Abstract
Sybille Krämer’s Medium, Messenger, Transmission: An Approach to Media Philosophy is the first book-length English translation of the prolific German media scholar. It is published as part of the ‘Recursions: Theories of Media, Materiality and Cultural Techniques’ book series edited by Jussi Parikka, Anna Tuschling and Geoffrey Winthrop-Young. Recursions aims to promote situated understandings of media theory that are grounded in practices as they unfold within specific contexts. Krämer’s offering fits in well with these objectives as it develops a theory of transmission where transmission is understood as an embodied, material process as opposed to a disembodied or invisible media phenomenon.
The book is prefaced with a useful introduction written by translator Anthony Enns that summarises Krämer’s general approach to transmission. Enns situates Krämer’s thought in relation to dominant themes in media, information and communication theory and signposts how her theorisation of transmission offers a productive intervention. He suggests that Krämer articulates a realm of mediality that is curiously disregarded by frameworks which seek to place agential emphasis on two opposing poles of what Krämer calls ‘the transmission event’: the technical apparatus transmitting the message or the receiver who interpret ‘the message’s’ contents. Krämer, on the contrary, presents a theory of transmission located in the middle of these two polarities as she elaborates on the ‘mediating function’ (p. 39) of the messenger/medium.
Medium, Messenger, Transmission is thus framed as an ‘outlandish effort’ in relation to contemporary media conditions: its focal point – the messenger – is according to Krämer a ‘relic of an epoch when the technical support of long-distance communication was not available’ (p. 19). Through the figure of the messenger, Krämer argues that it is possible to locate the ‘primal scene of media transmission’ (p. 19).
The book is organised into distinct sections that include, among others, ‘Methodological Considerations, The Messenger Model and Transmissions’. At times, the rigidity of these sections separates the theory from its application in ways that are perhaps unhelpful. As a reader, I felt that the Introduction, which outlines different theoretical conceptualisations of transmission, could have been synthesised with the section on ‘Transmissions’. In a more positive view, however, one can see that these discrete sections enable Krämer to clearly distinguish between different parts of her argument that, due to its polemical aspirations, necessarily have to be delivered carefully. Overall Medium, Messenger, Transmission is a complex theoretical work that refuses to offer any neat conclusions to the reader. The argument unfolds slowly at times, operating as a series of incremental incursions into the diverse occurrences of transmission processes. Arguments are repeated, unravelled and developed, yet there is always a sense that ideas are being systematically tested across diverse transmission phenomena.
Krämer’s text could also be perceived as outlandish for how it actively eschews discussion of commonplace media and communication forms such as radio or television. This is part of a deliberate strategy ‘to trace by analogy the functional logic of the messenger precisely where the mediality of this process was not at all obvious’ (p. 165). The result is an expanded understanding of media processes through which Krämer develops what could be called a general theory of transmission. A significant insight of the text is that it elaborates on how transmission is a cultural technique that is functionally embedded across a range of practices. It helps us to understand, in other words, how media processes are wholly part of phenomena which, on first appearances, seem to have nothing to do with the media. Inspired by the work of Michel Serres, for example, Krämer explores angels as examples of placeless border-crossers who facilitate contact between the otherness of different worlds. A discussion of viruses examines how transmitted infections occupy a host’s body, a ‘“foreign” territory, which differs from itself’ (p. 98). Other themes include the ‘indifferentiality and neutrality of money as a medium of circulation’ (p. 115), the messenger function of the translator as a figure situated between languages, the role of the analyst as a medium for transference within psychoanalysis and the embodied role of the witness within transmission. These very different examples, which are accompanied with detailed theoretical discussion of their specific transmission properties, serve to ‘expand the categorical abundance of the rather simple theoretical model of the messenger’ (p. 165).
This book is recommended to different audiences within the discipline of Media Studies. For scholars interested in learning more about media theory in Germany, Medium, Messenger, Transmission will offer a valuable introduction to Krämer’s work, a much-published theorist in the field. For those interested in how the concept of transmission has been theorised by different cultural theorists, the book outlines how several thinkers, including Walter Benjamin, Michel Serres, Régis Debray, Jean-Luc Nancy and John Durham-Peters, have conceptualised this social, cultural and technical phenomenon. Following Krämer’s intervention, we can add ‘media’ to the list of transmission approaches: in her book, she develops layer upon layer of concepts that render visible the properties of media relations by defining transmission as a cultural technique and phenomenon. Given how transmission infrastructures profoundly shape the social contours of 21st century life, Krämer’s theories offer a much-needed resource for analysing what is at stake when ‘messages’ migrate from one context to another, a movement that Krämer claims is not easily reducible to spatial or temporal dimensions. It is here that Krämer’s ontology of the (media) carrier emerges, located in the unidirectional, asymmetrical act of transmission. It is what Krämer calls the rehabilitation of ‘the postal principle’ which refuses to privilege dialogue and reciprocity as the ‘unalterable essence of communication’ (p. 24), but instead suggests a powerful distancing from the normatively positive rhetoric which characterises celebratory accounts of media connectivity, especially in a digital environment. It is here perhaps that Krämer’s theory offers the most discomforting proposition: that at the heart of the transmission event is an irreducible social distance that cannot be bridged, even if its implications must be conceptualised, interrogated and transmitted.