1.2. Theoretical approach
The theoretical aim of this study is to push contemporary media theory one step further, to extend it towards another level. Considering its current state of evolution, notably its incorporation of numerous previously-independent communication
technologies—the telephone, portable music player, watch, camera, World Wide Web, to name a few—the mobile phone cannot just be seen as an ―autopoietic‖ machine, which simply supplements, enhances, or augments its existing function. It is rather a new species of media, a ―hybrid,‖ born out of the complicated interfacing of various media. It is thus not a ―remediation‖ (Bolter and Grusin 1999) of older and other current media. What happens in current mobile phone technology is not a borrowing or a
repurposing of one medium in another; it is rather a simulating or a blending of all possibilities at hand enabled by ―deep remixability‖ (Manovich 2006: 6-7)—the defining character of present-day digital technology.
While Manovich‘s theory on new media is insightful, his focus remains on the dimension of software design. He does not go further to acknowledge the relational nature of human experience with technology. In order to develop a more sufficient and proper account of individuals‘ practice with digital media, Manovich‘s insight and other current media theories need to be extended, so as to be able to enter uncharted territories.
It is precisely for this purpose that this study brings forward the philosophical discourses of Serres and Simondon, with the evolutionary biology of Margulis.
Regarding the mobile phone as an individual, which is just the same as its user, this study examines how its relationality emerges as a mode of subjectivity, as in the process of an organism‘s self-production. In this process, the organism—the mobile phone, its user, information, or any parties involved—always opens up to the possibility of change in its organization and structure, approaching a ―techno-ontological threshold.‖
To illuminate the lived relationships between individuals and technologies, and, subsequent emerging subjectivities, Marshall McLuhan‘s (2001) famous phrase of
―Media—Extensions of Man‖ also has to be extended much further. The extensions of
Man are only a small part of media: what is being extended is not only Man but also the machine—media—itself and the relationship between the two parties. What has been neglected is the dynamism and transformability of the machine itself and its relationship with individuals. Media and individuals recreate each other. In the third space
in-between, between a subject and a medium, there happens an ongoing series of perturbation, incorporation, disequilibrium, equilibrium, and integration. Those seemingly noisy states are the promise of possibilities of the emergence of the new, if we follow Serres‘ parasitology; or, we can see this third space as in meta-stability, following Simondon‘s (1992) theory of individuation. This space is where a subject and a medium constitute their subjectivities, through ever-new experiences and the
resonances they have with older ones. A new subjectivity arises as a duration of those resonances, to borrow from Bergson (1998). Their becoming (Bergson) or individuation (Simondon) is an ongoing parasiting: a subject or a medium is always engaging in the process of parasiting as an individual, and a newly constituted or transformed
subjectivity is a new mode of their existence which becomes a new constituent for another subject-formation.
This means a truly creative model of evolution, which asserts that evolution does not simply involve self-preservation or self-reproduction through the dissipation of outside forces and the nullification of dimensions of alterity. It is linked to and resonant with a way of thinking about evolution that challenges Darwin‘s model of evolution based on linear or filiative evolution. It draws on the contentious rethinking of evolution in the work of Margulis (1981; 1998) and Sagan (1986), who point to the parasitic and symbiogenetic relations that precede the appearance of reproduction through nucleic DNA. If we look into the history of its development, we can see that the mobile phone has evolved rather like bacteria; just as bacteria moves through without fidelity to genus or species, transmitting information through simple contacts and re-engineering the genetic material of each lineage, so the mobile phone has had no hesitation in taking up profitable elements from outside its original territory (the phone), mixing them in its own way to become a totally new medium.
By way of parasitic complement and mutual heightening among the theoretical points made by Serres, Simondon, Margulis, along with other related arguments, this study intends to address the emergent nature of mobile phoning. In what follows, contiguous concepts and theories will converse and resonate with one another, like organisms in symbiogenesis, for understanding of individuals‘ practice with the mobile
phone, which is itself a symbiogenesis. And this transversal of ideas will be coupled with an empirical study, to achieve real-time understanding of actual users‘ everyday life with mobile phoning. It thus moves towards a new humanism, which recognizes an object and technology as being no less and no more important than a subject, and appreciates the ―process‖ of the ―becoming‖ of both a subject and an object. The onto-genetic characteristic of individuals‘ everyday practice with mobile phone technology cannot be easily and properly deciphered within any single discipline of theory. The landscape itself is continually on the move, escaping from any clear explanation. It calls for a multi-, or, rather, anti-disciplinary approach, as Pickering (1995) argues in his approach to the unpredictable nature of knowledge, machines, and human beings that are ―mangled‖ together in shifting relationships.
This approach has to be a journey itself – a ―randonnée‖- a hiking or walking, full of unexpected discoveries (Serres 1982b: xxxvi). Rather than embracing either misanthropic technological determinism or what may be called an ―opportunistic humanism,‖ it needs a materialist engagement with ―techno-humanistic culture,‖ in which concrete human practices intertwined with the ordinariness of everyday lives with objects. The scene of mobile phoning, however simple and instant it may seem, is in fact very complicated. There the dimensions of parasiting are multiple, involving relationships not only among various communication technologies but also between a subject and the machine, and within a subject‘s activities in his or her own body and mind. As the relationships arise from the ―concreteness‖ of an individual‘s everyday life, this process of parasiting is fundamentally materialist and this perspective marks an important move for theoretical interest in technology and individuals. To ensure an engagement with this concreteness, any theoretical pursuit of an individual‘s everyday life with the machine has to be present-centered and experience-based without any ideological presuppositions; it has to focus on the enacted and bodily experience, which is untethered from any transcendentals so that the lived relationships between
individuals and the technology can be properly addressed. Instead of a moral or a
political critique of science and technology, the engagement is thus rather like a ―modest witness‖ (Haraway 1997) to the scene of everyday practices. It is also an engagement based upon the humanism of classical pragmatism (James 1978). As Geertz (1973: 3-30) maintains, the true generality of studies into human culture comes from their complex specificness and circumstantiality, which can give us a sort of sensible actuality from which we can think creatively and imaginatively with them. It is to
achieve a real-time understanding and to work out the incisiveness and delicacy of its distinctions.
To be a meaningful study on mobile communication practices, what is needed is thus a mapping, not a tracing, through a randonnée, in a topological space. To see the landscape of mobile phoning as topological means to consider it as a dynamic and durational space of becoming, for the individuals, technology, and their relationships.
Topology concerns the process of arriving at a form through continuous deformation and transformation (Massumi 2002: 184-86). A topological figure is thus continuous and multiple: it is not defined by invariant formal properties or coordinate points but is characterized by vectors, which are moving-through points, and therefore it is trans-positional. Because of its vectorial nature, the topological figure cannot be considered without its duration; the figure runs through an infinity of static figures. It is not itself determinate, but determinable; each static figure stands for its determination but does not exhaust it. Though it is oriented, it is not sequential; it is vectorial and recessively
―transitional.‖ It cannot be separated from its duration due to its transitional excess of movement. Topological space is therefore where becoming, in the Bergsonian sense, takes place, with its infinite movement and duration.
The notion of the ―traveler‖ seems suitable for the reading of this onto-genetical and topological space of becoming. In Serres‘ (1995c: 51-55) words,
geography overtakes knowledge, because ―geo‖-―graphy‖ is the ―spatial‖ language of writing the world, which marks the moments of passage towards a new epistemology.
Hence, the traveler, in the space of becoming where new relationships between individuals and mobile communication technologies are constantly emerging,
appreciates the passage (process) rather than the final destination (position). To make the journey fruitful, the traveler is also ready for various detours and bifurcations because, to borrow from Serres (1982b: 51), the space is sporadic, not unlike the Greek islands, and it is with fluctuating tatters, like the North-West Passage. It is the third space of ongoing parasiting, and the space of complex movements and durations for the emergence of the new.
This perspective is exactly what is needed for the proper understanding of the current landscape of individuals‘ practice with mobile phones. The study of mobile phoning has to be like a traveler who is willing to parasite on the host‘s meal at any time and to pay for it with stories, precisely because the constant emergence of new
technological assemblages and the users‘ creative tooling of them (another machinic
assemblage) show us that it is no longer appropriate to see the phenomenon solely from sociological or cultural point of view. As the landscape involves immanent,
onto-genetical scenes of emergence in the complex and dynamic space of topology, the understanding of this landscape requires extensive ―parasiting‖; conceptual resources are to be drawn from a wider range of theories, so as to be able to illuminate the complex process of emergent becomings of a subject and an object and their
relationships. Like the traveler who does not fear alien territories, the study of mobile phoning needs to incorporate profitable insights from a much wider range of disciplines than today. The traveler needs to welcome a trans-logic, not a meta-logic, to describe the way multiple logics and the operational levels they model hold together. A trans-logic
―enters‖ the fabric of relations and pulls as many strands as it can, to see what emerges.
As the event of individuals‘ mobile phoning is ―emerging‖ in the onto-genetical space of becoming, it is appropriate to engage with raw phenomena, rather than with ideals, so as to encompass the concreteness of experience in its everyday ins and outs.
Traveling the path of mobile phoning thus requires that techniques of ―critique‖
be used sparingly. For the traveler in the topological space of mobile phoning, the balance has to shift to affirmative methods: techniques which embrace the events‘ own inventiveness and are not afraid to own up to the fact that they add to reality. It is not that critique is wrong. It is not a question of right and wrong; rather, it is a question of dosage. It is simply that when the traveler is busy critiquing, he or she is less busy augmenting and fostering, and this approach is the most notable characteristic of Serres‘
work. It would be profitable at this point to look into how Foucault (1997: 41-81) uses the word ―critique‖ in a different way to mean something close to this affirmative approach rather than to its traditional meaning. Arguing that critique is a ―generative‖
practice, Foucault tries to extend the meaning of the term. He writes that critique provides openings, pathways, and alternatives that were previously foreclosed by the structure of a discourse, at precisely the moment of its negativity. Critique in this sense is therefore less concerned with defining or creating concepts than with generating what Foucault calls ―problematizations,‖ and it works at the interstices of its objects,
revealing the points of fissure in the forces that come together to form a given practice, discipline, or a body. This Foucauldian term of critique shares common ground with affirmative approaches in that it has to do with pragmatics, seeing that particular instances are themselves carriers of infrastructural questions, providing points for interrogations.
Pragmatics is a strategy of a proper recognition of emergence, which precedes any evaluation or judgment. It aims to achieve incisiveness and a delicacy of actuality in human practice, as in James‘ (1978, 1996) radical empiricism, which sees reality as always in the making—as snowballing. The traveler in the space of mobile phoning thus depends on pragmatics; of prime importance is the ―performative‖ image of science and technology (Polanyi 1966; Pickering 1995), which puts an emphasis on operational principles, rather than pre-described instructions for them. As the space is relational, the traveler supports the argument that things have ―social lives‖ of their own (Appadurai 2000) and are subject to ―deep play‖ (Geertz 1973: 412). The traveler also appreciates the philosophy of becoming, which has been threaded through from Spinoza and Bergson, to Serres, Simondon, and Deleuze and Guattari. The traveler recognizes becoming as ―molecular‖ activity; as a matter of emitting particles in between, rather than that of a ―molar,‖ which defines and constrains identity. The becoming of individuals is therefore a ―rhizomic‖ activity, contrary to a ―root-based‖ system (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 3-25; 2000: 283-96), which takes place in ―a third position,‖ not unlike a practice of ―translation‖ (Serres 1982b: 54-62), which is the forging of a novel association or an act of invention, brought about through the combining, mixing, and fusing of varied elements.
For the traveler in the onto-genetical space of mobile phoning, relevant concepts and theories are adjuncts, things added to become a complex entity as supplementary rather than essential parts. They are contiguous, sharing a common border, touching on one another; they are therefore metonymic, rather than metaphoric.
To be metaphoric presupposes a meaning to be transferred onto somebody or something else via the logic of similarity; it prioritizes quality (product) rather than becoming (process). But to be metonymic requires no finite meaning to make a transfer.
Metonymic concepts and theories propagate themselves, ―snowballing‖ their meanings, while sharing and interchanging their properties via contiguity on the borders
in-between. They are ―open‖ to ―creative contagion.‖ At stake is not a similarity in their qualities but a connectibility among them, and it is the most important point of Serres‘
parasitology as it institutes a new theory of relationality.
For Serres the parasite does not simply cancel the existing system; it treats the system as a resource for the creation of the new, different system of relations. Serres in such a way gives us relational thought, offering a ―corrective‖ to the tradition of Western thought which has failed to acknowledge that it is relations that create human
life and the world and keep them moving. While Christian, Cartesian, and Kantian ethics totally neglected the notion of relationality by adhering to pre-given order, the idea of the ―survival of the fittest,‖ which has been applied by Spencer in 1864 and then used by Darwin in 1869 to explain the notion of ―natural selection,‖ nurtured a far-reaching conception of competition and tension as the prime mover of all relationships in this world. Relationality as a creative force, which brings about the emergence of the new, has hardly been brought into focus. At best, the notion of relationality has been subsumed as a double structure of competing forces, as in Benjamin (the original and mechanical reproductions) and Derrida (the said and the unsaid) or, as an expression of the cultural psychology of the pre-existing order, as in Levi-Strauss (1992).
The following begins with chapter 2, a brief literature review and explanation of empirical methods used in this study. Then it continues to chapter 3, which deals with how Serres recovers the Other, the guest, in order to complement one-sided story, so as to write a new theory of relationships. His parasitology is based on his unique
understanding of reality and knowledge, and his kind of structuralism always connects apparently disparate elements to weave relationships by traveling through noisy, cacography-like scenes, which he says are nothing other than reality itself. Serres‘
argument is unique and innovative, as it radically differentiates itself from traditional western thought on subjectivity, undoing the closures imposed by the Christian,
Cartesian, and Kantian blockages. There are also other thinkers who devote themselves to a similar project to Serres—the recovering of the Other—and the later part of this chapter treats their arguments to see how they reconfigure the notion of subjectivity to overcome the closures by cross-fertilizing one another.
Chapter 4 is a speculation about how complexity theory and vitalist philosophy have changed the way of looking at the world, and accordingly, at subjectivity,
conversing and resonating with the arguments discussed in the previous part. It looks into how those discourses, performing in and across many disciplines and occasions, show that the real is multiple and contingent with no pre-existing orders, and that humans and machines are interchangeable. The two notions of boundarylessness and performance will then be coupled with Simondon‘s seminal conception of individuation and Margulis‘ revolutionary theory of symbiogenesis, to constitute a theory of the emergence of the new for an individual, which means a subject, an object, an event, a collective, or any entity in the world. The theoretical aim of this part is thus to establish a conception of relationality at the level of ontogenesis, as a converging point for a new
theory of subjectivity, by way of parasiting on relevant discourses from wider disciplines.
Before turning to discussions on digital media and my empirical research into how people use their mobile phones in Korea, chapter 5 travels to the other relationality, by which this study means traditional Asian conceptions of the relationship between things and humans in a world based on Confucianism. With combined influences from Daoism and Buddhism, it reflects a completely different way of seeing the world from its western counterpart. It provides an understanding that things (and humans) exist only by virtue of their interrelationships and these relationships have open, immanent, and pragmatic structures which are in a state of continuous modulation. It is interesting that this Asian conception of relationality seems to share some basic elements with the underlying logic of digital media, but it is not the purpose of this study to argue for any theoretical correspondence between them. Moreover, it is neither the aim of this part to claim that this other relationality defines the characteristic of mobile phoning in Korea.
Though it is true that there is rather stronger cultural inheritance from Confucianism in Korea than in China, due to the fact that Chinese people experienced a radical break
Though it is true that there is rather stronger cultural inheritance from Confucianism in Korea than in China, due to the fact that Chinese people experienced a radical break