Update on the Habermas paper

I spent a few more hours this weekend on what has come to be named, in my consciousness at least, "The Goddamn Habermas Paper." Not that I have anything bad to say about Habermas at this point. Reading Theory of Communicative Action again has been something of a revelation, and a renewal of philosophical investigation. Plus, I like how it feels to think through Habermas. But I have a hard time setting down in words any of the ideas that this has sparked.

I should perhaps point out, for new readers of this blog, as well as for anyone who happens across it, that I have philosophical training in phenomenology, existentialism, Hegel, and Marx. My dissertation was on the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and how his philosophical perspective arose from his appropriation of Hegel (especially the Hegel of the Phenomenology of Spirit).

During grad school, I started into a serious project investigating phenomenologically the experience of media. I had the idea then that typical "media studies" perspectives had given short shrift to the fundamental issue of how we perceive and how we live through and in media. By focusing attention on the content of media presentations, these perspectives basically ignored the perceptual aspects.

Often, media studies approaches imagined an audience duped by media into buying things - products, political candidates, etc. - on the basis of misleading, or on the more subtle basis of soliciting agreement, by speaking to the audience as a member of the group addressed as buyers of those things. In short, media presentations don't persuade us to buy things, they persuade us that we're people who buy things, and then the images of products/candidates simply offers us something to buy at that moment that we're considering ourselves buyers-of-things.

It's cute. But here's the thing I thought I'd discovered: those analyses miss out on the way media trains our perception to be the perception of one buying (for instance). The problem of media (so to speak) is not deliberate manipulation of the dumb masses, nor ideological solicitation of an audience you produce as consumers, but the habituation of modes of perceiving that undermine looking deeply into - well, into anything.

Exhibit A was the way television prompts us, 10 times an hour or so, to watch television. On one level, this is obviously in order to get us to watch that channel, so that network can retain advertising dollars by selling our eyes to someone. On another level, television tells us to keep watching, and thus to continue to learn the habit of watching. Television moves in to our perceptual schemata, constructs our ways of perceiving, and becomes a model of how to view the world itself. This, I felt, was the real meaning of the old CBS (I think) slogan "We Bring You The World."

Now I'm reading Habermas, and finding that all the meaningfulness of media - ideologically or perceptually - could be ancillary to its main achievement, which is the coordination of social action. For example, television has not only constructed my consumer identity, not only trained my perception, but has regulated time in accordance with a rational order whose purpose has nothing whatsoever to do with the sense I make of the images on the screen. As an element of the communicative action of contemporary bureaucratic capitalism, television is part of a system of economic forces, part of the media of money and power, which affect how I live my everyday life regardless of what I perceive or understand the images on the screen to be. In fact, television has this mediated effect even if I don't watch.

So, now what do I do? I'm writing a paper in which I am planning to tell the Society for Phenomenology and Media, of which I'm the current president, for crying out loud, that phenomenological analyses of media make no difference, because "experience" of media is only one part of the situation. Difficult task.

And by the by, it was only last week that Lauren and I were in transit, for 21 hours, home from New York. And we leave for San Diego Thursday.