Media of Geology
A brief argument against media materialism
Matter, however, is never without an essential form, and it is only by virtue of this form that it is something. The more I appropriate this form, the more I come into actual possession of the thing.
-G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right (1991 [1820], §52)
In A Geology of Media, Jussi Parikka suggests that “media materialism refers to the necessity to analyze media technologies as something that are irreducible to what we think of them or even how we use them” (2014, p. 1). This is a perfectly incoherent formulation for an intellectual inquiry. Surely, in making the unintelligibility of the object the center of our analysis, we are already thinking a great deal about what we claim exceeds our ability to think about. I don’t mean to be coy; of course, I know what Parikka is trying to say: materiality in some way precedes or remains independent to thought, and that, further, this excessiveness is often obscured insofar as materiality is only ever received in forms imposed by thought. It is an old philosophical problem, much older than media studies. But the conceptual privilege apparently owed to materiality is simply posited by Parikka rather than justified. This, then, is what leads to incoherency: the excess of materiality is posited from the limited perspective of a consciousness which is, from the outset, denounced as failing to account for its own alterity. Who is thinking here, then? Who, in other words, is in a position to announce the irreducibility of materiality to its thoughtful mediations?
Before proceeding to answer that question—one left entirely unexplored in A Geology of Media—the first thing we must clarify is the ontological status of materiality. Given the incoherency of the research program, I suggest that this status remains confused in Parikka’s account. On one hand, Parikka writes of lithium as a “premediatic media material,” his point being that “mineral durations” are essential for the functioning of media apparatuses, yet in-themselves do not remain forever pliable to human ends (2014, p. 4). A radio will slowly degrade and break down; form will give way to the ‘raw’ materiality which preceded it and which will outlast its social forms. This Parikka characterizes as the “materiality of the uncontained” which runs “constantly in tension with the operations of framing” (ibid., p. 13). Once again, however, we have no criteria with which to verify this uncontained-ness of materiality. The breakdown of an apparatus does not somehow leave it unformed by consciousness; it simply takes on a different form with respect to that consciousness. If it is thought at all, it does not ever escape its cognitive mediation, definitionally.
So, this “materiality of the uncontained” explains nothing about the materiality in question; it only further mystifies the dependency of its positing on (human) consciousness. Notably, at other points in the book, Parikka appears to recognize this. His subsequent invocation of “medianatures,” for instance, belies precisely this suggestion of any ontological apriority of materiality, insofar as the term denotes some inextricable entanglement of media and nature in the emergence of “material-discursive events” (ibid., p. 14). Here, materiality is not a priori at all but instead serves as something far more heuristic, a conceptual crutch to scramble the “restriction” of thinking in “already formed human subjects;” hence, to repeat the new materialist mantra that action is not isolated to subjects but distributed in networks of human and nonhuman “agents” (ibid., p. 21).
Thus, in Parikka’s account, matter is or can be “premediatic,” yet it can also apparently be “co-constituted” with media. This is not simply a “double bind,” as he wants to insist, but a logical paradox which is simply left hanging throughout the book. At times, he will seek to highlight the “nonmediatic matter that contributes to the assemblages and durations of media as technology,” the “materiality of media” which “starts much before media become media” (ibid., pp. 36-37). Yet, again, the “co-constitutive” dynamic of “medianatures” would seem to suggest this apriority has been undermined. Consequently, at other moments in the book, the entanglement of media and nature thwart this posited independence or apriority of materiality, for instance in the discussion of e-waste in Chapter 4, the point here being to excavate the oft-neglected “afterlives” of our digital media apparatuses.
Now, one might suggest here that “medianatures” is a limited and thus not universal condition of materiality—as appears to be Parikka’s point, e.g. when emphasizing its deployment in defining the specifically technical dimension of media cultures. Certain materials may, in other words, be caught up with media, but this does not revoke the ontological status of the former from being prior and hence external to media. But even in his reference to lithium as “premediatic,” it is worth asking: in what sense? From my vantage point—indeed from any conscious vantage point—it seems a thoroughly mediated entity, both practically and conceptually. Practically, its interaction with social being is predicated upon extremely elaborate techniques for its refinement. Conceptually, its ‘social form’ is clearly cathected with all sorts of techno-optimism about green energy which push it to the center of Parikka’s ‘materialist’ critique. But even in the more traditional sense of medium (i.e. as scrutinized by Parikka, concerning semiotics), extraction regimes are highly mediated: complex processes are coordinated remotely through computers displaying field data collected by massive networks of in situ sensors in the form of highly sophisticated models to engineers and other end users.
The point, to be sure, is not to say materiality is reducible to its social mediations, but to be able to find means to justify this irreducibility, which Parikka simply does not and cannot do. He shuts himself off from the possibility of establishing any criteria for judging the objectivity of materiality precisely as he forecloses it as something wholly in-itself, beyond consciousness. Once again: who is in a position to declare lithium to be “premediatic”? Without a clarification of the relation between subject and object, thought and its content, the “materiality of the uncontained” remains merely metaphysics.
In their retort of Ludwig Feuerbach’s naive materialism, Marx and Engels had reason to ask in The German Ideology: “Where would natural science be without industry and commerce?” This proposed purity of natural science, disclosed “only to the eye of the physicist and the chemist” is in truth provided “only through trade and industry, through the sensuous activity of men”:
So much is this activity, this unceasing sensuous labour and creation, this production, the foundation of the whole sensuous world as it now exists that, were it interrupted only for a year, Feuerbach would not only find an enormous change in the natural world, but would very soon find that the whole world of men and his own perceptive faculty, nay his own existence, were missing. (1998 [1846], p. 46)
The purported purity of natural science thus has its precondition in a certain history of social development. This, Marx and Engels insist, is not to deny the externality of nature which “remains unassailed,” but to insist that this “differentiation has meaning only insofar as man is considered to be distinct from nature.” Put differently, to reckon with the externality of nature necessitates reckoning with its historical positing by (human, social) thought. To this end, in The Concept of Nature in Marx, Alfred Schmidt is likewise careful to distinguish the dialectical materialism of Marx from the naive realism which preceded him and culminated in Feuerbach. There is a difference, in other words, between positing that matter historically precedes consciousness and positing that “materiality” is some “final ontological principle” (Schmidt, 1971, p. 29).
The nature that preceded human history—the “literal deep times and deep places of media in mines and rare earth minerals” which capture so much of Parikka’s attention (2014, p. 5)—no longer exists. Consequently, we do not need media theorists to become “pseudogeologists” (Parikka). There is little value in the simple, mundane recognition that iPhones contain minerals, or that industrial processes produce waste. And producing such insights isn’t even what geology does as a scientific field of inquiry anyway. In turn, it seems to me that much more appropriate for a media scholar to conduct than a geology of media would be a study of the media of geology—that is, an inquiry into the technological mediations deployed to produce knowledge about the earth.
References
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 2001 (1820). Philosophy of Right. Translated by S.W. Dyde. Kitchener, Batoche Books.
Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. 1998 (1846). The German Ideology. Prometheus Books, Amherst, NY.
Parikka, Jussi. 2016. A Geology of Media. Minneapolis and London, University of Minnesota Press.
Schmidt, Alfred. 1971. The Concept of Nature in Marx. Translated by Ben Fowkes. Verso, London and New York.