes in The Black Imp, in the form of demonic possession; but for us as viewers to realize this, it must be remediated as a special-effects film, and we must be shown the demon, so that we can go back to viewing the scene “as if” the demon isn’t there. The fantastical element of Méliès’s films is to be able to see what media and mediation usually don’t make visible—this is why Méliès’s films are about film, and more broadly, about technological mediation. But it is, of course, only through the medium and its “special effects” that one can gain a glimpse of what is not mediated.

Perhaps this can serve as a description for the types of media and mediation we will be calling “dark media.” Dark media have, as their aim, the mediation of that which is unavailable or inaccessible to the senses, and thus ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Series Page
• Contents
• Introduction: Execrable Media
• Love of the Middle
• Dark Media
• Furious Media: A Queer History of Heresy
• Notes