Abstract
Media can be a maddening subject, one full of disagreements and discrepancies. As part of the University of Minnesota Press’ In Search of Media series, Action at a Distance examines media from three critical perspectives to directly engage the complexities and contradictions informing a simple overarching question: What does it mean to act upon something through distance? In their respective essays, John Durham Peters, Florian Springer and Christina Vagt offer nuanced responses to this query by assessing various media, their physical qualities and their relationships with distanced action.
Florian Sprenger’s Temporalities of Instantaneity: Electric Wires and the Media of Immediacy examines the cable, focusing on its impact upon the perception of distance and temporality. Analysing English researcher Stephen Gray’s electrical experiments, Sprenger argues ‘the media history of the cable is a history of the phantasm of immediacy’ (p. 4), a history ‘of connections and disconnections, of temporalities and spatialities’ (p. 3). Here, ‘the cable temporalizes spatialization’ defeating space in time and ‘thereby creating a time between two places’ (p. 25). However, even ‘instant’ speed has a delay, and Sprenger notes ignoring it ‘means ignoring its influence on how we are connected and disconnected’ (p. 20), thus obscuring spatial relations.
Sprenger scrutinizes how cables affect transmission, reception and communication with clarity, stating ‘what Stephen Gray transmitted in that garden in the south of England in the summer of 1729 was transmissibility; what was communicated in his garden was communicability itself’ (p. 3). For Sprenger, the general goal of communication is to defeat ‘temporal or spatial difference, to make it disappear’ (p. 2); by focusing on the cable, Sprenger offers insight into how communicative media and their utilization can alter understandings of time, space, speed and place.
John Durham Peters’ kaleidoscopic A Cornucopia of Meanwhiles examines ‘human-based simultaneous action at a distance’ through ‘meanwhile structures’ (p. 30). These structures are ‘techniques of shuttling between two points in space at the same time that are too far apart for the unaided human senses’ (p. 30), and Peters compares examples of them to illustrate the idiosyncratic dynamics necessary for comprehending simultaneity in space and time, his key point being ‘banking time is a way to span space’ (p. 30).
Peters looks at texts as disparate as the Bible, Homer’s Odyssey, Aristotle’s Politics, works by Chinese poets like Zhang Jiuling and Li Bai, and critical analyses by Benedict Anderson and Hartmut Winkler; even singer Billy Bragg is playfully referenced. Peters argues what he calls ‘oblivious simultaneity’, where innumerable actions occur without our direct awareness, is a state ‘written into our condition’ (p. 49) which ‘seems simply part of the order of things’ (p. 29). However, what Peters refers to as ‘conscious or controlling simultaneity’, by which we may be cognizant of or act upon simultaneous events at a distance, ‘requires a logistical link of some kind in matter or mind, in transportation or communication’ (p. 29). Analysing simultaneity reveals how synchronization requires resources like energy and time, while affecting space and, by extension, our communicative practices.
Christina Vagt’s intense and expansive Physics and Aesthetics: Simulation as Action at a Distance investigates the role of distance in biomaterial computer simulations, which ‘mediate between image and model’ (p. 55). Aesthetics are important here, as Vagt argues, ‘computer simulations are aesthetic procedures in and of themselves, because they create their objects of study – they make things appear that weren’t known before’ (p. 53). In keeping with the book’s theme, these necessitate ‘a certain temporal and spatial distance to real-world phenomena of the living environment and its corporeal and tactile information’ (p. 55).
Vagt explores ideas such as Bergson’s cinematographic mechanism as it relates to perception and Hans Blumenberg’s thoughts on concepts, writing ‘human reason as the sum of conceptuality relies on action at distance, on the aesthetic intermediation between concepts and objects’ (p. 56). Vagt also analyses two modelling simulations, and states such simulations are not exercises in dematerialization because ‘they just operate from a distance, in absence of the object, like concepts and numbers’ (p. 72). A simulation permits, ‘the recognition of something that cannot be perceived, measured, or experienced in any other way. It enables one to discern gaps within the perceived, the measured, the experienced’ (p. 73), and does so by defining limits, as ‘the mapping of possibilities is production of negation’ (p. 73). Distance is vital in these pursuits.
Action at a Distance offers interesting thoughts about how distance affects media while illuminating the breadth of the phenomena. The differing approaches and subject matter of the contributors create an intriguing mix which reflects the richness of the topic, and it could be useful in an advanced undergraduate media theory seminar or a historically oriented science and technology studies course for this reason. Although short, the subjects in Action at a Distance are skillfully covered in its 104 pages; the impressive depth of Vagt’s contribution – a dynamic, challenging piece which rewards multiple readings – is particularly commendable considering its brevity.
This text may function as a springboard to address related ideas, such as Harvey’s (1990) time-space compression or Innis’ (2008) thoughts on radio’s nullification of geographical borders. Despite being occasionally difficult to parse, the robustness of Action at a Distance may prove valuable to those with only a passing familiarity with the evolution of media as a theory and as a historical phenomenon as well as its relationship(s) with materiality, time and space. Although the book is slightly circuitous and sometimes repetitive, this is in keeping with the nature of analysing something as polysemous as media, and so its construction honours its subject both thematically and philosophically.