The Arts of Contingency

The Arts of Contingency
Author(s): Elena Esposito

Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 31, No. 1 (Autumn 2004), pp. 7-25
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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The Arts of Contingency
Elena Esposito
If we consider the present situation of the arts of transmission in the

broad sense of the phrase as Francis Bacon used itnamely, as the whole
of the procedures that circulate, record, and organize knowledgewe have
to admit to quite a discouraging condition for theoretical reection. While
there exist many techniques in the sense of technologies, machineries, and
instruments, the ancient sense of art, as used by Bacon, has been lost. In
this sense, artthe art of carpentry, for instance, or the art of navigation
or persuasionis something governed by rules that can be taught. These
rules indicate what to do, how to do it, and for what purpose.1 On a con-
ceptual level, there does not presently seem to be much to teach, in spite of
incessant reection on media and of the multiplication of theories about
media. Technological development and media practice proceed quickly but
also proceed independently of theoretical reection. Theory seems rather
to be concerned with integrating mostly uninterpreted new developments:
chat rooms rather than virtual reality (which was much theorized but
quickly faded from general interest), the internet explosion instead of in-
teractive television (which failed because of a lack of interest rather than
because of technological diculties), very intelligent video games rather
than (often quite stupid) articial intelligence. We lack autonomous theo-
retical categories that can deal with these developments. Instead of sur-
prising and informing the development of technology, theory seems to be
continuously surprised by the evolution of technology.
Media theory seems to be suering from a kind of interpretive inade-
quacy. In media analysis, for instance, theory tends to presuppose a dubious
1. See Giuseppe Cambiano, Platone e le tecniche (Turin, 1971).
Critical Inquiry 31 (Autumn 2004)

2004 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/04/3101-0005$10.00. All rights reserved.
8 Elena Esposito / The Arts of Contingency
nal causality. One tries to explain the phenomena by starting from the
eects, as though a certain innovation had been successful because of its
usefulness or because of the advantages it implies. But an innovation, as we
well know, would not be new if it were not unknown before; and how can
unknown (and hence imperceptible and, strictly speaking, also unintelli-
gible) advantages motivate and foster the assertion of a new technique,
overcoming the resistance that always opposes the modication of familiar
practices? How can one examine the birth and consolidation of the new
without slipping into aporias or tautologies?
Problems of temporal coordination also emerge in the simple analysis
of data. In the study of media, the presumed eects often seem to come
before the cause, as exemplied by the age-old disputes over the relationship
between the introduction of the printing press and the consequent social
transformations of the Renaissance. Many of the innovations allegedly en-
abled by the new medium (such as the production of a great number of
volumes, which was possible also in scriptoria, and the introduction of
punctuation, references, and title pages, with which copyists had already
experimented) seem to have actually preceded it, in a curious muddle of
causalities.
In my essay, I would like to propose a hypothesis: the diculties of
media theory can be connected with the fact that the dierent approaches
above and beyond their disagreementstend to employ a concept of me-
dium based primarily on transmission.2 The weakness of studies of the arts
of transmission could then be due to an excessive emphasis on transmission
itselfto the detriment of the art as such and its other aspects. Certainly,
the notion of communication is by now much broader than the mere dif-
fusion of information, and also includes emotional, expressive, relational,
and other aspects. The medium itself is no longer understood as a neutral
2. A similar approach can be found in Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural
Form (London, 1974), where he argues that diusion is a secondary aspect in the sense that it
comes later. First there is redenition of the functions and of the process of communication,
leading then to new techniques for diusion. An example is lithography, which was developed to
produce portraits to preserve memories for those who already knew the represented person and
was used later to overcome spatial and temporal distances (see in particular 1.3). I owe this
reference to James Chandler.
E l e n a E s p o s i t o is professor of sociology at the University of Modena-Reggio

Emilia. She has published several works on the theory of social systems, media
theory, and social memory, including Soziales Vergessen: Formen und Medien des
Gedachtnisses der Gesellschaft (2002) and Die Verbindlichkeit des Vorubergehenden:
Paradoxien der Mode (2004).
Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2004 9
diaphragm diusing denotations and connotations with the least possible
interference; the medium intervenes, inuences, constructs, or distorts the
message (depending on the view of the student). But in general it is thought
that the central point is the spreading of communication beyond the im-
mediate perceptual context (as in writing) or beyond the personalized
sphere of the people and things one knows or could know (as with the print-
ing press). This feature of the medium should then explain its cognitive
eects, like the ability to abstract or to modalize, with their respective
consequences for the general organization of semantics. One starts from
transmission and eventually returns to the recording and organization of
information.
In section 1 I will propose an alternative conception, the one of socio-
logical systems theory, which starts not from a concept of the medium as a
unity but from the dierence between medium and form.3 As we will see
in section 2, this leads to consideration of the familiar technologies of com-
munication from the point of view of their capacity to loosen and recom-
bine the elements of the consolidated forms. Transmission, that is, the
capacity to reach more receivers and in dierent ways, would then be only
one of the aspects of this general reassessment of the relationship of the
necessary and the contingent, of the stable and the mutable, of redundancy
and variety. In section 3 this approach will be tested in the cases of the media
of writing and the printing press. In section 4 I will try to sketch the con-
sequences of this approach for the still open eld of computers as a medium,
specically with regard to their communicative uses.
1
In the sociological view the problem of media is not primarily the study
of the features of some objects, that is, of particular instruments with certain
presuppositions and certain consequences. There is also this problem, of
course, but prior to it there is the much more radical, self-referential ques-
3. In sociology, systems theory, associated mainly with Niklas Luhmann (for an overview, see
Niklas Luhmann, Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft [Frankfurt, 1997]) represents the rather
controversial and very complex attempt to research society starting from communication
rather than from people or the objects of the world. Objects of sociological analysis are then
rst of all the ways and forms of communication, from which follow not only the conguration
and the complexity of the concepts used to consider the world but also what, for a given social
formation, is the world: not an independent external datum but the external reference of
communication. In this way, science and law, economics and politics, religion, formal
organizations, love, and much else have been examined. For such an approach, the study of
media is clearly central, even if at the moment there is no nished treatment of this topic.
Media, however, cannot appear as external instruments (typewriter, telephone, or television
set) but as modalities that congure and organize communication, rst of all as its internal
articulations, which will then use these instruments.
tion of reecting on the presuppositions of the very operation one is bring-
ing about. Specically, sociological research is conveyed through oral or
written communication, which is printed or mediated in various ways. To
study the required conditions and the ties imposed by media means at the
same time to investigate the conditions and ties of the very communication
through which one studies them, which remains subject to them even if it
allows their functioning. In other words, the study of media becomes a par-
adigm for the (typically circular) analysis of the relevance of external factors
as seen from the inside. That is, the study of media represents an attempt
to independently question that which one ultimately depends upon.4
Seen in this way, the problem of circularity holds evident paradoxical
implications. In this form, this problem has been the object of several phil-
osophical reections, which have mostly triedin very dierent waysto
neutralize the problem by diversifying the perspective (individuation of
metalevels, deconstruction of the discourse, or other solutions). In general,
these reections shift the focus from unity to dierence. The sociological
perspective, which is much more interested in concrete (situated) practices,
comes to a similar end (the exploitation of dierence as the basic element
of a theory that cannot and does not want to eliminate the shadow of par-
adox). However, this perspective is much more concerned with the oper-
ationalization of this position. In the case of mediaand here we come back
to our initial questionthis leads to a theory that replaces the unitary con-
cept of medium, which is too concrete and too connected with the idea of
a denite object to be studied, with a specic dierence: the dierence me-
dium/form.5 The object of media theory is, then, not an object but a dif-
4. George Spencer-Brown spoke of a space that can be inferred only when a mark has
distinguished inside it a marked state and an unmarked state, and the initial space can be
reconstructed as the unity of both states, a unity that, however, at that point no longer exists; see
George Spencer-Brown, Laws of Form (New York, 1972), chap. 2. According to Spencer-Brown,
this produces the shadow of paradox accompanying each step of the logical calculus developed
from the initial distinction, like a sort of condition of possibility that must be neutralized at each
passage in order to be eectively forgotten (but never eliminated). The problem is quite near to
the one in a philosophical perspective from which Derridas construction starts (or deconstruction;
see in particular Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie [Paris, 1967]). If one investigates the original
forms of communication one encounters a language that is from its very beginning writing, that is, a
mediated form that breaks the unity with a violence originaire (ibid., p. 55). The primary forms are
already secondary; they are the result of an exteriorization, and immediacy is only the illusion of an
observer looking for a world where he or she does not exist (transcendency). The study of media is
then nothing more than the study of this inevitable mediatedness, accompanied also in this case by
the aura of a paradox often latent but never eliminable.
5. See Luhmann, Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft, p. 195 and Die Kunst der Gesellschaft
(Frankfurt, 1995), p. 165. The distinction medium/form has been elaborated by Luhmann starting
from the distinction medium/thing presented by Fritz Heider in the frame of the theory of
perception; see Fritz Heider, Ding und Medium, Symposion 1 (1926): 10957; translated as
Thing and Medium, Psychological Issues 1 (1959): 134. Here I skip the historical reconstruction
ference, which oscillates from one side to the other and is never univocally
dened because each side depends on the other. Who looks for unity nds
only this paradoxical oscillationand then one should move to dierence.
This lack of univocality is the most important aspect of the distinction;
the medium, which is always evasive, cannot be observed immediately and
is apprehended indirectly in the forms through which it exists, but these
forms themselves would not exist without the corresponding medium. In
Luhmanns formulation, this can be stated as follows: on both sides of the
distinction medium/form there are elements that in the medium are cou-
pled loosely and in the form are coupled more tightlylike, for instance,
grains of sand in a beach that have no connection to one another and there-
fore are t to receive the form left by a footprint or like light rays making
objects visible. More interesting for communications studies is the case of
language, which exists as a medium in the sentences (forms) built by using
the possibilities it oers. The elements are the single words that in the me-
dium have no connection to one another and gain sense only in the context
of the sentences coupling them tighter.
The medium cannot be observed directly, but this does not imply that
it is not subject to any limitations; words can be combined to form dierent
sentences, but the words still have their own meaning and cannot be
changed or invented at will. This holds for all media that show dierent
grades of granulosity, which makes the media more or less plastic and more
or less receptive to forms. As the presence of little stones in sand hinders
the impression of prints, so the concreteness of a word limits its possible
uses in forming sentences. The looser the medium, the more abstract the
forms impressed in it can be. This abstractness can be amplied by the re-
cursivity of the distinction medium/form; the elements constituting the
medium can be themselves forms impressed in a dierent medium, and the
forms can act as media for the imposition of other forms. The sentences of
spoken language, for instance, can be the elements used in writing (another
medium) to produce dierent combinations (forms).
What are the advantages of this construction for media research? Our
problem, as we said, is to have available conceptual instruments that allow
us to distinguish and at the same time to connect the question of trans-
mission (media) with its semantic presuppositions (forms), without giving
priority to either aspect. In this view, media only arise together with the
corresponding forms in the moment when the elements constituting both
(in more rigid or more loose couplings) are available. Media arise only when
and the examination of the dierences between both approaches, about which one can read in
Luhmann, Die Wissenschaft der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt, 1990), p. 53.
it becomes possible to break the compactness of a unity into a multiplicity
of loose elements that can be recombined in dierent ways, that is, when
new possibilities to generate forms arise. Media are only potentialities, and
their fundamental function is to make contingent something that was for-
merly indispensable.
2
The distinction medium/form is applied in sociology to several dierent
problems: specically, to all cases where one wants to show how a specic
modality of contingency is produced and how it is controlled through spe-
cial forms. Media are then very dierent-seeming phenomena like love,
money, and truth, but also are positions in organizations and pupils in the
praxis of education. But media are alsoand here we enter the eld that
concerns usthe languages (which allow us to organize the medium of
sounds into discrete unities that combine to form words and sentences) and
above all the technologies of communication:6 from writing and the print-
ing press through the mass media and the recent advances in telematics. In
what sense are we dealing with media here, and which are the corresponding
forms and the elements to combine? Which unities get loosened, and which
necessities become contingent?
Writing and the printing press allow and impose a much higher aware-
ness of communication than is associated with oral communication, which
relies on many perceptive presuppositions implicitly taken for granted.
Written communication, on the contrary, must create autonomously
(through communicative means) all the references it needs and is in this
sense a more communicative form of communication.7 In comparison to
orality, writing is on the one hand obviously disadvantaged because it must
give up much of the support that comes from the shared context of the
interlocutors, but on the other hand it can make use of the advantages that
come from the capacity to clearly distinguish communication from its ob-
servation. In an oral situation, both moments coincide; both comments and
reections on the ongoing communication and also the preservation of the
6. Luhmann (Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft, pp. 202315) speaks somewhat misleadinglyin
my opinionof media of diusion, which underlie precisely the aspect of transmission that I wish
to relativize. In his analysis, however, this accentuation disappears then completely.
7. See Luhmann, Soziale Systeme: Grundri einer allgemeinen Theorie (Frankfurt, 1984), p. 224.
Systems theory, like deconstruction, inverts the trivial chronological priority relation of common
sense and of disciplines like linguistics, which assume oral communication to be the most
authentic form of communication and consider all others to be derivative forms. This hierarchy
can itself be a consequence of the availability and pervasiveness of alphabetic writing, as is shown
also by the fact that in cultures without accomplished phonetic writing, like ancient Mesopotamia,
written names were the ones expressing the destiny and the nature of things because they could be
analyzed and handled with the typical techniques of a divinatory culture, while orality was
secondary; see Jean Bottero, Mesopotamie: LEcriture, la raison, et les dieux (Paris, 1987), p. 126.
content of the communication occur only during the course of commu-
nication itself. There can be no detachment from the situation. In a hypo-
thetical condition of primary orality, there is neither the time nor the
detachment necessary to distinguish a communicative text from the context
of the ongoing communication.8 In writing, on the contrary, this is possible
and this becomes more and more necessary as writers presuppose that read-
ers are in the habit of distinguishing the narrated action from the actual
situation. What changes with the diusion of alphabetical writing is rst of
all the mode of observation. The observer is distinguished from the object
of observation, which enables new forms of reexivityincluding the po-
tential to observe oneself as an observer and to communicate about com-
munication.9
Communication can then refer directly to communication, to com-
menting on other communications, or to citing written texts, even if they
are not present. It can, however, acquire much greater autonomy and de-
velop its own criteria, which become more and more dierent from the ones
based on perception and on lack of detachment. The things said (or written)
become more and more autonomous from the person saying (or writing)
them and instead gain currency from the strength of the argument, which
becomes increasingly important. Oral communication is an event that dis-
appears in the moment in which it is produced and thus cannot be modied
or manipulated. Writing, on the contrary, remains xed in the form in
which it was produced, but exactly because it does not change and does not
ee it can be considered from dierent points of view. Its invariabilityallows
for more possibilities of transformation, that is, for a greater variety of in-
terpretations.10 Writing, one could say, compensates for its xity with the
potential for varying interpretations. One can change the communication
because it does not change itself.
Oral language is notorious for its use of deictic expressions that neu-
tralize the problem of the referent; their references are evident and clear by
themselves. With writing, nothing can be taken for granted; deictic expres-
sions must be replaced with formulations that remain univocal even when
the context changes. One must then face what remains xed in spite of these
changes: the referent, which becomes a theme and a problem.11 Another
8. Eric Havelock bases his reconstruction of the origins of abstract thinking in ancient Greece
on this thesis; see Eric Alfred Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cambridge, Mass., 1963).
9. See Luhmann, The Form of Writing, Stanford Literature Review 9, no. 1 (1992): 2542. There
is a widespread hypothesis that the birth of the critical attitude, together with the praxis of
observing and revising the contents of communication, is due to alphabetical writing; see Marcel
Detienne, Les Savoirs de lecriture en Grece ancienne (Paris, 1988).
10. See Luhmann, Soziale Systeme, p. 128.
11. This is also a very controversial argument of Havelock: in the moment when the alphabet
enables a reproduction of communication that is really independent of the context (while even
syllabic writings presupposed that the reader already possessed the information necessary to
aspect is especially interesting for our topic: orality, which relies on context
and its univocality, can accommodate a lack of coherence that to our eyes
often looks contradictory because coherence was aorded by the situation
and did not have to be established through communicative means.12 Oral
culture, based on repetition and on constant reproduction of the same
models, can then allow remarkable variety, which results from the variety
of situations and contexts. Written communication, on the contrary, can
not feed on environmental variety because it is denitely detached from the
context and bound to a much more rigid self-discipline. Writing must be
coherent, in the sense that all its parts must support each other without
contrasts and contradictions because there is no external context to resolve
any inconsistencies.13 Written communication is much less able to endure
incoherence, but exactly because of that it curiously enables more variety
then oral communication does.
Orality, as we saw, depends on repetition and can put up with ever-
changing situations; dierences and lacks of coordination can be tolerated
because they are reabsorbed in the unity of the sense of communication.
Writing, on the contrary, must be coherent in order to be understandable
in dierent and unpredictable situations, but it can admit the unpredicta-
bility and diversity of reading situations. Writing must be coherent in order
to be independent from context, and when writing is coherent the context
can then be left indeterminate. One does not know by whom, how, and with
which agendas written communication will be read.14 The emphasis, pre-
viously on redundancy, is now on variety. Formerly, one admitted variety
in order to conrm stability, and now the xedness of writing is only a
means of achieving variety. And variety now means the capability to spread
communication through space and time without having to foresee dier-
ences of context; that is, variety can be dened as a greater capacity for
transmission.
eliminate the ambiguity of reading), the context itself becomes independent and can become the
object of an autonomous analysis, from which philosophy originates; see Havelock, Preface to
Plato, p. 148; Bottero and Marie-Joseph Steve, La Mesopotamia: Dalla scrittura allarcheologia
(Turin, 1994), p. 42; Bottero, Mesopotamie, p. 103; and Jan Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedachtnis:
Schrift, Erinnerung, und politische Identitat in fruhen Hochkulturen (Munich, 1979), p. 220.
12. See Albert B. Lord, The Singer of Tales (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), p. 99, and Detienne, Les
Matres de verite dans la Grece archaque (Paris, 1967), pp. 46, 56. This apparent ambiguity is often
presented as one of the characteristics of mythical thinking.
13. The originary deixis is replaced by a system of references to other elements of
communication, which in linguistics is called Diskursdeixis; see Rudiger Weingarten, Die
Verkabelung der Sprache: Grenzen der Technisierung von Kommunikation (Frankfurt, 1989), p. 19.
14. Here also originates the problem of interpretation, to which we will return later. Even
Gadamer, however, insists nally on the unity of the text (Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und
Methode [Tubingen, 1960], p. 375).
Returning to our distinction medium/form, what has it to do with this
analysis of the features of written communication? In our terms, it is a dem-
onstration of the functioning of communication technologies and of the
reasons it is convenient to use the distinction between media and forms.
Writing (and then printing) is a medium because by separating commu-
nication and observation it loosens the unity of the communicative act into
separate elements that can be recombined in dierent ways (in specic
forms). Writing allows distance from the context, and consequently iden-
tication of the referent is no longer immediately supplied by the situation,
but must be constituted by the communication, combining the available
elements in a new (and coherent) way. For this reason, because they gen-
erate new forms from their own decomposition into elements, writing and
printing are media adding new potentialities to linguistic communication.
These new forms are the ones that can be communicated at a distance from
context and make communication successful even when it must give up the
supports on which it formerly relied. In other words, the medium becomes
an instrument of transmission primarily because it can produce its own
forms, but transmission is only an aspect, almost a consequence, of a gen-
eral transformation that modies the asset of communication. Distant
transmission then feeds back on this decomposition into elements and
(particularly with printing) fosters recomposition in more complex and
unpredictable forms. However, it is not by starting from transmission that
one can understand the scope of the transformation and the role of the
medium.
3
I will try now to verify this still quite abstract hypothesis by analyzing
more concretely the mediative features of writing and of the printing press.
Much historical research adopts an approach that assigns priority to the way
information is handled, preserved, and combined, and infers from this the
possibilities of transmission that are available in a given social formation.15
With due prudence, one can also refer to the research on the psychic impact
of communication technologies. Lev Vygotskys and Alexander Lurias
now-classic studies subordinate the ability to participate in communication
15. See, as exemplary instances of research on the social relevance of media, Havelock, Preface to
Plato, p. 109, and Elizabeth Eisenstein, preface to The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe
(Cambridge, 1983). Many accuse Havelock and Eisenstein of considering respectively the alphabet
and the printing press as the cause of social and semantic transformations. The data they present
actually contradict this claim, showing that the transformations in question did not follow the
diusion of the new technologies but accompanied themthereby making the causal constellation
much more complex.
at a distance (for example, the ability to learn only by linguistic means) to
acquisition of logical instruments and the achievement of the necessary de-
tachment from the visual-practical situation.16 In order to be able to read
in a proper sense, one must be able to think in a written waywithout the
ability to loosen the elements of media, there can be no transmission.17
Of course, a certain capacity for abstraction exists even without writing.
One foresees, remembers, classies, and groups, but apparently in all these
activities the separation of words and things is not acute. The things and
not the words are of interest, or the words are of interest only as things
among the others.18 Alphabet-based writing, which enables communication
without sound, is the medium that denitely underscores the dierence
between sound and senseand consequently between linguistic sounds
and referentsby shifting attention to the restrictions and conditions that
words must satisfy in order to refer to the corresponding objects. Attention
can then be turned to readers, with their abilities and their limitations, be-
cause knowledge is no longer governed by the distinction between the
known and unknown, the familiar and unfamiliar. The unknown, which
previously referred to deeper (and by their nature unattainable) truths, be-
comes the simple counterpart of what is known, is written somewhere, and
can be read.19 Nobody can know everything that has been written; therefore,
one can be concerned with the diusion of knowledge. Transmission be-
comes a lay question and can as such be technicalized.
The text as such attracts attention; it is xed, controlled, and observed,
and becomes the object of several interpretations. And it is exactly in the
dierence text/interpretation that the distinction medium/form nds ex-
pression in the case of writing; as a written text, communication as a me-
dium oers the space for a multiplicity of dierent interpretations.20 It
16. See Alexander R. Luria, Cognitive Development: Its Cultural and Social Foundations
(Cambridge, Mass., 1976).
17. Actually, the communicative competence proceeds at the same pace as the acquisition of the
individual competences in the use of writing: annotation and modeling.
18. See Jack Goody, The Domestication of the Savage Mind (Cambridge, 1977), and Walter Ong,
The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (New Haven,
Conn., 1967), p. 43. This deep solidarity between words and things is not aected by the
availability of nonalphabetical forms of writing exactly because these do not allow for the
contextual autonomy I discussed above. Chinese culture developed very complex and rened
ways of manipulating words, but apparently never questioned the reciprocal dependency and
interpenetration of words and things; see among many David Palumbo-Liu, Schrift und
kulturelles Potential in China, in Schrift, ed. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and Karl Ludwig Pfeier
(Munich, 1993), pp. 15168.
19. See Luhmann, Die Lebensweltnach Rucksprache mit Phanomenologen, Archiv fur
Rechts- und Sozialphilosophie 72 (1986): 187.
20. And then also for oral texts that exist as texts only once the form of the text has been
established in writing.
makes available the loose elements in which the more rigid forms of dif-
ferent interpretations can be impressed. Communication consequently be-
comes much more varied and much more complex21 because the rigidities
connected with the concreteness of the references and with the sacrality of
the approach are loosened. Just as a medium exposes itself to the imposition
of forms and is a medium only through the forms impressed in it, so the
text exposes itself to the game of interpretations and exists as a text only
through its constant interpretation.22 And it is in its new medial guise, as a
text, that communication can be transmitted at a distance and can make
sense in unpredictably dierent situationsbut an always dierent sense,
as dierent as the possible interpretations of a text.
In this process, the printing press exemplies a deep continuity with the
medium of writing. Gutenbergs discovery itself ts in a situation (in the
course of the fteenth century) in which many others searched for the way
to produce articial script.23 Initially they were interested only in pro-
ducing another kind of writingan articialiter scribere that could make
better what had been made before, not a kind of writing designed to spread
communication to unknown and unpredictable readers. Once introduced,
however, the printing press greatly increased the mediality of written com-
munication. The printing press achieved this through a process in which
transmission is again only one aspect, aside from the methods of collec-
tion, systematization, and retrieval of data on which most contemporary
thinkers actually concentrated their attention. David Hume declared ex-
plicitly that the fundamental advantage of the printing press seemed to be
the potential to continuously improve and amend books in various edi-
tions (in other words, the potential to impress in the medium of the text
always dierent forms).24 The rst revolution of printing was a deep trans-
formation in the way that texts were produced and manipulated, combining
an apparent continuity with a radical change. It is only with printing that
books really become textsartifacts open to interpretation.
This is not, however, as is sometimes believed, because concerns about
the manipulation, systematization, and pagination of the text began with
the printing press. To a certain extent, these concerns have always existed,
even if they related to other problemsand here lies the not marginal dif-
ference. Up to the eleventh century, writing aimed primarily at reproducing
the ux of oral language in order to mimic a correct oral reading. The ex-
21. I here understand complexity in the technical sense of the availability of more and dierent
possibilities.
22. See Luhmann, Das Recht der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt, 1995), p. 255.
23. Saul H. Steinberg, Five Hundred Years of Printing (London, 1959), p. 21.
24. See Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, p. 83.
isting punctuation marks were prosodic ones, meant to indicate to the
reader if, and when, the voice had to go up or down.25 There were no signs
indicating the separation of the words or of the unities of discourse. The
texts were transcribed in the so-called scriptio continua, uniformly lling up
the lines of the manuscript without any visible articulations in the ux of
writing. But, once more, this was not because punctuation was unknown.
The ancient grammarians had devised techniques on the matter, and the
Romans had used them. In Ireland the separation of words, which greatly
increased the legibility of manuscripts, had been widespread since the sixth
century.26 On the continent, however, these techniques had not been used
for a long time because they did not capture general interest. There was no
interest in facilitating reading because reading was still a practice that pre-
supposed experience and familiarity with the text, which was taken as an
object of meditation and memorization before the performance of the oral
reading. The task of individuating the syllables and combining them into
words was part of the art of reading and not to be performed by the scriba.
One must not think, however, that the manuscript text lacked any in-
ternal organization. On the contrary, books had a complex hierarchical ar-
ticulation with the aim of making perceptible the underlying logical (and
nally cosmic) order. Images, for instance, did not have a merely decorative
purpose. They were undoubtedly useful as mnemonic clues, in accordance
with the old precepts of mnemotechny, but they also had a functional mean-
ing, helping to transform the text into a complex symbolic object. Illustra-
tions were useful to orient the attention of the reader, with tables that
exposed or summarized the content of the chapters, but they were also use-
ful (in the decoration of the initial letters) in helping readers scan and mark
the rhythm of discourse. The ornate letters pointed out the dierent unities
of the text and allowed readers to distinguish its components; for instance,
the initials of the text were more developed than the ones of the commen-
tary.
On all of these levels it is interesting to note that the turning point is not
the introduction of the printing press but much earlier, in the eleventh cen-
tury, when the use of images became more complex and when the sepa-
ration of words and ecient forms of punctuation became common.
Research instruments like verbal concordances (word indexes) and material
25. See Jean Vezin, Poemes gures, in Mise en page et mise en texte du livre manuscrit, ed.
Henri-Jean Martin and Vezin (Paris, 1990), p. 439, and Martin, conclusion to Mise en page et mise
en texte du livre manuscrit, p. 462. This volume oers much interesting material on the techniques
of organization of the pages in manuscripts.
26. See Paul Saenger, La Naissance de la coupure et de la separation des mots, in Mise en page
et mise en texte du livre manuscrit, p. 448.
concordances (subject indexes) were developed, overcoming even the mis-
trust for conventional cataloguing systems like alphabetical order, which
bore no relation to the ultimate order of the world. The printing press was
introduced into a foment of active experimentation with the forms of pre-
sentation and the organization of manuscripts, which were innovations
connected with mostly autonomous developments like the increase and
consequent standardization of available books. Collectively, these devel-
opments created a favorable environment for the consolidation and the suc-
cess of the typographical innovation.
Must we say, then, that the printing press did not make any dierence?
Rather, in this situation of exibility and ferment, the new technological
possibilities introduced transformations that marked the nal separation
from the ancient and medieval approach. In preceding centuries images
associated with textsimages that were as elaborate and complex as ever
still created a situation where the picture remained subordinate to writing.
It illustrated the text and not the world. The miniaturist could go on copying
the images of the manuscripts reproduced by an amanuensis that under-
went a progressive transformation but remained recognizable. Or he could
draw his motives from a collection of available models or from repertories
of scenes and motives accumulated in memory, without any direct con-
frontation with the external world.27 Since the sixteenth century the ten-
dency has been reversed: the image illustrates the referent and changes its
relationship with the written text. The reference to reality resides now in
the image more than in the text, which in some cases is now used (contrary
to the former habit) to explain and to interpret the image. The text is in
service of the image and not vice versa. Even more acutely, the change in-
volves systems of information nding. As we saw, indexes and repertories
were already available before, but they did not refer to contingent criteria.
There were specic indexes, referring to the exact sheet and to the column
of the book, that held for only one manuscript, and there were independent
indexes, referring to chapters and paragraphs, that were valid for each spec-
imen of the work. There were, however, no instruments that were inde-
pendent and general at the same timereferences such as page numbers,
which do not depend on the specicity of the single volume or on the in-
ternal organization of the text. References to the page number of a particular
edition remain contingent (in another edition the page can of course be
dierent), but are nevertheless univocal on strictly formal grounds, making
no reference to the content of the text.
27. See Helene Toubert, Fabrication dun manuscrit: LIntervention de lenlumineur, in Mise
en page et mise en texte du livre manuscrit, p. 417.
From our point of view, this is a further arena for the decomposition of
communication into loose elements that can be recombined in new, more
varied, and more eective forms. The novelties in paging and in the typo-
graphical aspect are not only exterior questions but indicate the move to-
wards a dierent idea of order; in the Middle Ages the sense of order still
resided in an Aristotelian idea of putting things in the right place, where
rightness depended on a necessarily cosmic (and in its essence, inscrutable)
organization. Even if the organization of the manuscripts used complex and
rened solutions, it still remained bound to this reference. The order
typographers tried to give to texts was, on the contrary, a rationalization
based on use and practice, a contingent organization that could be modied
and was driven by the possibilities for making use of the books. The aban-
donment of delity to the original also meant abandonment of the necessity
of order and the opening of a new space of contingency.
Communication thus becomes more and more autonomous, and this
implies correspondent autonomy of the referent. The books of men, once
separated from the Book of God, are separate also from the book of nature,
which is not the illustration of an already given truth but an inexhaustible
search horizon. In the search for knowledge one can move on both levels;
one can investigate nature with a previously unknown freedom, but one
can also consult, confront, and combine books. It is not only the single text
that is decomposed and combined in dierent forms; the relations among
texts, or the general horizon of communication, also become possible ob-
jects of decomposition and recombination. The medial landscape of the
culture of the press is constituted precisely in this loosening in elements,
which is accompanied by new possibilities of distribution and of diusion
(of transmission).
Even in distribution, of course, innovations are introduced. A primary
example is the orientation towards the market, making the distribution of
books much more eective and above all much less controllable than in the
traditional restricted channels of manuscripts.28 However, the ability to
read remained restricted for a long time,29 which leads one to think that
the enormous importance of the larger availability of books lies not only
in a quantitative factor (more readers) but also in the qualitative change
in the practice of reading. Terence Cave speaks of a discovery of the reader
in the sixteenth century based on a circular and indeterminate relationship
between the writer and the reader;30 the writer writes so as to compel the
28. Particularly for consideration of the eects of the move to the market on the constitution of
a critical public sphere, see Jurgen Habermas, Strukturwandel der Oentlichkeit (Neuwied, 1962),
chap. 1.
29. See Rolf Engelsing, Analphabetentum und Lekture: Zur Sozialgeschichte des Lesens in
Deutschland zwischen feudaler und industrieller Gesellschaft (Stuttgart, 1973).
30. See Terence Cave, The Mimesis of Reading in the Renaissance, in Mimesis: From Mirror to
Method, Augustine to Descartes, ed. John D. Lyons and Stephen G. Nichols, Jr. (Hanover, N.H.,
reader to elaborate his or her own autonomous perspective, that is, to pre-
suppose his or her active role. A practice of generative reading is thus sta-
bilized, where the text is used as material to be interpreted according to
criteria and interests completely foreign to the one writing.31 Compared
with the previous practices, this is a deep transformation just on the level
of the dierence of medium and forms; the medieval allegorical reading
aimed at identication with, and not at detachment from, the perspective
presented in the text (which was not that of the writer, but on a noncon-
tingent and nonsubjective level). From that point of view, writing and read-
ing were virtually identical. The text was read in light of its transcription
from another text, and interpretation coincided with imitationin other
words, the transposition of the rst text onto a second text meant to re-
produce it.32 The reader was not presented with loose elements to recom-
bine but with a compact perspective with which to identify; he or she was
not presented with a medium but with a portion of the world. The medium
arises with the pretense of interpretation, when the text appears as an in-
complete entity subject to the interpretations of readers. Even the long-
persisting use of topoi or the citations of the ancient authors lose their
mnemonic value and function as clues to be reorganized in an autonomous
way.33
The new autonomy of readers has remarkable practical consequences.
The spread of reading is signicant not only because of the fact that one
learns to read but also because by reading one can learn. With books avail-
able, one can learn without teachers (without support from the interaction,
that is, by orality) and eventually even against the indications of the teachers,
interpreting books in ones own way. Besides the diusion of alphabetiza-
tion, a no less relevant change takes place in the way books are used by the
alphabetized individuals. The old treatises of rhetoric and memorization
are reproduced, but so is an ever-growing number of guides and practical
handbooks, meant to function as dumb teachers with the aim of transmis-
sion of knowledge that is rst of all an autonomous act by the reader. The
world of communication holds by itself and no longer needs contextual
1982), pp. 14965. In the same period, the humanists lamented that the multiplication of printed
texts brought their contemporaries to unlearn the art of reading as it was practiced up to then; see
Martin, conclusion to Mise en page et mise en texte du livre manuscrit, p. 467.
31. See Cave, The Mimesis of Reading in the Renaissance, p. 163, who speaks explicitly of an
unforeseen mental horizon.
32. See Cave, The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (Oxford,
1986).
33. Given this circularity of utterance and interpretation, it cannot come as a surprise that the
reader has been discovered together with the complementary role of the author, which also did
not exist before the diusion of the printing press and on which much literature is available.
Inevitable in this account is the reference to Montaigne.
support; on the contrary; it is now communication in absentia that deter-
mines the ways and the practices in presentia of objects and persons. Me-
diation is not subordinated to immediacy any more. Transmission can now
appear as an autonomous question.
4
Since the diusion of the printing press, our medial landscape has un-
dergone deep changes. In the present situation, many students assume an
autonomous relevance of the media as a specic system or as a complex of
internal criteria for the selection and production of communication.34 It
would be interesting to examine the functioning of the mass media on the
basis of the distinction medium/form, especially in view of the involvement
of perceptual components, which are dissolved and recombine themselves
in specically communicative forms.
Owing to a lack of space, I would like to focus on the potential usefulness
of the distinction medium/form for describing another aspect of the media
in contemporary society: the impact and consequences of the spread of the
communicative use of computers. The aim of this paper is to propose and
comment on the advantages of this distinction as regards the overemphasis
on transmission in the analysis of media; in the case of telematics and related
phenomena this overemphasis seems particularly evident. Think only of
some sensational failures of the last decades: the project of broadband in-
teractive television, which dramatically demonstrated (for the nancers)
the publics lack of interest in a potentially innite transmission capability.
Apparently users are not particularly interested in choosing from a near-
innite selection of programs. What interests them is not so much the quan-
tity of transmission but rather the quality of selections, the possibility of
decomposing and recombining information in new ways, with supports
and instruments available to help them in this recombination. This capacity
is what they seem to be nding in the internet.
The diculty in dealing with this topic lies rst in the fact that we cannot
presume to foresee the evolution of a medium in the course of its deni-
tionnot only because the situation is still very uid, but especially because
of the fundamental elusiveness of novelty. What can be predicted in the
present as a new development cannot be really new, if novelty means rup-
34. The case of the news is particularly studied, about which one speaks of criteria of
newsmaking that have little to do with truth, morality, or objectivity; see, for example, David L.
Altheide, Creating Reality: How TV News Distorts Events (Beverly Hills, Calif., 1976), and
Altheide and Robert P. Snow, Media Logic (Beverly Hills, Calif., 1979). Luhmann, Die Realitat
der Massenmedien (Opladen, 1995) presents the mass media as an autonomous functional
system of contemporary society.
ture and surprise. A predictable surprise is as paradoxical as an already pres-
ent future, a concept that, not by chance, is cited in almost all scenarios of
the alleged eects of technology.
But, then, what can be analyzed? Where can we turn our attention? We
can consider the medial features of the new technologies, which are far from
unproblematic. Does it make sense to speak of a medium in the case of an
instrument that seems to subvert all the familiar characteristics of mass me-
dia? Where there was anonymity there is now personalization, where there
was unilaterality there is interactivity, where there was the mass there is in-
dividual conguration, and, above all, where there was an instrument ex-
pected to be as not noisy as possible, not to interfere with the message,
there is now a machine used precisely to process information. Starting from
transmission and its features, the introduction of the communicative use
of computers seems to mark a rupture rather than a continuity, and the
available analytical categories do not seem adequate. Before stating de-
nitely that the computer is not a medium, however, it can be useful to try
to modify the concept of mediumfor instance, by applying the distinction
medium/form and seeing if we get any useful clues. The starting question
would not be how telematics facilitate the spread of information but rather
if and how they permit a new decomposition into elements and a subse-
quent recombination in dierent forms.
It is well known that computers are quite a special kind of purposeless
machine,35 radically not trivial machines, because, paradoxically, they are
not used to produce any specic object predictable from the beginning but
rather to produce previously unknown information36 that is, to produce
surprises. The curious aspect is that this production of surprises is entrusted
to a technique that can to some extent be programmed and controlled. The
forms impressed in the medium are then pieces of information; but what
are the loosely coupled elements that will be coupled in a more rigid way?
Again, these are pieces of information, but this information is not dealt with
as information; computers process data that were initially information for
someone and will possibly produce information as the result of the pro-
cessing but are actually handled with no reference to their meaning. This
loosening is much more radical than the one that led, some centuries before,
to the dissolution of the unity of written communication in the multiplicity
of interpretations. Here even the sense of the interpretation is irrelevant and
is completely subject to the interests of the user.
35. See Heinz von Foerster and Paul E. Weston, Articial Intelligence and Machines That
Understand, Annual Review of Physical Chemistry 24 (1973): 35378.
36. Not simply to diuse.
The mass of loosely coupled elements, the substrate of this medium, is
constituted by the data put into the machine. These data represent a set of
elements whose bonds are loosened in order to be available for new recom-
binations. This is the unprecedented ability of computers: to deal with
communications as simple discontinuities without any reference to the in-
tention of the transmitter or to the situation in which communications are
produced. Computers and only computers are able to radically loosen the
unity of communication in the search for new forms that mostly had not
been considered by the one who produced the information. For example,
when processed by computers, a text can show structures, regularities, and
repetitions completely unknown to its author. These features can never-
theless serve as clues for the creation of forms of other kinds, which can
themselves become informative. Features that are perfectly casual from the
point of view of the one drafting them, such as recurrent constructions and
the redundancy present in lists or directories, are used by the computer in
order to achieve eective ways of processing, with unpredictable results
(think of compression techniques or the work of search engines). Even the
search for information through computers relies on simple data; the work
of computers has nothing to do with meanings, and this is its great advan-
tage and its great disadvantage. It is an advantage because it enables the
decomposition of communication into elements specic to the medium
with no regard for the previous bonds. But it is also a disadvantage in all
cases where information rather than simple data is the desired output; for
example, computers are not able to plausibly translate a text from one lan-
guage into another.
A rst consequence of these transformations, as has already become
clear, is the need to rethink the concept of informationa typical modern
notion conceived as a unity with its own identity. According to this par-
adigm, information can be exchanged, gathered, stored, and transmitted
like the (printed) books containing it. In this sense information as such is
a value and its accumulation is wealth because information is understood
as something scarce, and from the perspective of economics scarcity is the
presupposition for value. If, on the contraryas seems to follow from our
analysisinformation becomes relative to the specic perspective of each
observer,37 there is no information by itself, and its intersubjective value
37. See von Foerster, Notes on an Epistemology for Living Things, Understanding
Understanding: Essays on Cybernetics and Cognition (New York, 2003), p. 252: The environment
contains no information; the environment is as it iscoherently outlining the consequences of
the rst developments of cybernetics and of circular causality introduced by Norbert Wiener,
Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Cambridge, Mass.,
1948).
narrows to selection. In this case, information is valuable not because of
what it conveys by itself (everyone builds their own information from their
own perspective) but because it selects possibilitiesa place from which
one can start, like a computer does, to create more and more complex
forms. Information then has value only as a precondition for a further de-
composition into elements, which leads to recombination into forms.
Lets return in closing to the question of transmission. Does this medial
decomposition have consequences for the diusion of communication, as
happened with writing and the printing press? If so, what are these conse-
quences? Our mass media society has a need and a problem that are perfectly
complementary. On the one hand, there is a growing need for new infor-
mation to replace that which is published every day in the papers and
disseminated by television, which by the very fact of having been com-
municated is no longer new or news.38 On the other hand, society suers
from a constant information overload and is constantly searching for cri-
teria that enable selection and eective use of information. In this situation,
the computer as a medium oers, with its processing capabilities, a new
potential to produce and select information out of already available in-
formation (by handling it as data). With the use of computers, commu-
nication enormously amplies the ability to draw information from
information39 not hidden or impossible-to-nd information, but infor-
mation that did not exist before and is produced simply in order to increase
the available dierences. This information, however, is produced on de-
mand and is combined and selected in such a way as to permit the user to
forget everything he or she does not needthat is, to neutralize the problem
of information overload. It is possible that the eects of the medium on the
transmission of forms depend on this aspect. That the informatic programs
rather than the structures of language and of communication decide which
forms are impressed in the medium of the available data is a novelty on
which we can only now begin to reect.
38. On this double relationship of mass media to time, due to which the communication
of the new is always at the same time production of the old, see Luhmann, Die Realitat der
Massenmedien, chap. 3.
39. We nd here again, in an ironic version, the reexivity of sociological research, investigating
a category of objectcommunicationto which the research itself belongs and that takes as an
object distinctions that depend on communication itself.

The Arts of Contingency

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The Arts of Contingency

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The Arts of Contingency

Author(s): Elena Esposito

If we consider the present situation of the arts of transmission in the

1. See Giuseppe Cambiano, Platone e le tecniche (Turin, 1971).

Critical Inquiry 31 (Autumn 2004)

E l e n a E s p o s i t o is professor of sociology at the University of Modena-Reggio

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