Theory, Culture & Society

http://tcs.sagepub.com Ubiquitous Media: An Introduction

Mike Featherstone Theory Culture Society 2009; 26; 1 DOI: 10.1177/0263276409103104 The online version of this article can be found at: http://tcs.sagepub.com

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Ubiquitous Media
An Introduction

Mike Featherstone

HE PAPERS in this special issue have been drawn from the Ubiquitous Media: Asian Transformations Conference held at the University of Tokyo in July 2007 to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Theory, Culture & Society.1 The idea of the conference originated from previous cooperation between Mike Featherstone, Shunya Yoshimi, Scott Lash, Couze Venn and others, going back to the development work on the Theory, Culture & Society New Encyclopaedia Project (which led to the Problematizing Global Knowledge special issue Featherstone et al., 2006).2 In seeking to grapple with the nature of contemporary knowledge formation, the processes of globalization and digitalization became seen as important axes for making sense of the changes taking place in the production, circulation and practical use of academic and intellectual knowledge today. One of our aims was to think through the problems of concept formation and knowledge classication, in the light of the critiques of Western-centred accounts of the rise of modernity (Featherstone, 2007). Not only in the sense of attempts to explore alternative genealogies and redress the theft of history, and theoretical-logical accounts driven by dubious notions of superior Western cultural resources (see forthcoming TCS special section on Jack Goody on Occidentalism and Comparative History [esp. Goody, 2006; Friedman, forthcoming]). But also in the concern to take into account the shifting global balance of power away from the West towards Asia and China in particular, which has the potential for the de-stabilization and even the de-classication of Western knowledge along with its universalistic assumptions of providing generic categories (Featherstone, 1995: ch. 8, 2000, 2006). This suggests not only the potential for introducing new content, but shifts in disciplinary structures and sets of theoretical categories. But additionally, and more fundamentally, it points to the reconstruction of the archive, as new sets of relevances come into prominence, which can lead

Theory, Culture & Society 2009 (SAGE, Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, and Singapore), Vol. 26(23): 122 DOI: 10.1177/0263276409103104

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Theory, Culture & Society 26(23)

to the generation of new connections and a different set of classications (Featherstone, 2000, 2006; Foucault, 1970, 1972). If the archive can be seen to stand behind all research, then we need to enquire into the processes leading to the globalization of the archive and the emergent inter-archive. Here questions of storage and access are important, which points to the second major process we identied in the New Encyclopaedia Project: digitalization. Digitalization restructures the ways in which material is stored and accessed in the archive. Many traditional academic archives still restrict access, even though digitalization potentially increases speed, scope and ease of accessibility of digitalized material. With the development of the Internet there has been the formation and expansion of a massive parallel unstable shifting archive which increasingly backs up teaching and research. The Internet is rapidly changing the nature of academic activity and is becoming the key interface in a new scholarly apparatus which is reconstituting the normal way of working, communicating, searching, researching and accessing. Knowledge becomes information. The Internet, then, forms an unstable digital eld, a potential space between the archive and the encyclopaedia, which we have termed the encyclomedia. In effect, the digital media become both a topic and resource, something researchers need to study and theorize to make sense of the world, but also the resource, the interface which cuts into and opens up that world (see Featherstone and Venn, 2006: 15). In addition to the need to develop new forms of creative research practice, there is the need to learn how to handle and navigate the expanding public and private digital storage systems, in which institutions, organizations and ordinary people collect, record, classify and edit material in digital format. This happens not only via the ofce or home terminal, but increasingly on the move through integrated media such as personal organizers, netbooks, mobile phones, iPods, etc. More and more people are watching Internet pod-casts, video clips and pop-ups and listening to music from their cell phones and other mobile devices. This greater capacity for switching modes, enhanced exibility and integration means that media are not just more mobile and work outside the ofce and home: the new media are also more interactive as cheaper multi-functional devices enable greater possibilities for creating, recording, editing, storing and archiving media content (tv programmes, movies, music, images, textual data). It is in this sense that people speak of ubiquitous media. We have moved within a generation from the terminology of mass media, or the media, with debates about the monopolistic concentration of media power and dangers of pervasive manipulation (the culture industry, the consciousness industry, the hidden persuaders), to the sense that media are now differentiated, dispersed and multi-modal. It is no longer adequate, then, to consider the media as referring to television, radio, magazines and newspapers. The media can no longer be considered to be a monolithic structure producing uniform media effects. Terms such as new media and
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Featherstone Introduction 3

multi-media seek to grasp this move towards greater mobility, exibility and interactivity. At the same time they fail to adequately capture the proliferation of media forms, the new modes and media of dispersal, linking and integration. Increasingly, as media become ubiquitous they become embedded in material objects and environments, bodies and clothing, zones of transmission and reception. Media pervade our bodies, cultures and societies a shift made possible by miniaturized electronic circuitry, the cheap ubiquitous computer chips embedded in environments and mobile devices that sustain a new communicative infrastructure. Cheaper multifunctional mobile devices are available which enable direct communication (voice, text, email) but also offer greater possibilities for downloading media content and capturing, recording and transmitting images and sound as we move through different worlds. At the same time as people are multitasking, attending to their miniature screens while on the move, they also are themselves being watched, checked out and recorded by CCTV cameras, computer spyware, biometrics, credit data checking, etc. The new ubiquitous media offer greater possibilities for surveillance and recording by the state and other agencies, not just benign and friendly wireless environments. The intensity of these changes represents a challenge to theorists who seek to understand the emergent conditions for the generation and transmission of knowledge and its relation to the proliferation of digitalized information and new modes of everyday communication. Theorizing ubiquitous media becomes an integral part of theorizing culture and society today. Yet the question of media has hardly been a central topic for previous generations of social and cultural theorists. In this context Friedrich Kittlers writings can be seen as important (see also Theory, Culture & Society [23(78)] on Kittler, edited by Winthrop-Young and Gane, 2006). In his contribution to this special issue, Towards an Ontology of Media, he suggests that philosophy from the beginning has been unable to conceive of media as media, the problem being that ontology deals with things, their matter and form, and not with the relation of things in time and space (their medium). Yet he goes on to show that Aristotle was the rst to turn the common Greek proposition metax (between) into a philosophical concept: t metax (the medium). It has often been remarked that philosophers and thinkers tend to forget the medium of their thought, but Kittler argues there is a strong connection between the making of books and the making of ontologies. This is evident in the move from reading scrolls to books in ancient Rome, with Saint Augustine and Christian writers shifting reading practices by comparing different conicting sourcebook traditions. The change in media technology from scroll to book provided a different storage medium for written material with a greater ease of access icking through books as opposed to laborious unwinding of scrolls which facilitated a more precise critical analysis of a wide range of texts. Kittler argues that philosophy consistently neglected its own technological media from the ancient scroll to the modern bestseller book.
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Bernard Stiegler in his contribution, Teleologics of the Snail: The Errant Self Wired to a WiMax Network, argues that the new era of ubiquitous digital connectivity raises the question of what being can mean in these new circumstances, the question of onto-teleology. It points to the need to radically rethink teleology and open up the question of new forms of teleologies and teleologics. Stiegler argues that todays mass media oriented to a capitalist consumer culture have altered the perception of ends or telos, and thus the economy of desire underlying any system of care. His starting point is that individuation and the constitution of singularities is bound up with the dynamics linking technical, symbolic and psychical associated milieus, that is, milieus composed of elements whose state and activity are dynamically interrelated. This change relates to the new conguration of technical, symbolic and psychical associated milieus that forecloses the possibility of alternative orientations to the future. In particular, he argues that hyperindustrial symbolic milieus, by undermining dialogical exchange between addressor and addressee, short-circuit dialogue and the possibility of collective individuation through participation with others in the transformation of the social world. Furthermore, digital communication technologies such as portable computers and other teletechnological digital devices are producing symbolic milieus of a new kind, namely those characterized by hypertextualization and hypermediatization. These new milieu institute a new ordering of our sense of the lived past and restructure memory. Their effectiveness as new technical and psychic milieus means that, as on the Internet, we unknowingly and unavoidably leave traces which lead to the objectication and potential exploitation of individuals. This suggests we need to rethink care in the digital age. There is the need to explore the potential of ubiquitous digital media to be harnessed for new teleological becomings which would further a politics prioritizing the Iother relation, or philia. Digital new media not only provide the potential for ubiquitous connectivity and greater interactivity, enabling everyone to communicate with everyone else; they also open up a further stage, that of a physical environment of things talking to each other. In her contribution to this collection, RFID: Human Agency and Meaning in Information-Intensive Environments, N. Katherine Hayles analyses this emergent internet of things in which RFIDs (radio-frequency identication devices) are creating an animate environment with agential and communicative powers. The binary divide between active, communicative humans and passive, silent, xed objects no longer works, as objects are provided with ID tag computer chips and a transmitter/receiver. This allows them to sense their environment and exchange information with other devices which form a complex interrelated system along with its related databases. For Hayles, RFIDs open up a new ontological dimension which challenges our conventional ideas about information. The RFIDs are becoming ubiquitous easy to produce and cheap to sell, with the cheapest passive ones, as small as a grain of rice, costing only pennies. The simple ones have a computer chip
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Featherstone Introduction 5

which supplies a 10-digit identication number, antenna and power source to backscatter a signal sent from a reader. More complex active ones can send as well as receive radio waves for up to a mile. RFID tags are revolutionizing the way products are moved around, accessed and stored, with Wal-Mart and the US Department of Defense already requiring suppliers to attach tags to their products. Tags can also be embedded in objects such as cars, clothes, wallets, shoes and of course passports, which enable people to be tracked as they move through environments which have RFID receivers. Increasingly, we face a world where the things on our person, near to the body or means of transport, will be communicating with the network of embedded chips in the environment, allegedly for our benet for example the museum or restaurant we pass which supplies information to our mobile devices as we walk past. This creates an environment where things around us are constantly offering, passing and collecting information. The collectors include governments, the military, corporations and other bodies interested in harvesting our traces information about our movements, consumption habits and taste preferences which are uploaded into relational databases which allow for correlations and data-mining techniques. Hayles argues that the ontological and epistemological implications of the extension of these processes are important. If we understand human consciousness as emergent from lower-level distributed cognitive processes, then human cognitive and sub-cognitive processes can be connected to distributed mechanical cognition. RFIDs have the capacity to interface with human cognition well below the threshold of consciousness, via embodied actions such as gesture, posture, etc., which give rise to and embody unconscious presuppositions what has been referred to as the technological unconscious (Clough, 2000; Thrift, 2005). If meaning and interpretation occur across and between human and mechanical processes, then the contexts for human actions are information-intensive environments which include context-aware technologies such as RFIDs and their relational databases suggesting for Hayles the need for an expanded sense of ethics less concerned with generalization but more sensitive to context, processes and embodied distributed cognition. The politics of this emergent world, the increased surveillance in an extensive society of control and the potential for counter-technologies are important questions. In his contribution to the collection Kiyoshi Abe addresses this question of increased surveillance in the Japanese context. For Abe, the new media have too frequently been addressed in terms of what he refers to as the myth of media interactivity. Successively, we have had new media in the 1980s, multimedia in the 1990s and ubiquitous media in the 2000s proclaimed as heralding more open interactive communication. Yet the public is largely unaware of the way in which information can be traced and stored at each stage of the communicative process. Abe is arguing for the coexistence of the surveillance society alongside the optimism surrounding ubiquitous new media. Indeed, he goes on to emphasize that in the Japanese
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context the assumptions of cultural homogeneity and communality are often regarded as preconditions for communication a view which is strengthened by the actions of conservative governments which have been resistant to opening up Japan to outsiders. Control of information ows and surveillance are therefore strongly evident in interactive media sites such as mixi, where participants obsessed about the security of their interactions with strangers are eager to accept regulation and have little time for hospitality. In recent decades a relatively benign image of high-tech Japan has been developed and globalized. The notion of cool Japan (using the descriptor cool to echo the Cool Britannia rhetoric of the early years of the Blair Government in the UK) became associated with Japanese consumer and leisure goods largely targeted at youth. The term J-cool, as Anne Allison remarks in her contribution to this collection, The Cool Brand, Affective Activism and Japanese Youth, has been used to refer to everything from Japanese video-games and soft toys to the latest fads and fashions. She argues that it emerges with the move in Japan towards a more exible economy based more upon services than manufacturing. This has been accompanied by a shift from material things to the immateriality of information, communication and affect. Following Hardt and Negri (2000), Lazzarato (2007) and others, Allison uses the concept of immaterial labour to point to the move into an epoch which Hardt and Negri refer to as informationalization, where more and more workers produce immaterial goods such as services, cultural products, knowledge and communication. Of special interest is the subcategory of affective labour that Allison argues is central to understanding the current situation of youth which, given their exible attitude towards technology, play and communicative goods, occupies a special position in this transition.3 They are among the groups most vulnerable to economic restructuring and precarious work, the new forms of insecure, contingent, exible work which range from illegal, casual and temporary work to homeworking, piecework and freelancing. Precarity, as Gill and Pratt (2008) argue in the special section in the Theory, Culture & Society Annual Review on Precarity and Cultural Work, is double-edged, with a second aspect that should not only be seen as oppressive but as positive, opening up the potential for new types of subjectivities, socialities and politics. Allison examines this duality in the Japanese context in which youth suffer the insecurities of affective labour, which see new forms of sociality and social types develop: the freeta, youth employed in non-permanent jobs such as convenience stores; the parasito shinguru (parasite singles), those who stay at home living with parents; the hikikomori, the socially withdrawn; the NEET, the youth who dont attend school or work. But there is also affective activism, entailing new forms of care: the freeta unions, which in some cases reach out to the NEET and even hikikomori with campaigns for better jobs, work conditions and security for youth; the kowaremono (broken people) performances with their events and support groups. Affect is also designed into the new media forms and material goods, which cross over and mutate within consumer culture Pokmon being seen as a key example of
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Featherstone Introduction 7

this new form of affective brandgoods, and the globalization of Japanese soft power. Allison sees this as part of a new form of fuzzy consumerism or soft capitalism, where the player-consumer is asked to be an active producer creating webs of attachment by developing interactive role-play networks, involving the consumption not of things but the construction of worlds which can be inhabited along with real and virtual friends and associates. This capacity of media goods to move across different media modalities and immaterial and material forms is also taken up by Marc Steinberg in his paper in this collection, Anytime, Anywhere: Tetsuwan Atomu Stickers and the Emergence of Character Merchandizing. Steinberg focuses on character merchandizing which has become a major element in the contents industry. Like Anne Allison, he notes the shift in Japanese government policy in the last decade towards cognitive capitalism, with the focus on the provision of media content buttressed by intellectual property rights. Steinberg argues that character merchandizing can be seen as a major factor in what has become known as the media mix, a term widely used in Japan to describe the creation of a series of connections between and across media texts: a manga or comic serialization will be turned into an anime series, then a live action lm, a video game and a novel. At the same time in Japan the media-mix is not particularly new, given the longstanding strength of the anime-manga nexus. Steinberg tells us that a major turning point occurred when the popular manga character Tetsuwan Atomu [literally iron arm or strong atom, marketed in the US as Astro Boy] became transformed into a highly successful anime television series in the early 1960s. The TV shows sponsor Meiji Seika, the largest chocolate manufacturer in Japan, decided to use the Atomu character for a sticker campaign. The sticker drawing of Atomu had a close graphic match to the manga and anime depictions and high potential mobility they could be stuck anywhere on school bags, desks, refrigerators, books, clothes, etc. The stickers were notable in their transportability and capacity to act as devices to help the child evoke and re-imagine the atom boy world, anywhere, anytime. They facilitated a new type of sociality based upon thing communication (mono-komi as opposed to masu-komi [mass communication]) and participation in communities of consumption. This leads to not just a ubiquity within media (Atomu is everywhere on television) but a ubiquitous media in which media images and texts are found everywhere in multiple media formats (manga, anime, television, stickers, toys, etc). Following Lazzarato, Steinberg emphasizes that capitalism should not be seen as a mode of production but a production of modes, or fashions, and consumption entails not buying or destroying a product but belonging to a world. For Steinberg, this suggests the need to rethink the postmodern emphasis upon the consumption of immaterial signs (Baudrillards sign value with its emphasis on relational differences), as this neglects the consideration of the material products and the patterns of usage which support these signs a familiar argument for Theory, Culture & Society readers given a new twist.
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Some of these arguments are also taken up by Ian Condry in his contribution to this issue on Anime Creativity. Condry wants to focus on what he refers to as collaborative creativity, the various dimensions of collaboration amongst animators and media industries, between producers and consumers and globally across national boundaries. The Japanese government has been promoting a shift towards cultural industries over the last decade and has become aware that, despite the rhetoric of producing a nation founded on intellectual property, capitalizing on creativity and media dynamism is a more important long-term source of value than the immediate economic success of culture industries. This insight is used to suggest that Japan needs to foster the visibility and desire to produce cultural content; hence the development of character as a uid, relational object becomes highly valued. This leads Condry to examine a number of case studies (including Dekoboko Friends, Zenmai Zamurai and others) to argue that it is the character, rather than the storyline, which is seen as providing the potential for merchandizing and other forms of value realization. In some ways the construction of characters in anime acts like brands, with the latter having been referred to as the institutional embodiment of a new form of informational capitalism given their ability to exploit the capacity of consumers to produce a common social world through communication and interaction (Arvidsson, 2006). Yet brands tend to refer back to their corporate origins, whereas characters tend to emerge from particular premises and world-settings which dont necessarily centre on the storyline, for often characters inhabit a space where the story, the narrative coherence, is left open. Rather than focusing attention on culture in the unchanging normative sense culture as a thing Condry, following Michael M.J. Fischer (2007; cf Spivak, 2006), prefers to see culture as emergent out of mutations and assemblages. New information technologies and media environments can be regarded as culturing new connectivities, with culture here being seen in the biological sense of culturing tissue or growing new immortal cell lines to write with biology. It is in this sense that Condrys use of the term collaborative creativity is eshed out. Characters matter because they offer greater value realization and connectivity the market for licensed merchandizing based on ctional characters is ten times more than that of anime itself. What anime produces is not so much lms and television series but, more importantly, ctional characters that can be played out across diverse media and consumer modalities. Using an ethnographic approach to the making of Japanese animation, Condry tries to show that anime creators design new products not in terms of the stories they tell, but rather in terms of the distinctiveness of their characters, premises and world-settings; this suggests that popular anime series arise because of the designed-in exibility of being able to move characters and premises across a wide range of media platforms. Further aspects of the Japanese contents industries and new media are addressed in the contributions to this collection by Hyeshin Kim, Dominic Pettman and Sunil Manghani. Kims investigation of electronic games for
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Featherstone Introduction 9

women, Womens Games in Japan: Gendered Identity and Narrative Construction, conrms a similar pattern of mixing and multiple media, working across anime, manga and other forms, to that found by Steinberg and Condry. Examining long-standing games such as Angelique, the rst womans game developed for the Super Nintendo in 1994 by an all-female team at Koei, Kim tells us that it was a dating-simulation game, heavily inuenced by the long-standing Japanese girls comics (shoujo manga) format, which was integrated into the familiar mixed-media cross-overs with fan-books, and cosplay (costume play dressing up as anime, manga or game characters). The main concept of the Angelique game was to compete with a mean rich girl surrounded by cool guys, a recurrent theme in shoujo manga with its prevalent emphasis upon love, romance and relationships, as the player strives to raise the affection meter through repeated conversation and dating. A more recent popular game, Haruka, created in 2000, has seen a transition from the conventional more passive soft feminine heroines of the original version to the sword-brandishing warrior heroine of Haruka3 (2004), which is set in the Genpei War of 12th-century Japan. Yet this manifest wilfulness in the central character Nozomi is still blended with familiar traditional feminine shoujo manga qualities; she is both the identiable subject and desirable object: a character which retains a key aspect of female avatars, a femininity which is neither downplayed nor overtly sexualized. In his contribution, Love in the Time of Tamagotchi, Dominic Pettman continues the discussion of Japanese libidinal relationships and new media technologies by focusing on dating simulation games. Many people will have heard about Japanese young peoples fascination with Tamagotchi, which enjoyed its rst boom in 1997. A Tamagotchi (literally egg-watch) was a small disc-shaped pocket device with a screen providing a digital animated pet simulation; the pet needs regular feeding, walking, training and caring if neglected, it becomes bad tempered and eventually dies. The dating sims are a further development also involving routinized care for a partner with a series of rewards and penalties for the user who must learn to win the heart of the beloved through diligence, attentiveness and inventiveness. The dating simulations have spawned hundreds of crossplatform and merchandizing spin-offs with numerous online versions (winning a lover or nurturing a virtual roommate rather than a virtual pet). This suggests the migration of types of affective intimacy previously seen as analogue into digital new media forms. Pettman argues we will increasingly nd that the question of whether the information through which we engage with our interactant is constituted by the image of an actual person or the avatar of a virtual character, will become a redundant ethical question as we become more familiar with digital life. Romanticism has already prepared us to fall is love with composite indescribabilities (Travers, 1999: 333) of various kinds in the genealogy that can be traced back from William Gibson to Mary Shelley and beyond. As Pettman points out, there are expanding debates in both academic and public life as to the balance sheet
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for human beings who increasingly interact with screen simulations and avatars, to the extent that the lines between virtual agents and real friends become blurred. This echoes the debates about the rise of the Facebook and MySpace Friends generation and concern about the alleged damage to human psychology and biology that the loss of everyday face-to-face social relationships poses. Yet these debates should not obscure the fact that courtship at a distance, using various mediating technologies, has long been with us. This argument is also addressed by Sunil Manghani in his contribution to this collection, Love Messaging: Mobile Phone Txting Seen Through the Lens of Tanka Poetry, in which he explores the linkages between mobile phone text messaging and long-standing Japanese tanka poetry. Manghani suggests that both tanka poetry (originating in 8th-century Japan, with tanka competitions still held today in popular newspapers) and txt (the SMS [short message service] abbreviated text messages sent via mobile phones and other devices) require a similar discipline of composing short texts to be exchanged with an intimate other. Short texts can only be up to 160 characters long; a tanka poem is comprised of 31 characters, usually written in a regular 57577 structure. Rather than conceiving of mobile phone texting as a purely functional code devoid of affect, aesthetics and poetics, Manghani argues that messaging can be used to keep alive the ongoing background awareness of others, to retain ones part in a full-time intimate community. It is interesting to note that those who use mobile Internet frequently also spend more time in physical contact with friends. The interface-to-interface contact does not need to replace the face-to-face as many commentators fear; both forms have the capacity to sustain intimacy. In some ways they can both be seen as devices to heighten romantic communication to enhance communication by largely doing without communication (Luhmann, 1986: 25). The tanka poem and mobile text message both offer not only expression but the discipline of the short form, a sort of minimalist kind of love based on indirect communication. At the same time, texting is clearly much more immediately interactive than sending love letters. Yet common to both forms is the potential for a form of collaborative writing, a continuous chain of exchanges built into a sequence. In the case of texting there is also the added problem of storage and archiving messages: given the lack of standard memory on phones, painful forced deletions are necessary (which, Manghani argues, could be seen as akin to tearing up a photograph of a loved one). Yet this impermanence and lack of transferability between different media and archiving potential could well be on the way to being solved. New technologies become adapted and integrated into the human body and the body itself changes with technologies. The move from writing with a brush to writing with a pen, to keying in words on a typewriter, personal computer and mobile phone means signicant shifts in the musculature and control of the hand and hand-brain coordination. Young people become increasingly familiar with and skilled at texting one-handed with a mobile
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Featherstone Introduction 11

phone, using the thumb as the interface. For them, the thumb enjoys a more central role and replaces the index nger in some functions such as pressing the doorbell button. It would seem that corporations and governments have primarily considered mobile phone texting as a communicative device, and the nature of the text provided on the screen and layout of the keyboard are subsumed under the quest for speed of keying and readability with ergonomics the main consideration. The potential benets of mobile phone texting, the effects of the scripts and codes used for training the mind or body, would be seen as bizarre. Yet, as Raja Adal suggests in his contribution to this collection, Japans Bifurcated Modernity: Writing and Calligraphy in Japanese Public Schools, 18721943, the attitude in Japan towards teaching children how to write, or penmanship, has shifted many times from the 1870s to the present day. The Meiji reformers of the 1870s, who instituted a programme of rapid modernization, favoured a penmanship which tted in with the demands of modern industrial society for functionality, speed and clarity and thus favoured the pen over the brush. Yet as Japan became modern, modernity itself became the object of critique, and calligraphy, writing practices emphasizing aesthetics, art and ritual, were viewed favourably. Especially in the 1930s and 1940s, penmanship became associated again (as in pre-Meiji Japan) with perfection of character and was referred to as shod (the way [d] of doing writing [sho]). The secondary school curriculum of 1943 introduced two new subjects which ended with d (path or way): shod (the way of writing) and bud (the martial way). The two forms became joined together as bunbu (the literary and martial skills), a return to the core of the education of samurai children. Yet in the postwar era penmanship, unlike the martial arts, retained its utility. In the Japanese context, although the wabun typewriter had been invented in 1913, it never became widespread due to the difculties of incorporating the thousands of Kanji (sinogram) characters of the Japanese language. Typings impracticality thus favoured the superior functionality of penmanship until the appearance of the word-processor and computer at the end of the 20th century. Yet both the typewriter, the quintessential functional machine, and art, an 18thcentury reaction to the coming of machine civilization, were effectively modern. The nature and genealogy of the Japanese and sinogram writing inscription systems has not only favoured their double life, that of the pen and the brush, functional and aesthetic, design and digital print, but has been a singular resource for the construction and reconstruction of tradition. Hwa Yol Jung takes the discussion of sinograms and sinography further in his contribution to this issue: Ernest Fenollosas Etymosinology in the Age of Global Communication. He argues that sinography, in its calligraphic form in particular, is kinetic and is the human body in motion. Of particular interest is his discussion of Marshall McLuhans fascination with the audio-tactile morphology of the Chinese ideogram or sinogram, which he had earlier encountered via the etymosinology of Ernest Fenollosa. For McLuhan, the Chinese sinogram unleashed bodily energies, arousing the
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audio-tactile senses as opposed to sight. Hwa Yol Jung remarks that McLuhans The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) is an anti-visualist and antitypographic treatise in its embrace of the poetics of electronic media. McLuhan saw this as a step beyond Eurocentric ocularism, which had its origins in the invention of the alphabet in ancient Greece and became intensied with the dominance of print technology in the post-Gutenberg era. For McLuhan, electronic technologys global extension not only challenged and deconstructed the hegemony of vision but also released the synaesthetic interplay of all the senses. In a similar way to electricity, sinograms for McLuhan are seen as arousing the sense of touch, which can be seen as initiating the synthesis of the senses. McLuhan, then, is attracted by the sensory synaesthesia of sinograms as the preferred medium of communication; sinographic writing is anti-anaesthetic and tactile, avoiding ocularcentric fragmentation. In his posthumous work Laws of Media (1988), apeks Philosophical Impact of Contemporary Physics McLuhan discusses C (1961) and Capras The Tao of Physics (1975) as relevant to his attempts to develop a new science of media and to establish the dynamic nature of the physical world in terms of auditory models or polyphony, as opposed to pictorial or visual ones. He saw Capras work as capable of opening up a dialogue between McLuhans own (Western) new science of media and the East. For McLuhan the non-alphabetic (sinographic) East emphasizes the acoustic, simultaneity and synaesthesia, whereas the West emphasizes the visual, the linear and the sequential, together forming the basis for a new synchronicity, or in Gadamers phraseology the fusion of horizons, which is the platform for the development of another future, the future of planetary thinking. These reections from the later McLuhan are made with broad brushstrokes and could be seen as generating an overtly-forced EastWest dichotomy for example, where Hwa Yol Jung presents him as working on a model of the brains right hemisphere as sinographic and acoustic (the East) versus the left hemisphere as alphabetic and visual (the West). In her contribution to the collection, Thoughts Not Our Own: Whatever Happened to Selective Attention?, Barbara Stafford comments that while it is common that language-related processes have been seen as belonging to the left hemisphere and the more holistic spatial and perceptual functions regarded as assigned to the right hemisphere, research on brain lesions challenges this neat division of labour as a cognitive illusion. In actuality, both the left and the right hemispheres work together to create a single individual. For Stafford too vision cannot work in the ocularcentric, disembodied and monological way Jung attributes to Cartesianism and much of Western science. Jung approaches the question from a perspective inuenced by Merleau-Ponty with the emphasis on the lived body (corps vcu), the body as a means or organization, as the eld in which perceptions become localized. Stafford also examines the structural and phenomenological aspects of vision, but focuses more centrally on the revolutionary ndings of the modern neurobiological sciences, which have also challenged the powerful
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Featherstone Introduction 13

epistemological models of Western science and philosophy. She is aware of the centrality of movement to vision and aesthetic experience (kinaesthetics), the importance of change in perspectives and sudden shifts in aspect, which has recently been conrmed by neuroscientic studies that emphasize the plasticity of the human brain. Yet neuroscience also emphasizes the brain-mind as a self-organizing system and the decentralized brain in the body, in which an estimated 90 percent of brain activity is performed largely unconsciously and autonomously following pre-determined instructions, relatively closed off from environmental sensory inputs. Stafford is calling for visual studies to become incorporated into a more general phenomenology of the senses, based on the understanding of how rapid neural recongurations inuence the highly exible behavioural dynamics of our everyday lives. Escaping our autopoietic brain regulative system and focusing carefully on the world is the challenge to be faced. Stafford argues that art is a willed perception imaginatively and publicly working on the world. But she feels that these conscious operations are made more difcult by the proliferation of autopoietic devices and the new media. The decision about what should be suppressed is taken for us by solipsistic cellphones, environment-screening Bose headsets, mobile microsized PDAs or removable MP3 players and VR gaming systems. She sees the problem with these mobile devices and portable immersive technologies in the way they screen out what supposedly does not matter; yet educating the remaining 10 percent of the brain, she suggests, is about showing students the benets of volition and effort, so that by changing the way they think about their thoughts they can change their brains and the world. The new ubiquitous media, then, invite a range of responses. Katherine Hayles shows this ambivalence in her discussion of RFIDs which can be seen as a new form of surveillance and monitoring by governments and corporations, but also can be useful for ordinary people in negotiating complex environments and locating particular goods, services and stored items. Likewise Maurizio Lazzaratto (2007; see also Toscano, 2007) has argued that the new technologies, especially video with its capacity for delaying and accelerating, has the ability to show pre-individual affect and permit access to a new aesthetic dimension, opening up a new way of seeing the world. This is also reinforced by Mark Hansen in his analysis of videoart, in particular his discussion of Bill Violas Anima (2000). Hansen argues that the way in which Violas artwork takes one minute of different expressions of emotion on the human face, and slows them down to over one hour of playback time, enables the rich texture of affective information in emotional transitions to become visible (Hansen, 2004b; see discussion in Featherstone, 2009). In his contribution to this collection, Living (with) Technical Time: From Media Surrogacy to Distributed Cognition, Mark Hansen continues his analysis of recent work in media art to investigate how time has changed in the wake of digital new media. Hansen initially focuses on the German
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artist Wolfgang Staehles work Empire 24/7, which involves a webcam live video-feed of images of the Empire State Building, an attempt to update Andy Warhols famous eight-hour movie Empire, which records the duration of a day of the Empire State Building. Staehles piece, Hansen argues, works in an entirely different aesthetic register, having an open-ended indeterminate nitude. Empire 24/7 poses the question of whether the cinematic temporal object (even one as of extensive duration as Warhols Empire) can still claim to mediate temporal experience in the contemporary world of digital computing. Indeed, as Hansen remarks, this raises the question of whether contemporary technical mediations of time are beyond aesthetics, because they operate at a level that bypasses circuits linking technics and human beings; that is, those circuits that we currently conceptualize under the name of media. Works like Staehles institute a different technical regime which goes beyond the Husserlian denition of the temporal object, in that they are not a surrogate for the ux of consciousness. Empire 24/7 inscribes times ux independently of any synthesis of consciousness and therefore prior to the differentiation of lived and artifactual time. In this, Hansen argues, it creates a technical temporal quasi-object which he calls a diachronic thing. The new media technology supports what Hansen calls primary presencing, a form of temporal continuity that is a precursor to all forms of temporal experience, to aesthetics and the media; it can do this because the technics is fully integral to the happening. To understand the impact of the spread of the new media today, Hansen argues, we therefore need to focus on the shift in the artifactualization of time from cinema media objects to more ne-scaled digital inscriptions. Following Husserl, Stiegler has argued that cinema is the exemplary temporal object for reecting on time-consciousness. It provides the general technical support for our experience of time and, consequently, human consciousness can be seen as having an essentially cinematographic structure (Stiegler, 1998: 68). Furthermore, consciousness operates through a process of selection not only essentially similar to the process of cinematic editing, but Stiegler goes further to argue that in todays world contemporary culture industries offer us standardized collective secondary memories that form the basis for the selection of new presents and for the projection of the future. In effect, for Stiegler (2003: 154) todays culture industries have control not only over content but the very mechanisms of our temporalization. For Hansen this paints a too grim neo-Frankfurt School picture, and against this he suggests that digital technologies inscribe time in a range of ways which are far more open and exible; they do not bind time in a restrictive form, nor subordinate it to the ends of any common experience. Film as a medium is also addressed by Shigehiko Hasumi in his contribution to this collection: Fiction and the Unrepresentable: All Movies are but Variants on the Silent Film. Hasumi is interested in why it is the case that in over 100 years of lm, the medium has not yet truly incorporated sound; in effect the so-called talkie can be regarded as only a variant of the silent lm. The camera and the sound recorder developed as two entirely
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Featherstone Introduction 15

separate technologies with no consideration as to how the image and sound might be synchronized. It is accepted by viewers as entirely normal that sound has been added after the event to movies in post-production. In contrast to the long history of amateur movie-making which can be traced back to the outbreak of the First World War, the technology of sound recording remained the exclusive preserve of specialist technicians for much longer. Sound engineers successfully defended their monopoly from the encroachment of amateurs until the popularity of the tape recorder in the 1960s. Video cameras containing digital magnetic tape made it possible to record sound and image synchronously on the same medium. This enabled the real voices of actors to be recorded without suspended or boom microphones and for the rst time freed the production of lms from conicts between lighting and sound engineers. It is only with the digital age of the 21st century that we are beginning to see the real integration of image and sound reproduction. The popularity of the digital video camera is a key moment in the process, yet it remains to be seen how long it takes for lm to break free from the long dominant paradigm of the silent lm, given that most directors have been steeped in the history of the cinema and are in many ways lm fundamentalists. Certainly, Hasumi says, our perception of the history of the 20th century would have been different if synchronous sound and lm recording of events had taken place. Our own lives in general are bound up with many events presented in the silent movie dominant paradigm, with aural representation generally excluded from consideration; hence it remains to be seen whether the 21st century will be anything other than a variant of the 20th century. Hasumi argues that the taboo against reproducing the voice could be nothing other than a reection of the supremacy still granted to the voice in the structure of human knowledge. Unlike images, which were themselves already reproductions, the voice was identied with the body itself. This suggests for Hasumi that reproducing the voice implied a loss of corporality, and it was for this reason more than any other that amateurs were barred from access to sound reproduction technology for so long. If lm is only now starting to explore the potential of simultaneous visual and sound recording, the potential to add on other sensory inputs for many would seem to still be in the realm of science ction. Yet Dave Boothroyd in his contribution to this collection, Touch, Time and Technics: Levinas and the Ethics of Haptic Communications, takes up the challenge to theorize the potential of touch and argues that the development of interactive haptic media can help us to rethink the nature of communication. He emphasizes communications essential embodied, sensory and tactile capacities, which provide an opportunity to rethink the ethical dimension of sensuality and develop an ethics of contact or touch. Boothroyd argues that theorizations of media-related virtuality (cyberspace) have generally remained preoccupied with questions of representation, which has helped perpetuate the ocularcentric paradigm. The haptic, the sense of touch, he sees as central to personal or intimate relationships: when one shares the
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same physical space with another it provides the potential for touch (stroking, caressing, hand-holding, massage, kissing, palpating, patting, etc.). Haptic media technologies are still only starting to be developed, but Boothroyd anticipates the time when the richness and plenitude of sensation through haptic tele-contact may be as evident and familiar as tele-vision is for us today. At the same time he emphasizes that this should not be seen as merely a reconstruction of an originary pre-existing sensible reality, for each new media technology introduces what McLuhan called the total media environment, a transformation of reality through a process of technical incorporation which produces new ways of being in the world, new experiences and forms of social relationships. Boothroyd discusses the work of Mark Hansen (2004a, 2006a, 2006b), who argues that the human body and digital information need to be thought of as a conjunction. Focusing on the visual arts, Hansen suggests that the visual should be thought in terms of haptic processes involving the modication of the physical body. Indeed Hansen invites us to think of all the senses in terms of the haptic: the human body is seen as proactively and proprioceptively reexive. An affective body doesnt wait for the judgement of consciousness but, following Bergson, can be seen as a centre of indeterminate affective processes; an affective body is not passively acted on, as there is no essential xed distinction between internal and external, but is rather included within the information processing ensemble. Boothroyd wishes, then, to examine the ways in which haptological thinking raises the issue of the connectivity of the body to its total environment, with the latter seen as an immersive total media environment progressively transformed by each new medium (writing, print, radio, TV, digital, etc.) in the way McLuhan outlined. Boothroyd goes on to discuss the writings of Derrida (2005) and Levinas (1981) to develop his critique of Hansen. Derrida emphasizes the inseparability or necessary interfacing of the human toucher with the manipulation of the touched material environment. He argues that a certain haptocentrism has always been at work beneath the ocularcentrism of Western thinking and cautions that the dangers of a re-evaluation of hapticism could lead to a re-invention of haptocentrism. The emergence of the digital haptic media environment has developed in parallel with the rethinking of the senses in terms of affect and has facilitated a rethinking of the visual outside the paradigm of representation. In terms of affect theory, touch can be viewed as being fundamental to each of the other senses; yet Boothroyd, following Derrida, cautions against the dangers of thinking of touch based in its supposed re-presentation, as in the haptic data sets we nd in the contemporary brain sciences, and remarks that Mark Hansen relies on a positivist account of the haptic which tends towards the kind of haptocentrism Derrida warns against. For Derrida, touch precedes the differentiation or determination of the subject and the object and for this reason is unrepresentable and ultimately unthematizable. This suggests that a theory of touch must go through a theory of skin, for the skin is the site where the event of contact takes place. Touching
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Featherstone Introduction 17

precedes my sense of my own being-in-a-skin and my subjectivity is produced from the sense of a certain withdrawal of contact, the movement away from an other. This relates to Levinass ethical theorization of the skin, an ethics of touch, in that he regards touch as the exposure to affective involvement with others. Touch should be seen as a form of contaminated communication, not subjectobject communication. Yet, for Boothroyd, the skin should be regarded as an inter(sur)face and not seen as restricted to any technological form but as a reference to the materiality of the process of communication, which is the site of affective transmission and exchange of movement. The thematization of haptic media, then, provides a new cultural context for rethinking this relationship. In her contribution to this collection, Symbiotic Architecture: Prehending Digitality, Luciana Parisi discusses the use of the genetic algorithm in digital architecture. Computer software has been used in architectural design since the 1960s and, more recently, there have been debates about the use of cybernetic experiments that use self-organizing systems to design responsive media environments. The Sensity Project, for example, collects sensorimotor data including changes in the weather, trafc noise, movement of people and vibration of buildings to develop an emergent architecture able to re-form the experience of the city in real time. This can be seen as part of a shift away from the xed shapes of Euclidean geometry to an architecture of movement and variation. Movement and curvature become central to this software-responsive architecture and represent a departure from Le Corbusiers nite lines, right angles and frozen surfaces. The concern with movement can be traced back to the Italian Futurists and, more recently, there has been the metabolist movement in Japan in the late 1960s, with Kisho Kurokawas design for the centre of Tokyo including a central nucleus and seven tentacular axes leading to peripheral paths of energy-information exchange, with the capsule employed in a modular system as the minimum dwelling unit. Here we have the dynamics of continual growth and renewal by mechanical processes, but the modularity still meant pre-ordained parts that could be broken apart and brought together again. This contrasts with the interest since the 1990s in the development of symbiotic algorithms which has permitted architectural design to experiment with growth and breeding, to produce an evolutionary architecture of movement, interaction, iterative differentiation and continual curving. An architectural design, based on the ways since the 1990s that the biological and informational have been joined together to produce autonomous evolutionary programmes which feedback into digital culture and indeed more general cultural modelling, is now seen as composed of milieus of viral ecologies. As Massumi (2005) argues, the new biogram digital architecture can be seen to resonate with the proprioceptive and affective orientation of a body in space, with its capacities of variation and movement across levels, shapes and forms. This form of symbiotic architecture sees solids not as static but as trajectories; it turns space into blobs, an aqueous extension and near solid. Unlike Dawkins model of biological evolution
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based on a serial genetic algorithm, Parisi favours a model of evolution based upon parallel algorithms entering into symbiotic alliances triggered by environmental variation. This parallelism produces not just the evolution of one algorithm or the other, but a new algorithmic behaviour akin to the self-organizing multiple agent systems such as one nds in ant colonies or bee swarms. Here Parisi draws on the conception of symbiotic parasitism in which hosts and guests become accomplices in the production of intricate ecologies, drawing on Marguliss (1992) serial endosymbiotic theory developed to understand the parasitic architectures of bacteria. The mutational nature of and continual variation of the assemblage is emphasized in which the environment is not seen as a static ground but as being continually moved, which strongly suggests that the status of the object and subject need to be rethought in terms of vectors of a curve, not the line and point of view of the ocularcentric tradition, which equates the point of view with a pregiven subject and object assigned a xed position. Digital architecture and its increasing use in the design of contemporary media culture, then, should not be seen as an architecture of form; rather, it seeks to grasp the haze of dust without object out of which form emerges and falls back (Deleuze, 1993: 94). The new forms of digital architecture become used in digital software design which has a myriad of applications in ubiquitous media. In an age of pluriform, out-of-control megacities, it may never result in the new planned city, based upon evolving architectures, but nevertheless can become applied in a range of spatial and environmental contexts. It is exploring similar theoretical terrain to some of the recent work on biotechnology, bioinformatics, bioart, biocapital and biopolitics and the affective turn (Clough, 2007, 2008; Cooper, 2006, 2008; Dillon and Lobo-Guerrero, 2009; Palladino, forthcoming; Rajan, 2006; Rose, 2001; Thrift, 2008). As mentioned in our earlier discussion of Fischer (2007) in which media environments can be seen as culturing new connectivities, there is a return to the biological sense of culture, or rather culturing: growing cultures which produce new mutations and assemblages. Not only is information alive, but information-saturated cultures are also seen as alive (Brouwer and Mulder, 2003; Featherstone and Venn, 2006; Mulder, 2006; Spivak, 2006), and we see the emergence of a new set of metaphors for social and cultural life. At the same time Parisis discussion is conducted at a high level of abstraction, focusing on architectural design modelling, and is removed from any sense of the practices of people who move about the city, along with the shifting power-balances between architects, developers, businessmen and politicians which result in the adoption of particular types of architecture. From one perspective the city can be analysed as a self-governing process, one in which the rise of the media-architecture complex can be seen as giving rise to the media city (McQuire, 2008). Yet there is a danger in thinking the media city purely in terms of visual media technologies like photography, cinema and screen computer technologies. Rather, as Kittler (1996; see also Chikamori, 2009) argues, the city more fundamentally
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Featherstone Introduction 19

should be regarded as a medium. The city buildings, the streets, the monuments, the cemeteries are also recording and storage devices and archives of not just public information and memories but ones that embody a labyrinth of traces and involuntary memories which are not just summoned by the eye but by the full range of other sensory impressions. The city as medium connects with the body as medium, the body as a recording and storage device, the body as archive. Moving around the city demands a tactile eye (Taussig, 1991) and the engagement of the synaesthesia of the senses, suggesting, as Hwa Yol Jung cautions, the need to go beyond ocularcentric accounts of media. This certainly has been one of the lessons of this set of papers produced from the Ubiquitous Media Conference, and we look forward to future explorations of this theme in the pages of Theory, Culture & Society.
Notes 1. The Ubiquitous Media (UMAT) Conference was one of a series of TCS conferences which include: the 10th Anniversary Theory, Culture & Society conference held in Pittsburgh in 1992 (selected papers published as Global Modernities, Featherstone, Lash and Robertson, 1995), and the second Theory, Culture & Society Conference on Culture and Identity: City, Nation, World, held in Berlin in 1995 (selected papers published as Spaces of Culture, Featherstone and Lash, 1999). A third conference on Cosmopolis was held in Helsinki in 2000 with a selection of papers published as a TCS special issue (Featherstone, 2002). 2. This issue would not have been possible without the valuable work of Couze Venn, Neil Turnbull, Jun Tanaka and Roy Boyne, who read and commented on all the papers submitted for the special issue in addition to our usual TCS referees. Simon Dawes, the TCS editorial assistant, has provided important work in helping prepare the papers for publication. Couze Venn also made numerous helpful suggestions about ways to improve this introduction to the special issue. In terms of the organizing and planning of the conference, we owe a major debt to Shunya Yoshimi and Hidetaka Ishida and their colleagues at the University of Tokyo. Important coordination work between the English and Japanese groups was provided by Tomoko Tamari and Takuji Yamamoto. The design work for the conference website and wireless metaspace system was conducted by Takuya Abe and Shinichi Hisamatsu. The media art stream and exhibition was organized by Tomoe Moriyama. The programme committee (Roy Boyne, Akihiro Kitada, Jun Tanaka, Neil Turnbull and Couze Venn) dealt with the numerous abstracts and paper submissions. The important work of the many Interfaculty Initiative in Information Studies and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences postgraduates should also be acknowledged, especially: Yutaka Iida, Rin Tsuboi, Kenji Nishi, Kazumichi Takahata, Takeshi Nakaji, David Buist, Hiroko Ichikawa, Sungmin Kim, Kyoko Shibano, Yoshiaki Shuuto, Takahito Niikura, Mitsuhiro Hayashi, Fumiko Ito, Atsuko Watanabe, Kawol Chung, Ja-young Nam and Junko Aoki. Robert Rojek at Sage helped in countless ways. On the TCS side a number of editors, especially Ryan Bishop, Roy Boyne, Nick Gane, Scott Lash, John Phillips, Neil Turnbull, Bryan Turner and Couze Venn, helped with many aspects of the conference. Financial support was provided by: the Horiba International Conference Fund, the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science International Meeting Series, the International Communications

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Foundation, Japan Foundation, The 21st Century Center of Excellence Program/Center for the Study of Ubiquitous Computing Infrastructure at the University of Tokyo, and SAGE Publications Ltd. 3. The term affective labour is often seen as too vague and imprecise and has many critics. For a discussion see Gill and Pratt (2008). References Arvidsson, A. (2006) Brands: Meaning and Value in Media Culture. London: Routledge. Brouwer, J. and A. Mulder (2003) Information is Alive. Rotterdam: V2/Netherlands Architectural Institute. apek, M. (1961) Philosophical Impact of Modern Physics. New York: Van Nostrand. C Capra, F. (2000 [1975]) The Tao of Physics, 25th Anniversary Edn. Boston: Shambhala. Chikamori, T. (2009) Between the Media City and the City as a Medium, Theory, Culture & Society, forthcoming. Clough, P. (2000) Auto-Affection. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. Clough, P. (2007) Biotechnology and Digital Information, Theory, Culture & Society 24(78). Clough, P. (2008) The Affective Turn: Political Economy, Biomedia and Bodies, Theory, Culture & Society 25(1). Cooper, M. (2006) Pre-empting Emergence: The Biological Turn in the War on Terror, Theory, Culture & Society 23(1). Cooper, M. (2008) Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era. Seattle: Washington University Press. Deleuze, G. (1993) The Fold. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. Derrida, J. (2005) On Touching Jean-Luc Nancy. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Dillon, M. and L. Lobo-Guerrero (2009) The Biopolitical Imaginary of Speciesbeing, Theory, Culture & Society 26(1). Featherstone, M. (1995) Undoing Culture. London: SAGE. (Japanese translation Hotsureyuku Bunka published by Hosei University, 2009.) Featherstone, M. (2000) Archiving Cultures, special issue on Sociology Facing the Next Millennium, British Journal of Sociology 51(1). Featherstone, M. (2006a) Archive, Theory, Culture & Society 23(23). Featherstone, M. (2006b) Body Image/Body without Image, Theory, Culture & Society 23(23). Featherstone, M. (2007) Consumer Culture and Postmodernism, 2nd edn. London: SAGE. Featherstone, M. (2009) Transformazioni. Corpo, imagine ed affect nella cultural dei consumi [Transformations: Body, Image and Affect in Consumer Culture], in Gustavo Guizardi (ed.) Identit incorporate. Bologna: il Mulino. Featherstone, M. and S. Lash (1999) Spaces of Culture. London: SAGE. Featherstone, M. and C. Venn (2006) Problematizing Global Knowledge: An Introduction, Theory, Culture & Society 23(23).

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Featherstone Introduction 21
Featherstone, M., S. Lash and R. Robertson (1995) Global Modernities. London: SAGE. Featherstone, M., H. Patomki and C. Venn (eds) (2002) Cosmopolis Special Issue, Theory, Culture & Society 19(12). Featherstone, M., C. Venn, R. Bishop and J. Phillips (eds) (2006) Theory, Culture & Society 23(23). Fischer, M.J.M. (2007) Culture and Culture Analysis as Experimental System, Cultural Anthropology 22(1). Foucault, M. (1970) Order of Things. London: Tavistock. Foucault, M. (1972) Archaeology of Knowledge. London: Tavistock. Friedman, J. (forthcoming) Occidentalism and the Categories of Hegemonic Rule, Theory, Culture & Society. Gill, R. and A. Pratt (2008) In the Social Factory? Immaterial Labour, Precariousness and Cultural Work, Theory, Culture & Society 25(78). Goody, J. (2006) The Theft of History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hansen, M.B.N. (2003) Affect as Medium, or the Digital-Facial-Image, Journal of Visual Culture 2(2): 20528. Hansen, M.B.N. (2004a) New Philosophy for New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hansen, M.B.N. (2004b) The Time of Affect, or Bearing Witness to Life, Critical Inquiry (Spring). Hansen, M.B.N. (2006a) Media Theory, Theory, Culture & Society 23(23). Hansen, M.B.N. (2006b) Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media. London: Routledge. Hardt, M. and A. Negri (2000) Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kittler, F.A. (1996) The City is a Medium, New Literary History 27. Lazzarato, M. (2007) Machines to Crystallize Time: Bergson, Theory, Culture & Society 24(6). Levinas, E. (1981) Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence. The Hague: Nijhoff. Luhmann, N. (1986) Love as Passion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McLuhan, M. (1962) The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. Toronto: Toronto University Press. McLuhan, M. (1988) Laws of Media: The New Science. Toronto: Toronto University Press. McQuire, S. (2008) The Media City. London: SAGE. Mackenzie, A. (2006) Cutting Code: Software and Sociality. New York: Peter Lang. Margulis, L. (1992) Symbiosis in Cell Evolution: Microbal Communities in the Archaean and Proterozoic Eons. New York: W.H. Freeman. Massumi, B. (2005) Parables for the Virtual. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mulder, A. (2006) Media, Theory, Culture & Society 23(23). Palladino, P. (forthcoming) Picturing the Messianic: Agamben and Titians The Nymph and the Shepherd , Theory, Culture & Society.

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Rajan, K.S. (2006) Biocapital: The Constitution of Postgenomic Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rose, N. (2001) The Politics of Life Itself, Theory, Culture & Society 18(6). Spivak, G. (2006) Culture Alive, Theory, Culture & Society 23(23). Stiegler, B. (1998) The Time of Cinema: On the New World and Cultural Exception, Tekhnema Journal of Philosophy and Technology 4: 62118. Stiegler, B. (2003) La Technique et le temps, 3: Le temps du cinma et la question du mal-tre. Paris: Galile. Taussig, M. (1991) Tactility and Distraction, Cultural Anthropology 6(2): 14753. Thrift, N. (2005) Knowing Capitalism. London: SAGE. Thrift, N. (2008) Non-Representational Life. London: Routledge. Toscano, A. (2007) Vital Strategies: Maurizio Lazzarato and the Metaphysics of Contemporary Capitalism, Theory, Culture & Society 24(6). Travers, A. (1999) The Nazi-Eye Code of Falling in Love: Bright Eyes, Black Heart, Crazed Gaze, Theory, Culture & Society 15(34). [Reprinted in M. Featherstone (ed.) Love and Eroticism. London: SAGE.] Winthrop-Young, G. and N. Gane (eds) (2006) Friedrich Kittler: A Prole, Theory, Culture & Society 23(78).

Mike Featherstone is Editor of Theory, Culture & Society. His recent publications include Automobilities (edited with N. Thrift and J. Urry, SAGE, 2005; Japanese translation forthcoming from Hosei University Press) and Consumer Culture and Postmodernism, 2nd edn (SAGE, 2007). The Japanese translation of his book Undoing Culture has just been published as Hotsureyuku Bunka by Hosei University Press.

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