The Electronic Presence of Absence

The Electronic Presence of Absence: Renediating Media Studies Andrew Murphie (bio) Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Durham and London: Duke University press, 2000), 257 pages. Haunted Media is one of those books that should have been written a long time ago, but perhaps has only been possible to write recently. For one thing, it takes up the recent concern with displacing secular-centric thinking about culture (a concern best typified by William E. Connolly’s work) without abandoning a fairly rigorous commitment to cultural materialism. The result is a history of the full glory of media metaphysics that we should always have had. In the process, the book ‘remediates’ (to use Bolter and Grusin’s term) media theory itself in terms of the history of popular culture. The result is a questioning of metaphysical claims about media made by some media theory on the one hand, and a concurrent questioning of the sometimes too-quick dismissal of the cultural effects of these claims on the other. Sailing through all these matters is, of course, not an easy task. Yet for the most part Sconce is successful. I would place this book within a ‘trilogy’ of important recent works dealing with these neglected issues; the other two being David Noble’s The Religion of Technology, which details a much longer period of history, and Erik Davis’ still astounding Techngnosis, which has perhaps a little less of a cultural studies flavour than Sconce’s book, and a more particular thesis (summed up neatly in the title). Sconce’s central notion is that electronic presence has haunted culture since the invention of electronic media, particularly through the strangeness of ‘new’ media. Every new medium has given rise to new claims about contacting ‘spirits’, other worlds and so on. Every new medium in itself has proven to be somewhat ghostly. One could also add that new media continue to haunt media and cultural theory. New media, when they are ‘new’, do not just signify events but are events in themselves — or at least are significant participants in contemporary events. These events shift regimes of signs. They also change the relations between metaphysics and technics that are so crucial to culture — even as the difference between metaphysics and technics becomes hazier with each new medium. Sconce’s movement between telegraphy and television registers the difficulties new media events pose. No matter how much the attempt is made to bring new media into the fold of received ideas, ghosts, strange new places (or non-places in the case of media such as television), and even just new mental states, leak out in every direction. It is this leakage that Sconce reports: telegraphic communications with ghosts, haunted television sets, psychic invasions and what he calls the closeness between ‘simulation and psychosis’ within the televisual. Haunted Media is full of extended discussions of examples of all of these. Sconce has a knack for giving accounts which, although not without a healthy scepticism, do not take the easy way out. He never simply frames culture as completely mistaken or just plain silly when confronted with these phenomena. Indeed, the feeling by the end of the book is that culture’s varied attempts to bring media events into social structures often look more interesting and more dynamically interactive with these events than the media theorists who so often stand in judgment of culture with respect to media events. As Sconce points out, often the academy only repeats the problem it diagnoses, a too-overwhelming assumption of the power of media over culture. For example, in the introduction Sconce points to ‘social scientific media-effects research’ (4) and its assumption of a ‘public enmeshed in an immediate, interpersonal, pathological, and ultimately unmediated relationship with electronic media . . . subjects . . . doomed to misapprehend the living artifice of television as a basis for their own social “reality”’ (4–5). In the final chapter Baudrillard is convincingly argued to repeat the general assumption found in science fiction television and film of the takeover of a simulated world through the televisual, or the delusion of the senses. The alternative to this academic paranoia and critique perhaps remains a little unclear, although to

Electronic media · Multimedia · Political science · Sociology · Cinema and Media Studies · Computer Science · Psychology

• The religion of technology

  David F Noble•Choice Reviews Online•1998

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