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June 9, 1997
Some Thoughts on Amedia

IN A WORLD of media abundancy, in which The Media overarch even the most ancient and buttressed cultural boundaries, spanning huge geographies with apparent effortlessness, and in which The Media undertake a never- ending dialog with, for, and about itself which, we can only conclude, is more for its benefit than for its purported audience of percipients (who are encouraged to remain as passive as possible)-but all this is old hat. It should be a given and, for the purposes of this discussion, is.

What we are interested in is a way to overarch media and-not simply to remove its controlling aspects in our lives-but rather to deform its purported power to the task of making lived life more interesting and philosophically satisfying. Some of us sit motionless before devices that flicker and vibe us into a form of hypnosis. We believe we are being entertained (held in place during the gaps between the really interesting events in our lives). Mediation is the source of a type of cognitive betrayal that we wish to counteract. It is the middleman in this complex of transactions that we cannot trust, for she is in it for his own benefit and, too often, entirely disinterested in the ramified effects of her tireless activity.

Detournement is the tired progeny of the 60s attitude that we can have our way with media and thus seduce it to spread our infectious messages. This ploy smoldered briefly but never caught fire, although the works it created did much to inspire our current world view. Its model is important because it does not assume that simple prophylaxis is the key; i.e., intellectually "inoculating" ourselves through awareness of processes and purposes (this is merely a tentative first step which, again, should be a given). Detournement goes further by adopting a trojan horse strategy wherein cultural workers disguise their messages just long enough to get through the gates of perceptual filtering calcified through years of use and into the very vault of the ideosphere of the percipient. Detournement's great contribution was that it saw that radical content did not require radical form; instead, wrapped in conventional form, a radical idea might get through and to awareness by appearing to be undangerous and possibly even emanating from "normal" or "mainstream" channels. It was a good move, but it did not go nearly far enough.

If not detournement, then what? Rather than try to lay out a consolidated plan of action around a core ideological position, we propose something purposely more vague. This vagueness will, hopefully, have the virtue of inspiring a closure of the gaps of intuition and resourcefulness, without locking into an embalming set of (in the end) arbitrary pre-drawn conclusions. We call our rough sketch of a concept amedia. "No middlemen" is our pretext and motto. (We must have anti-mottoes, too, but we will leave that for later.)

Amedia allows us to categorically use (enjoy, consume, pillage, comment upon, ignore) media without succumbing to its controlling aspects (or at least, limiting its control over us). This requires a certain amount of intellectual distance. We can allow ourselves to become absorbed in an episode of Seinfeld, for example, but each time product placement occurs (which includes Seinfeld itself), we are keenly aware of it. We would never make the claim that it therefore has no effect on us, but awareness is a stronger position relative to this phenomenon than is unconsciousness. This, by itself, is not amedia.

We recombine mediac elements into new constructs that did not exist before we made them. Through these efforts, we construct our own identities as amediacs, and we open a door to a potential community of amediacs. We declare a kind of independence through these acts. If we can have an imaginary universe such as "cyberspace," then we certainly can have a mental construct such as amedia, as well. We recognize, at the same time, that the independence we declare is an illusion. We consider this case to be a liberating illusion. This, by itself, is not amedia.

We use media as disrespectfully as it attempts to use us. We love the frisson of we get from recognizing a well-placed amediac gesture. We are both producers and percipients of our own works; we do not own them; we stand outside of them. We give them to the world. They are the opposite of personal statements; they are made with the community of amediacs in mind. This, by itself, is not amedia.

We throttle the middleman and all his works. We damn the Bible and everything that basks in its overarching self-importance. We challenge and accept the rules of logic. Logic helps us build a hideous world, then it helps us tear it down. Self-referentiality is the enemy. Recursion is the enemy. Belief is the enemy. Language such as this is the enemy. Nothing is mediated if we see it for what it is. We must make something new out of everything. These, by themselves, are not amedia.

We go out on a limb saying these things, and hope to accept any challenge that comes of it. We will not lose ourselves in these iambic cadences. This, in itself, is not amedia.

We drift through a mediac world of some collective making, ours to a greater or lesser degree, via our honed and balanced interpretive faculties. We live and love not without referring with nearly every breath to this world of our own making, which lives within a larger world (which we find endlessly fascinating) that is sometimes hostile towards us, but can do nothing but provide us with intellectual nutriment that can be put to use in our endeavors.

A mediated experience, as a rule, considers its audience carefully, and then cultivates it as raw material. The audience is the overbalanced part of the equation. This can be an efficient and fairly precise endeavor. The amediac could, in theory, aspire to this efficiency, but why would he? She treasures the fleeting happenstance of a collision of disrelated elements in free flux from their resident matrix. That is to say (to be more clear about it) things are culled rather than cultivated. The amediac simply creates an experience that may use the media, but never comes from it. But why?

Why not? is the answer that comes the closest. He seeks to make life blossom with all manner of rich, interesting experience. Possibilities are never boundless; each one enters the room hand-in-hand with a limitation. Freedom comes paradoxically from accepting, even enjoying this.

For some, this takes the form of deeply knowing your tools. For others, it is understanding a desired audience so that they can be reached effectively. They must offer their audience forms they will be receptive to, and at the same time fiercely resist compromising what they want to do.

Still others find a rejection of social roles and concepts such as "art" and "creativity," to be the answer. We need walls to hang our pictures on. We just want to built these walls for ourselves.

Life is the real artwork that we should aspire to-we have accepted this for ten years-and pulling life down to the level of art denigrates life itself. Positioning ourselves between these two barriers (art and non-art; life and death) yields the nutritious tension that we need to live beyond just surviving. We seem to need day jobs, to our never-ending consternation, so the task becomes using that, too. By all means, steal the paper clips, but do so in amedia.

(A text in progress.) by Lloyd Dunn

August 4, 1997
On the Construction of the Public

I

I have been thinking a lot about your ideas regarding the construction of the Public. I have realized that this is really the Enlightenment project, to create a citizenry that is so conditioned by certain standards of behavior that they act according to these mores in a way that feels natural, an enlightenment ideal of "freedom in servitude." So part of this project was the construction of the public as a subject and paradoxically an object, a self-aware aesthetic object. Aesthetics had become a way to locate the values of a new social morality in the subject themselves, since the totalitarian structures of the monarchy were failing. The unforseen results, of course,has been the combination of this enlightenment idealism and the utilitarianism of post-industrial capitalism in the form of the ultimate aesthetic object, the commodity. Thus the new citizenry is conceived of as enlightened consumers, engaged in "virtual," mediated relationships where consumer choice is equated with political choice. It is a double-edged sword. We are allowed to conceive of ourselves as individuals, as long as we accept the socialized roal of consumer. As consumer, we are a kind of holographic figure of society as a whole, as individual, we are allowed our choice of the variety of consumer products presented to us for our pleasure. As producer, we produce all these possible choices. But the choices are all the same: to equate having with being. For the enlightenment goal of locating value in the individual has failed as the externalized apparati of spectacular capitalism demands empty containers for its constantly revalorized object -- the commodity.

II

Should amediasts reverse the normal conception of mediation? I think people typically imagine that there is a greater perception of mediation the more one is aware of the artifacts of the technology, the scratches on a record, etc...Thus there is the goal of increasing transperancy of media, cds, and so on. However, perhaps mediation is actually related to a decreased awareness of the media. The more you are aware of the medium itself, the more you experience it as that, ie: you are listening to a phonograph, or to the radio, and so on. The less you are aware of the media, the more you are led to believe you are experiencing another kind of event, a concert, a discussion, and so on. Thus mediation is the effect of being distanced from the immediate event as a result of a lack of awareness of the mediating technology. Mediation increases with transperancy.

by Ralph Johnson

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