Travels in Intermediality: ReBlurring the Boundaries

Frank.

travels in

intermedia[lity]

BERND HERZOGENRATH

An Introduction

IN HIS ESSAY QUOTATION AND ORIGINALITY, RALPH WALDO Emerson writes: Our debt to tradition through reading and conversation is so massive, our protest so rare and insignificant—and this commonly on the ground of other reading or hearing (543). While Emerson was trying to understand the cultural inertia that he saw in the literature of his day, his central premise was that artists’ minds were too burdened with the weight of previous creative work, so that they only took elements from the past and reconfigured them to their own taste in their present day. Yet he also admits that in large sense, one would say there is no pure originality. All minds quote. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands (543). Much of today’s art operates under such an aesthetic: the [re]combinatorics of different media that was forming an artistic and aesthetic profile in Emerson’s times. From intertextuality to intermediality, today, the extent of that paradigm has become immense: today’s art, creativity, and originality are marked by intermediality and sampling, by a combinatory juxtaposition of genres, media, styles and surfaces, a rejection of objective history that explores the various connections of aesthetic forms.

In his 1977 book Image—Music—Text, Roland Barthes links intermediality to interdisciplinarity, and states,

Interdisciplinarity is not the calm of an easy security; it begins effectively (as opposed to the mere expression of a pious wish) when the solidarity of the old disciplines breaks down—perhaps even violently, via the jolts of fashion—in the interests of a new object and a new language neither of which has a place in the field of the sciences that were to be brought peacefully together, this unease in classification being precisely the point from which it is possible to diagnose a certain mutation. (155)

Since then, the ever-expanding and heterogeneous field of intermediality and visual studies has grown to be one of the most vital and invigorating developments within the humanities today. Contesting both the sustained hegemony of logocentrism and the conventional and disciplinary boundaries between different arts and forms, intermediality seems to propose as its object of inquiry the entire culture of the media (literature, paintings, film, music, digital art, photography, installations, comic books, and more). Intermediality thus comprises both the links (and cross-breeds) between various art forms, and the various disciplines with which we talk about these media. As Dick Higgins stated in 1966, intermedium is the uncharted land that lies between (22) different media, and intermedial works are not governed by rules; each work determines its own medium and form according to its needs (22). For Higgins, intermediality has always been a possibility since the most ancient times . . . it remains a possibility wherever the desire to fuse two or more existing media exists (25). Intermedia[lity] thus can very literally be described as between the between.

Although he is not a media theorist proper, I would like to digress briefly and point to the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze in order to make a point about intermedia[lity]. Deleuze’s philosophy of immanence (versus transcendence) is also an explicit philosophy of the surface. In its sense-producing function, media thus belong to (or are nothing but) a surface effect. Sense, as Deleuze writes in The Logic of Sense, belongs to no height or depth, but rather to a surface effect, being inseparable from the surface which is its proper dimension. It is not that sense lacks depth or height, but rather that height and depth lack surface, that they lack sense, or have it only by virtue of an ‘effect’ which presupposes sense (72). This surface then is not flat in the sense of missing something (depth or height), but is a fractal surface, a one-sided surface like that of the Moebius strip, where opposites meet and in that encounter create sense: It is thus pleasing that there resounds today the news that sense is never a principle or an origin, but that it is produced. It is not something to discover, to restore, and to re-employ; it is something to produce by a new machinery (72).

From this perspective, media are nothing but these machineries of sense-production, and the rhizomatic interconnections among the various media are what constitute the field of intermedia[lity]. Intermedia[lity] is thus the media-version of the plane of immanence, of that fractal surface—which is not to say that first there are different media, and then there is intermedia[lity]: this rhizomatic intermedia[lity] is the quasi-ontological plane underlying all media, out of which the specific media that we know percolate, so to speak. Then there is also an epistemological side to it: we can only refer to media by using other media (the default example being language as a primary medium). So, in a way there is one intermedia[lity] that comes first, which is the quicksand out of which specific media emerge, and a second intermedia[lity] that focuses on the various interconnections possible, from the very perspective of these specific media forms.

Over the past decades, the subject of intermedia[lity] has lent itself to countless studies. Still, the ongoing and accelerating development and global convergence of technologies call for perpetual reassessment. The proposed volume contributors were invited to join in an attempt to trace new developments in a realm of fluctuating and competing discourses. How do fiction, film, music, internet, plastic, performative, and fine arts negotiate their shapes, formats, and contents? How does their interaction shape their techniques of representation, strategies of communication, and forms of reception? The proliferation of media and its technologies is rapidly and decisively transforming the humanities. Thus today, more than ever, in the light of these ongoing interactive (and intermedial) processes, Cultural Studies and American Studies are challenged to restructure and reorganize themselves as Media Studies.

As Jens Schröter outlines in his chapter, Four Models of Intermediality, the field and discourse of intermediality is very diverse. Schröter’s essay attempts to structure the field and to formulate different models of intermediality. All these models are reconstructed from relevant theoretical texts, so that Schröter’s essay can be understood as a kind of meta-theoretical approach to the notion of intermediality. The main question is: What relations do the different discourses pose between different media? At least four models are identified (of which the last two are more different sides of the same coin than completely different models): synthetic intermediality, formal (or transmedial) intermediality, transformational intermediality, and ontological intermediality. The first model, the model of synthetic intermediality, proposes the idea of a fusion of different media to super-media (or a Gesamtkunstwerk). This model has its roots in the Wagnerian concept of Gesamtkunstwerk in the nineteenth century; according to this, intermediality is highly politically connoted. One problem of this model is the differentiation of inter- and multimediality. The second model, the model of formal (or transmedial) intermediality, is built on the concept that there are formal structures (such as narrative structures) that are not specific to one medium but can be found (perhaps differently instantiated) in different media, as when the narrative realization of a film and a novel are compared. This model of intermediality uses the concept of transmedial devices, and has the problem that media specificity cannot be conceptualized within it.

Number three, the model of transformational intermediality, looks at the representation of one medium through another medium (recently the term remediation has been suggested for this). Here we must question whether this fits intermediality at all, because a represented medium is not longer a medium but a representation. Insofar as media are always contested terrains, however, this form is important, because the definition of media depends on their inter-medial representations. That’s why transformational intermediality is the flip side of the final model suggested by Schröter, the model of ontological intermediality. Media always already exist in relation to other media. So at last we must ask whether the relations should be reversed. Individual media do not exist in isolation, to be suddenly taken into intermedial relations. Intermediality is rather the ontological conditio sine qua non, which is always before pure and specific media, which have to be extracted from the arch-intermediality.

From the perspective of European media philosophy, as Katerina Krtilova argues in her essay on Intermediality in Media Philosophy, the key issue (and also the starting point of her essay) is not a given notion of intermedia, or intermedia as a term, but rather its traces in media theory: intermediality as a key philosophical concept and at the same time intermedia as marginal phenomena of media interaction, which can be dissolved by a critique of (mono)media concepts or technically by digitization. Krtilova argues that intermediality tangents a performative concept of media and their reflection which situates a medium in-between tool and mediation, subject and object, technical and symbolic, sensual and intelligible, and which defines media as a process of becoming a medium: a medium emerges from a wide range of practices, technologies, symbolic and social systems, material conditions, and so on.

The focus on different aspects of the medial, the emergence and changes of media in history, differences, breaks, the oscillation between medial forms and the creation of new relations is not only characteristic for media philosophy and the historical analysis of media or cultural technologies but also for the origins of intermedia in art and art theory. In contemporary artistic practice, the performative concept both of art and reflectivity might suggest a new form of intermediality.

One of the most consistent commonplaces about the nature of digital photography (and digital imagery more generally) is that the old claim of photographic images to represent the world faithfully, naturally, accurately, has been undermined by digitization. Traditional chemical-based photography, we are told, had an indexical relation to the referent; it was physically compelled to form an image by the light rays emanating from the subject. This image or likeness was thus doubly referential, a double copy in that it was both an impression or trace, on the one hand, and a copy or analogon on the other. Both index and icon, it provided a kind of double-entry bookkeeping of the real. Like the fossil trace, the shadow, or the mirror reflection in a still lake, traditional photography was a natural sign. It carried a certificate of realism with it as part of its fundamental ontology.

W. J. T. Mitchell’s essay on Realism and the Digital Image aims to undercut or at least complicate the prevailing myth that digital photography has a different ontology than chemical-based photography, that this ontology dictates a different relation to the referent, one based in information, coding, and signage (the symbolic realm) rather than the iconic and indexical realms of the older photography. These examples also help us to question whether this very dubious ontology (which isolates the being of photography from the social world in which it operates, and reifies a single aspect of its technical processes) has any fixed relation to issues such as authenticity and fakery or manipulated and natural images. It seems clear, Mitchell argues, that the authenticity, truth value, authority, legitimacy of photographs (as well as their aesthetic value, their sentimental character, their popularity, and many more aspects) is quite independent of their character as digital or chemical analog productions. The notion that the digital character of an image has a necessary relation to the meaning of that image, its effects on the senses, its impact on the body or the mind of the spectator, is one of the great myths of our time. It is based on a fallacy of misplaced concreteness, a kind of vulgar technical determinism that thinks the ontology of a medium is adequately given by an account of its materiality and its technical-semiotic character.

Lars Nowak, in "Mother’s Little Nightmare: Photographic and Monstrous Genealogies in David Lynch’s The Elephant Man," investigates how one medium, photography, is reflected upon by a text of another medium, David Lynch’s film The Elephant Man. This reflection includes representation as well as imitation, and its primary object is portrait photography of the nineteenth century. Photography is a point of reference both for the film’s main plot and for its allegorical framework, which link it to various developments. Joseph Merrick, the eponymous elephant man, learns how to use photographs in a socially accepted way. Step by step, he moves from the wild treatment of his mother’s photo as an intimate object of oedipal fetishization to a civilized use of family and celebrities’ photos as objects of private collection, presentation, and exchange. His learning process is part of a more general Bildungsroman, in the course of which Merrick is (re) integrated into the substitute family of Dr Treves, the Victorian upper class, and, finally, the human race as a whole.

Although show freaks were among those celebrities whose photographs were collected in the nineteenth century and Merrick, the historical person, was photographed several times as well, none of the many photographs surrounding Lynch’s Merrick show the latter himself. Photography seems to be presented here as being incapable of rendering a portrait of the monster as human, because it cannot uncover the face lying beneath the monster’s head. Only film, The Elephant Man suggests, is able to do so by showing the motions of facial expression that emerge in Merrick’s interaction with other characters.

The reasons for this precedence of film over photography are given in the framework of Lynch’s film, which juxtaposes two material genealogies. The first one is photography’s gradual transformation into cinematography, which, as Nowak shows, is brought about by a splitting of the single image, the mobilization of objects within the picture and of the picture itself, a combination of shot and counter-shot, an opening up of the frame and the addition of sound. The second material development constructed by the framework is Merrick’s monstrous fathering by an elephant, an animal genealogy that Merrick’s re-humanization tries to rectify. By drawing an analogy between both genealogies, The Elephant Man presents film as photography’s monstrous descendent, which always already resembles Merrick.

The analogy is justified by the fact that both the origin of Merrick and that of film appear as divided and derivative. Merrick has not one but several mothers, and creates them himself. Photography is complemented by the freak show and the pantomime, which were no less important for the emergence of cinema. The operation of splitting a single picture, which is usually the first step of photography’s transformation into film, is here applied to an image that is already cinematic in nature. Indeed, technically, even the freeze frame, which brings film closest to photography, still depends on a filmic succession of identical frames, and historically, photography was understood as the origin of film only after the latter’s invention. In addition, The Elephant Man arranges the different kinds of images that mediate between photography and film in a nonlinear and illogical order.

For Nowak, The Elephant Man counterbalances film’s equation with a monstrous child with its comparison with a spiritual mother. For during the course of the film, the portrait of Merrick’s mother is not only transformed from a photographic picture into a cinematic one, but also from a material image into an immaterial one. By allowing the medium of film to paradoxically participate in this mythological immediacy, The Elephant Man completes its celebration of film as a medium that is superior to that of photography.

Michel Serres’s essay Laughs: The Misappropriated Jewels, or A Close Shave for the Prima Donna originally appeared as part of his monograph on his friend Hergé, the Belgian comic artist (whose real name was Georges Prosper Remi). An English translation of this text by Tony Thwaites and Sam Mele appeared in 1983 in the journal ART & TEXT, and has since then been out of print—I am very grateful to be able to reprint it here (with some minor alterations).

In his reading of Hergé’s comic book, Serres shows that the medium of the comic—itself an intermedium, in which images and text combine to create more than the sum of their parts—does not (have to) follow and imitate traditional media such as literature, music, painting, or film. In fact, Hergé’s comic book is revealed by Serres as being an essay about communication channels (another version of what media stands for) gone wrong and wild: Serres’s reading of Hergé shows the scrambling of media in all its guises.

In his chapter Words and Images in the Contemporary American Graphic Novel, Jan Baetens shows the relevance and the interest of word-and-image studies in studies of the American graphic novel, as itself and in relationship with tendencies and evolutions in European graphic novels. Relying on a broad definition of the genre, Baetens addresses all comic art productions in book form that address (also) an adult readership, ranging from postmodern cyberpunk superheroes comics à la Watchmen (Gibbons and Moore) to more experimental works such as Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan, to the autobiographic novel Maus by Art Spiegelman. Baetens’s essay challenges the idea that the issue of intermediality can be reduced to two fundamental questions: first, the convergences and divergences of the information carried by both visual and verbal aspects of the comic strip as hybrid medium; second, the inequality of both aspects: simultaneous but not necessarily given the same value. Instead, Baetens’s ambition is to refocus this double perspective through a systematic comparison between the North American and the European graphic novel. He stresses aspects related to techniques of storytelling and reinterprets the status of the narrative voice in the graphic novel, which is less a voice-over than a voice-with. More generally, Baetens makes a plea for a cultural analysis of the word-and-image relationships, which offers an opportunity to foreground some specific features of the American graphic novel, such as its link with the comics community at large and its less literary overtones (this aspect, however, does not prevent the graphic novel from being considered a literary genre).

Bernd Herzogenrath’s "Music for the Jilted Generation: Techno and | as Intermediality analyzes the intermedial phenomenon techno" within the context of (post) structuralist theory, literature, psychoanalysis, and philosophy. Techno originated in the dance scene and gay scene of Detroit and its warehouse culture. The essay focuses on the dance-techno act The Prodigy’s album Music For The Jilted Generation as a steering device providing thematic anchoring points during the course of the chapter.

Herzogenrath’s essay presents itself as a polylogue between the voice of The Law and samples of Lacan, Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari, Bataille, and so on, samples that can be said to speak of techno as that strange, disturbing machine always already underlying the cultural machine. Techno, in its decidedly a-political self-fashioning, thus nevertheless takes part in the radical politics of subversion. Not a subversion decidedly against The Law, against its mode of communication, but forcing signification against itself, by foregrounding the signifier against the signified, the polymorphous drive against repressive, phallic desire, pre-oedipal childhood against post-oedipal adulthood. It is thus a Rage against the machine, not from the (however illusory) position of a nonmachinic other, but a Rage of the (pure) machine against the (oedipal) machine, a "rage against the Symbolic." Techno does not speak from the position of either one or the other, not from a position of either side within difference, but from the chiastic position of difference itself, from the difference at the origin of culture and the symbolic: the law of the signifier is posed against The Law of the signified (which is the law of the signifier under determinate conditions)—"Fuck ’em and Their Law" (The Prodigy). Ultimately, Herzogenrath reads the pre-oedipal polymorphic perversity of techno as a libidinally charged equivalent to a fundamental intermedial approach.

In her essay Genuine Thought Is Inter(medial), Julia Meier examines the stage performances of the three musicians Diamanda Galás, Peaches, and Planning-torock as examples of contemporary intermedial productions that pursue the creation of a new language. In the sense of Gilles Deleuze’s understanding of Paul Klee’s famous formula in Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, they render visible the nonvisible, sonorous the nonsonorous, by exceeding the boundaries of their respective disciplines. Meier considers their personas the intermedial Gesamtkunstwerk in the sense of their ability to filter the space in between all different kinds of music styles, genres, eras, and cultures. In the clashing of all these different fields and media, a new, previously unknown space of sonic-sculptural quality is created.

In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze states that genuine thought begins with an external act of violence inflicted upon thought in order to awaken thought from its natural stupor. . . . Something in the world forces us to think. This something is an object not of recognition but of a fundamental encounter. That fundamental encounter is like a jolt, like a disequilibrium or deregulation of the senses that can only be sensed. Meier takes a closer look at just what might have constituted the jolt that could have caused deregulation in various visual and musical sequences and to further approach the aesthetic passages in which oscillations occur. The virtual space in-between carries the potential to create genuine thought as an event within the concentrated form of intermedial artwork. Hence, the creative act in its ability to produce a new language, becomes necessary for the emergence of meaning as a signifying potential.

examines some of the implications of intermedial intervention in contemporary theater in the context of The Noise of Time’s account of this production shows how reflection on all kinds of theatrical mediation makes an important part of what is seen as theater performance. It further illustrates how theater, a medium characterized by the notorious blurring of artistic boundaries (Carlson 140), transforms other media on stage to create a space for negotiating its forms and contents, and through them the spectator’s positions.

Brian W. Chanen’s chapter, "The Novel as Hypertext: Mapping Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day," examines Pynchon’s 2007 novel in light of the concept of intermediation. Chanen assumes that intermediation is a complex process of interaction among media forms that results in a work that shows signs of medial blendings that may only be apparent below the surface or material level, at a deeper structural level of representation. Following work by both N. Katherine Hayles on the nature of the influence of digital media on print works and by Marie-Laure Ryan on the functioning of narrative across various media, Chanen examines spatiality as a narrative element in different types of media. Different media formats privilege different ways of transmitting story, and in digital media there may be a privileging of spatiality at the discourse level of a narrative over temporality. This focus on spatiality in a digital text may in turn influence the presentation and reception of narrative in a print text. After first examining some work in spatial poetics in relation to both print and digital texts, Chanen’s essay aims to show that Against the Day represents a test case for the nature of the changing poetics of print as an intermediated space. Brian McHale has suggested that the novel is a step in a new direction for Pynchon and represents a text that is operating as part of what Joseph Tabbi calls a new media ecology. While Against the Day is set in a predigital time and uses the materiality of the page in a straightforward way, both its themes and its narrative structure point to an intermedial relationship with electronic hypertext. Against the Day represents at least a text that strains at the boundaries of genre because of the way in which narrativity is retained despite the work’s departure from usual—even in terms of typical postmodern moves—narrative structures.

The attention of the audience is a writer’s most precious possession, and the value of audience attention is seldom clearer than in writing for the Web. The time, care, and expense devoted to creating and promoting a hypertext are lost if readers arrive, glance around, and click elsewhere. When hypertext writers and researchers were still worried that hypertexts would enmesh readers in a confusing tangle of links, researchers called this concern The Navigation Problem. People sought to solve it in many ways: by providing many navigational tools; by keeping links simple; by using fewer links; and by organizing the links very rigidly. The heritage of this view today is reflected in tightly constrained and bureaucratic information architecture controls, in simple, hierarchical site structures, in minimalist graphic design and impoverished features. We sacrifice everything to avoid confusing the reader, only to discover that our reader now finds us shallow and dull.

As Mark Bernstein argues in Delightful Vistas: Revisiting the Hypertext Garden, the Navigation Problem was a phantom: readers are not more prone to be lost in a hypertext than to be lost in a book. Difficult concepts are still difficult, and confusing things cannot always be rendered simple; by providing abundant links in interesting and varied formats, we can help the baffled or the skeptical reader find their way. Once we relax our unjustified fear that the reader will be lost or confused, Bernstein states, we see that the hypertext is not, indeed, such a dangerous place after all, using park and forest as heuristic concepts: as in the park and forest, we delight in finding some things that are carefully planned and others that seem delightful because they appear to emerge organically and spontaneously from the material.

In park and garden, we contrive to combine the logic of underlying constraints—the contour of the terrain, the course of the stream, the immovable rock in the southeast—with plantings, with landscaping, and with architectural features. Hypertext links similarly connect ideas and media, texts and intertexts, in complex and unexpected ways that can give rise to new ideas and new media. Through park and garden our paths need not be straight. Through the collage and montage of the link we can achieve new intermedial complexity that eludes us if we restrict ourselves to merely instrumental linking.

The structural rigidity that makes navigation simple and ubiquitous, though it gives a hypertext the appearance of efficiency, can make a hypertext seem sterile, inert, and distant. We may find excitement in individual pages, but the hypertextual whole seems a mere shell enclosing variously interesting bits. According to Bernstein, rigid structure is often promoted for its efficiency and cost-effectiveness, particularly for large Web sites, but excessive rigidity can be costly. Flexible, organic structure can often communicate more directly and more succinctly while remaining more open to revision and extension.

For quite some time now, computer games have been entering academia. Espen Aarseth discusses the problems of analyzing games from a meta-methodological position: Who analyzes? Why do they analyze? What, how, how deeply do they analyze . . . and so on. In his chapter Playing Research: Methodological Approaches to Game Analysis, Aarseth explores important issues such as playing vs. nonplaying game analysis and analyst subjectivity and competence, and presents a typology of analysis positions.

Unlike game studies in mathematics or the social sciences, which are much older, games became subject to humanistic study only after computer and video games became popular. Any theoretical approach to game aesthetics implies a methodology of play, which, if not declared, becomes suspect.

How do we analyze games? Since a game is a process rather than an object, there can be no game without players playing. Since these games are about controlling and exploring a spatial representation, the game must take place inside a clearly defined game-world. In some games, typically multiuser role-playing games, the social dimension dominates. In strategy and reaction-based games, such as Command&Conquer and Tetris or Quake, the rules dominate the game. And in world-exploration games, such as Half-Life or Myst, the game-world is the dominant element.

Since all games are dominated by their rules, however, perhaps it is more accurate to say that in social games and world games, the rules dominate the experience less absolutely. When it comes to playing and player style, the playing analyst has a number of modes to choose from, depending on personal choice and game genre. Total completion is of course only possible in games with defined endings, and not in games such as Tetris or Space Invaders. The expert player is also, typically, a winner of multiplayer games. Should we expect game scholars to excel in the games they analyze? If we comment on games or use games in our cultural and aesthetic analysis, we should play those games, to such an extent that the weight we put on our examples at least matches the level of competence that we reach in our play.

Recent theory has postulated the notion of a magic circle without fully considering the intermedial potential of games that embody and express shifting and contextual spatial immersivity and embodiment. Thus, as game studies has emerged from the shadows of the computer lab, as Erik Champion argues in his chapter, The Nonessentialist Essentialist Guide to Games, the ludologists and the narratologists, the systematizers and the emergent game-play aficionados contest the field. As aspects of game-playing, art, film discourse, aesthetics, and pedagogy all have their adherents. Philosophers have singled out games as examples of an activity without a narrow definition. Is there an essence of computer game design? This chapter wishes to argue the converse to the liquid architecture theory of digital worlds posted a decade ago. Instead, Champion suggests that we may wish for vague digital media boundaries that congeal or even solidify on interaction, to direct people into different cognitive realms, be they visionary, communal, or