Heidegger and the Media E-Book

David J. Gunkel

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: TM - Theory and Media
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 284

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

The most significant philosopher of Being, Martin Heidegger has nevertheless largely been ignored within communications studies. This book sets the record straight by demonstrating the profound implications of his unique philosophical project for our understanding of today’s mediascape. The full range of Heidegger’s writing from Being and Time to his later essays is drawn upon. 

Topics covered include:
- an analysis of Heidegger's theory of language and its relevance to communications studies
- a critical interpretation of mass media and digital culture that draws upon Heidegger's key concept of Dasein
- a discussion of mediated being and its objectifying tendencies
- an assessment of Heidegger's legacy for future developments in media theory

Clear explanations and accessible commentary are used to guide the reader through the work of a thinker whose notorious reputation belies the highly topical nature of his key insights. 
In a world full of digital networks and new social media, but little critical insight, Heidegger and the Mediashows how a true understanding of the media requires familiarity with Heidegger’s unique brand of thinking.

Leseprobe

HEIDEGGER AND THE MEDIA

Theory and the Media

John Armitage, Virilio and the Media

David J. Gunkel and Paul A. Taylor, Heidegger and the Media

Philip Howard, Castells and the Media

Paul A. Taylor, Žižek and the Media

Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, Kittler and the Media

HEIDEGGER AND THE MEDIA

DAVID J. GUNKEL AND PAUL A. TAYLOR

polity

Copyright © David Gunkel and Paul Taylor 2014

The right of David Gunkel and Paul Taylor to be identified as the Authors of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2014 by Polity Press

65 Bridge Street Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press 350 Main Street Malden, MA 02148, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-7192-5

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website: www.politybooks.com

CONTENTS

Preface

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1  We Need to Talk About Media

2  Mediated Truth

3  In Medias Res

4  The Dasign of Media Apps: The Questions Concerning Technology

Conclusion: There is Nothing Outside Technology

Notes

References

Index

PREFACE

I am a philosopher, not a scientist, and we philosophers are better at questions than answers. I haven’t begun by insulting myself and my discipline, in spite of first appearances. Finding better questions to ask, and breaking old habits and traditions of asking, is a very difficult part of the grand human project of understanding ourselves and our world.

Dennett 1996: vii

Philosophy, unlike the empirical sciences or other investigative activities, is not necessarily concerned with answers. Like the American philosopher Daniel Dennett, Heidegger is not interested in providing solutions to existing questions and debates but is dedicated to re-examining all those questions that have typically been asked in a relatively uncritical fashion. Heidegger highlights the predominantly unacknowledged ways in which the very typicality of our conventional modes of inquiry already over-determine what can be asked about, what evidence will count as appropriate and what outcomes might be possible.

We do not deny that this makes reading Heidegger challenging, if not frustrating, in a manner for which the contemporary reader may be ill prepared. We live in an age in which questions generally demand immediate answers, and it is often considered bad form to respond to a question with another question. But this is precisely what Heidegger does and, in our view, this is what represents authentic philosophical endeavour – a much-needed form of inquiry that has increasingly been siphoned off by self-styled ‘social sciences’ in which the fetishization of methodology frequently acts as a poor alibi for genuine thought.

In keeping with this philosophical commitment to critical inquiry, however, a question immediately arises concerning Heidegger and his infamous entanglement with Nazism. According to Miguel de Beistegui (2005: 155), ‘no aspect of Heidegger’s life and work is more controversial than his engagement in favour of National Socialism, and his tenure as the first Nazi rector of the University of Freiburg from May 1933 to April 1934.’ Although Heidegger only occupied the position of rector for twelve months, he remained a member of the party through the end of the war and was officially classified a Nazi Mitläufer, or ‘fellow traveller’, in March 1949 by the State Commission for Political Purification as part of the post-war de-Nazification process. Heidegger presented his own account of this difficult period in an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel published posthumously in 1976 (a precondition for his agreement to talk). Despite his rationale, most scholars find Heidegger’s public explanations to be woefully inadequate and persistently unapologetic – leading to more questions than answers. And one of those questions that still needs to be addressed is what, if anything, can or should be salvaged from Heidegger’s work?

Our belief that Heidegger’s thinking still justifies persevering with rests upon two central points:

1  Refusing to engage with Heidegger’s philosophy achieves little because of the profound influence he had upon a range of distinctly non-Nazi and vehemently anti-fascist thinkers such as Hannah Arendt, Herbert Marcuse, Jean-Paul Sartre and Jacques Derrida. A proper understanding of these and other historically important thinkers necessitates engagement with Heidegger’s writing whatever censure we may wish to impose upon the man himself.

2  There is nothing in Heidegger’s philosophy that is innately fascistic. In fact, his critique of technology explored in this book raises profound issues about technology’s role in dehumanizing people, of which the Nazi death camps were the darkest historical manifestation. In this case, unalloyed censure of Heidegger’s thought based upon his deeply flawed political affiliation is not only an inadequate response – it misses an opportunity to understand better the role technology played in facilitating Nazi ideology.

The first justification falls outside the remit of a book about media technology, but the second relates to Heidegger’s unique perspective concerning the concept of essence as it relates to our contemporary mediated environment, where (foreshadowing Marshall McLuhan’s famous adage ‘The medium is the message’) we often miss the fundamental social effects of media due to our tendency to be distracted by the relatively superficial significance of their content when compared to their form.

In fact, this concern is clearly evident in one of the very passages relating to the Holocaust that Heidegger’s critics put forward as proof that he should be viewed as an intellectual persona non grata. In a 1949 lecture entitled Das Gestell (Enframing), Heidegger described how ‘agriculture is now a mechanized food industry, in essence the same as the production of corpses in the gas chambers and extermination camps, the same thing as the blockading and starving of countries, the same thing as the production of hydrogen bombs’ (BFL: 27). The equivalences Heidegger asserts here led to such representative criticisms as Davidson’s (1989: 424) observation that ‘when one encounters Heidegger’s 1949 pronouncement, one cannot but be staggered by his inability – call it metaphysical inability – to acknowledge the everyday fate of bodies and souls, as if the bureaucratized burning of selected human beings were not all that different from the threat to humanity posed in the organization of the food industry by the forces of technology.’ Using the phrase ‘were not all that different’, Davidson fundamentally misses Heidegger’s central philosophical point. By concentrating solely on the expression ‘the same thing as’, Davidson thereby ignores the crucial qualification contained in the immediately preceding phrase ‘in essence’. It is with this particular concept that Heidegger’s work, despite, we repeat, the eminently understandable reservations one might have about the man himself, provides profoundly important insights into the social impact of technology, and, in particular, media technology.

It is critically important to note here that Heidegger is not saying that the mechanization of agriculture and the extermination camps are equivalent phenomena. Instead, the similarity being alluded to is one of essence, and it is this conceptualization that has profound implications for our understanding of media as an integral part of a diverse technological environment that shares certain essential features. As Heidegger aptly described it, ‘the same is never the equivalent [das Gleiche]. The same is just as little a merely undifferentiated confluence of the identical. The same is much more the relation of differentiation’ (BFL: 49). Apparently self-contradictory, both this statement and the subsequent utterance that ‘the essence of technology is by no means anything technological’ (QCT: 4) highlight the fact that, whilst there are many different forms of technological artefact, common across such diverse forms is an underlying similarity, namely the facilitation of an objectifying attitude towards existence. This is an important insight into the essence of technology that informs much of the subsequent chapters’ specific attention to media and the process of mediation.

Thus, along with Heidegger, prominent Jewish thinkers like Zygmunt Bauman and Richard Bernstein also insist upon the wider and more generalizable significance of the uniquely industrial nature of the Holocaust. For example, in terms that directly resonate with Heidegger’s language, Bauman argues:

Like everything else in our modern society, the Holocaust was an accomplishment in every respect superior if measured by the standards that this society has preached and institutionalized. It towers high above the past genocidal episodes in the same way as the modern industrial plant towers above the craftsman’s cottage workshop, or the modern industrial farm with its tractors, combines and pesticides, towers above the peasant farmstead with its horse, hoe and hand-weeding. (Bauman 1989: 89)

Similarly, Bernstein pointed out how ‘we may find it almost impossible to imagine how someone could “think” (or rather, not think) in this manner, whereby manufacturing food, bombs, or corpses are “in essence the same” and where this can become “normal,” “ordinary” behavior. This is the mentality that [Hannah] Arendt believed she was facing in Eichmann’ (Bernstein 1996: 170). The mistake we often make is to think that such a mentality is limited to such exceptional figures as Eichmann. The truly disturbing point of Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem is contained within its resonant subtitle – A Report on the Banality of Evil. Any evil proclivities present in Eichmann were vastly overshadowed by the harm he caused as an otherwise unremarkable bespectacled functionary in a huge technological system devoted to the dehumanization of a whole people. The fact of Heidegger’s questionable past therefore does not, on its own, do away with the need to confront the stubbornly persistent implications of his ontological analysis of the essence of technology for our own historical predicament.

Hence, notwithstanding the myriad reasons for scepticism of the man himself, we remain drawn to Heidegger’s work because it epitomizes the fact that ‘the task of philosophy is not to provide answers or solutions, but to submit to critical analysis the questions themselves, to make us see how the very way we perceive a problem is an obstacle to its solution’ (Žižek 2006a: 137). This book, therefore, does not aim to provide readers with a neat (‘ready-to-hand’ in Heidegger’s terminology) framework with which to update Heidegger’s key ideas unproblematically for today’s mediascape. This would involve a performative contradiction – an instrumentalized critique of instrumentalism; a theoretical tool that paradoxically seeks to question fundamentally the nature of tools. Our much more modest aim is to encourage readers to question more forcefully both conventional approaches to the media and the conventional media representations of Heidegger. This objective, whatever its limitations, at least remains true to a key Heideggerian aphorism to which we wholeheartedly subscribe and return to throughout this book – ‘questioning is the piety of thought’ (QCT: 35).

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book was, we told ourselves, supposed to be easy to write. Paul had just finished writing Žižek and the Media (2010) and was therefore familiar with the format and tone necessary for the series. David had just completed The Machine Question: Critical Perspectives on AI, Robots and Ethics (2012), which, among other things, developed a method for using the work of Martin Heidegger to investigate recent innovations in information and communication technology.

We were wrong. This book turned out to be more difficult than we anticipated, but for good reason. In fact, as we began to develop the chapters, everything we thought we already knew about media and about Heidegger became questionable and question-worthy. Not that we are complaining. This is exactly what we had hoped to present in the book – a deliberate and explicit challenge to rethink both the work of Martin Heidegger and what we ordinarily call ‘the media’ – we just did not know how far down this would go.

In the process of traversing this path (to use a distinctly Heideggerian metaphor), we have been assisted by a number of others whom we wish to recognize by name. Thanks from both of us to Andrew J. Mitchell for providing early access to his translation of the Bremen and Freiburg lectures.

For Paul, a big shout out to the Victoria pub ‘Booth Group’ – David, Ben, Melissa, Stuart, Heidi, Calvin and Sita – and lots of love and thanks to Rachel, and Barbie the bull terrier, for the ‘good life’ at the Cymraeg version of Heidegger’s Black Forest retreat, Wyau Hapus!

For David, a danke sehr to those individuals who showed the way to reading Heidegger: Thomas Sheehan, John Sallis and David Farrell Krell; and a dziękuje bardzo i dużo miłości to Anja, Stas and Maki.

INTRODUCTION

Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.

Unofficial slogan of the National Rifle Association

The essence of technology is by no means anything technological.

QCT: 4

In the absence of precise statistics, we strongly suspect that the majority of self-styled liberal academics would vehemently disagree with the above NRA-associated sentiment. This is because those in favour of gun control (or at least some level of regulation) tend to readily embrace the seemingly logical notion that guns play a technologically determining role in violence. The presence of military assault rifles in urban settings, for example, is likely to lead to more fatalities compared to the presence of non-automatic weapons or no guns at all. Interestingly, however, amongst similar academics in the fields of Media and Communications Studies one frequently encounters a largely unquestioned belief in the essential neutrality of technology. This belief repeatedly manifests itself in variations on the basic mantra: ‘it’s not the technology you use, but how you choose to use it that is important’ – a view that Langdon Winner (1977: 27) termed the ‘myth of neutrality’ and dismissed as ‘a truism striving to be a bromide’. Despite being seldom acknowledged by media scholars (or if acknowledged, only cursorily), Heidegger’s philosophical approach to technology raises a profound challenge to those who selectively endorse and critique technological determinism, an issue that, with the advent of ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) and such new forms of subtly unobtrusive technological mediation as Google’s new Glass interface, has never been more pertinent.

Although seemingly paradoxical, Heidegger’s pronouncement that the essence of technology lies beyond the particular characteristics of any specific technological contrivance encapsulates the manner in which his work encourages us to consider the determining qualities of technological environments rather than individual artefacts. The homespun saying ‘when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail’ expresses this determinist quality, this alteration in our mindset that occurs when we start using a simple tool. The change introduced when the artefact at hand is a complex piece of technology is exponentially greater, and then greater still when considering the use of technologies that rely upon an integrated system of mutually referential technologies such as the digital matrices that surround us today. What makes Heidegger uniquely important for the study of media technology is the manner in which his seemingly unfashionable notion of technology helps us to reflect upon the general nature of the technocratic mind-set. We argue that this is ultimately much more significant than the specific peculiarities of individual artefacts whether they be hammers, iPads or the internet.

THE ONTOLOGY OF DASEIN

Dasein is an entity which does not just occur among other entities. Rather it is ontically distinguished by the fact that, in its very Being, that Being is an issue for it. But in that case, this is a constitutive state of Dasein’s Being, and this implies that Dasein, in its Being, has a relationship towards that Being – a relationship which itself is one of Being. And this means further that there is some way in which Dasein understands itself in its Being, and that to some degree it does so explicitly. It is peculiar to this entity that with and through its Being, this Being is disclosed to it. Understanding of Being is itself a definite characteristic of Dasein’s Being. Dasein is ontically distinctive in that it is ontological.

BT: 32

Since it is the use of untranslated terms like Dasein that is a likely contributor to Heidegger’s reputation for incomprehensibility, it is worth tackling this term’s significance straight away. In standard German, the word Dasein means ‘existence’. Heidegger, however, uses the word in its more literal sense of ‘there being’ as an expression of the kind of being that is characteristic of human existence. Obviously, German was the language of Heidegger’s original texts, but the fact that the term remains untranslated in standard translations of his writings is an indication of the special work it is designed to carry out. Dasein conveys something about the unique nature of being human that is not adequately articulated by the available vocabulary, like ‘human nature’, ‘human being’ or ‘human existence’. A key feature of the term that we will repeatedly return to throughout this book is its positionality, its being-in-the-world – something that is, for better or worse, not expressible with a single English word (or any other word in any other language, for that matter). Additionally, Heidegger’s use of the term Dasein immediately introduces us to the significance of the philosophical distinction between the ontic and the ontological. The ontic indicates that which exists, whilst ontological refers to the being of beings, or how the existence of those things is supported or structured. Much more than just an esoteric philosophical distinction, recognizing the difference between the ontic and the ontological is particularly important for understanding the nature of mediated Being.

For Heidegger, Dasein only makes sense in terms of a particular comportment towards Being. Being, however, is not, as Heidegger points out, able to be experienced as such; it does not exist alongside and come to be encountered as just another entity. For this reason, Being is that which we most take for granted and routinely fail to reflect upon. For example, we are so familiar with the conjoined (and upon reflection partially redundant) term human beings, that we tend to assume automatically the natural relationship between the two words rather than recognize the precise way in which together they express the inseparability of what we understand as ‘human’ and ‘being’. The curious obtrusiveness of the word Dasein (an obtrusiveness that is also evident in the German text and not just in translation) is deliberately used by Heidegger to call attention to this problem and cause us to think reflectively about something that often goes by without a second thought. Although the above quotation from Heidegger might initially appear more confusing than helpful, given the complexity of what Heidegger is trying to articulate about Dasein, it actually constitutes a direct statement of the term’s centrality to his insistently ontological approach. Namely, that an ‘understanding of Being is itself a definite characteristic of Dasein’s Being’. In other words, Dasein is not just one entity existing among other entities. What distinguishes Dasein is that it is the one entity that in its very being is concerned with Being. Or as Heidegger succinctly summarizes it, ‘Dasein is ontically distinctive in that it is ontological.’

But what does all this philosophizing possibly have to do with media? Our answer is that Dasein – both the obtrusive materiality of the word itself and the ontological concept to which it refers – raises a series of fundamental questions about the nature of being mediated and mediated being that have been largely ignored by media scholars due to, at best, indifferent neglect and, at worst, intellectually defensive and short-sighted claims that Heidegger is obscurantist and muddle-headed. Rejecting this characterization outright, we propose that Heidegger’s ontology enables us to understand the fundamental basis, the primum mobile, of the act of mediation. This understanding then sheds light on its subsequent embodiment in a whole range of media manifestations that culminate in today’s ‘ubicomp’ environment. Each with their own particular focus, the following four chapters all examine different aspects of Heidegger’s thought to show how we live in a mediated environment in which the distinction between being and Being or the ontic and the ontological has become increasingly indistinguishable. Although we risk being accused of taking the reader away from a direct focus upon media technology, this book takes Heidegger at his word when he says that ‘the essence of technology is by no means anything technological’. We therefore unapologetically focus on the essential aspects of media that, somewhat paradoxically, are better understood when one moves away from specific media examples and instead concentrates upon the broader implications for a society pervaded by mediated objects and techniques of objectification. In this way, Heidegger’s thought provides access to a core aspect of mediated life that more overtly media-focused approaches are actually ill-equipped to consider.

CHAPTER SUMMARIES

1 We Need to Talk About Media

The first chapter deals with the originating act of mediation, that is, language. It explores Heidegger’s innovative thesis that we not only speak language, but language also speaks us – a formulation that paved the way for subsequent explorations of this theme by influential post-structuralist thinkers like Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Jean Baudrillard and Jacques Derrida. Following the twists and turns of Heidegger’s lifelong engagement with this subject, the chapter analyses two common theories of language – the instrumental and constitutive views. This analysis of what is considered to be an essential form of mediation provides the crucial groundwork for understanding the rest of this book’s focus on the underlying processes at work in media – the seemingly obvious but often under-appreciated effort to mediate all things.

2 Mediated Truth

Building on chapter 1’s account of the manner by which media do not just represent things but also construct the world they portray, chapter 2 examines the way in which, with misleading equanimity, western culture has come to equate the concept of truth with correctness of representation. In other words, the second chapter is concerned with the standard account of the process of mediation, whereby media represent real things in the world and that the truth of what is represented can be assessed by measuring how well the mediated representations correspond to and correctly portray the facts on the ground. This traditional and long-standing formulation is contrasted with Heidegger’s stubborn insistence on the conceptual distinction to be made between what is true and what is merely correct. This rather heady philosophical point is then practically illustrated by using the notion of communicatively determinative exhibition to demonstrate how contemporary media society is the culmination of a historic development in western thought that increasingly privileges correctness as truth, and the chapter explores the consequences of this taken-for-granted and culturally ingrained bias.

3 In Medias Res

The third chapter considers the position of media as always already ‘in the middle of things’. Here Heidegger’s concepts of the ready-to-hand and present-to-hand are described in detail in order to help explain the essential difference that exists in his work between things, objects and equipment. Media technologies are shown to occupy a unique position in this schema due to the manner in which they straddle the distinction between inanimate objects (media hardware) and representations (software and media content). We see how, for Heidegger, it is a mistake to approach individual pieces of technology in isolation from the overarching equipmental totality to which they simultaneously contribute and derive their own form of being.

4 The Dasign of Media Apps: The Questions Concerning Technology

The final chapter brings together the previously encountered themes of mediation, representation and positionality to demonstrate how, despite accusations of being anachronistically nostalgic and folksy, or völkisch, Heidegger’s philosophy still has much to say about cutting-edge media innovations. In keeping with Heidegger’s use of deliberately obtrusive neologisms, we use the term Dasign to question the implications for Dasein of the historically unprecedented media saturation of contemporary life. Heidegger’s comments upon the modern media’s creation of uniform distancelessness is shown to have direct (but seldom commented-upon) relevance to the work of a wide range of theorists including such ostensibly unlikely candidates as Theodor Adorno and Jean Baudrillard.

THEMATIC SUMMARY

Taken together, the book’s main themes of language, truth, telepresence and technological determinism constitute the four key, related aspects of what makes Heidegger’s purportedly abstract and esoteric work so useful for revealing very practical and radical insights into the media’s role as a structuring element of our everyday lives.

1 Heidegger’s language

Rorty predicted that philosophers ‘for centuries to come’ will benefit from Heidegger’s ‘original and powerful narrative’ of the history of philosophy from the Greeks to Nietszche. I doubt this very much … Heidegger will continue to fascinate those hungry for mysticism of the anaemic and purely verbal variety, the ‘glossogonous metaphysics’ of which his philosophy is such an outstanding example … More sober and rational persons will continue to regard the whole Heidegger phenomenon as a grotesque aberration of the human mind.

Edwards 2004: 47

Given our claims concerning the importance of Heidegger’s analysis of technology, one question that immediately arises is why his work has not had wide acceptance and attention within Media and Communication Studies? Beyond the question of his involvement with National Socialism, one reason can be found in Heidegger’s unique mode of expression that has led ‘most philosophers in the Anglo-American tradition’ to dismiss him as ‘an obscurantist muddlehead’ (Searle 2000: 71). Negative reactions like this and the above obloquy from Paul Edwards have succeeded in creating a reputation for Heidegger’s incomprehensibility that draws upon his undeniable use of numerous neologisms, preposition-dependent German phrases, and pseudo-mystical conceptions (i.e. the Saving Power and the Four-Fold). These different linguistic manoeuvres perhaps account for why readers tend to approach Heidegger with either initial suspicion before they have read any of his work or a growing sense of frustration once they have, but we believe that there is substantially more to it than this.

First of all, and most practically, responses such as those of Edwards and others, fail to solve the innate problem encountered when attempting genuinely original philosophical investigation with a common-sense mode of expression. Although it is assumed to be the sine qua non of successful communication, intelligibility is not necessarily what we conventionally assume it to be. So that ‘in his Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis), Heidegger claims: “making itself intelligible is the suicide of philosophy.” He defines intelligibility in terms of the modern metaphysical forms of thinking and speaking about beings as objects of representation. Moreover, intelligibility involves a uniform accessibility for the inauthentic anybody of an age marked by thoughtlessness’ (Gregory 2007: 57). Crucial for the purposes of this book is the phrase ‘speaking about beings as objects of representation’. This touches directly on the interrelationship in Heidegger’s work between things and the various under-acknowledged ways in which we routinely transform things into objects. Gender politics is one of the few areas where the ideological implications of this process of objectification are commonly recognized. Much more common is the way we typically fail to recognize the widespread operation of various processes of objectification in which the media play a particularly pivotal role.

Heidegger’s work jolts us from accepting what otherwise ‘goes without saying’ in a radical manner. As William Lovitt (QCT: xvi) argues, Heidegger ‘often carries us beyond our facile conceiving to seek the ground of our thinking. But he does more. He confronts us repeatedly with an abyss. For he strives to induce us to leap to new ground, to think in fresh ways.’ As an antidote to facile forms of conceiving, Heidegger turns what goes without saying into an object of inquiry itself:

Being can be covered up so extensively that it becomes forgotten and no question arises about it or about its meaning. Thus that which demands that it become a phenomenon, and which demands this in a distinctive sense and in terms of its ownmost content as a thing, is what phenomenology has taken into its grasp thematically as its object. (BT: 59)

In other words, the very thing (Being) that we take for granted and assume as our starting point is, for Heidegger, the principal concern of his phenomenological project. The relevance of all this ontological rumination to the study of the media rests upon the way in which Heidegger’s search for ‘the ground of our thinking’ parallels the sort of structuring processes we need to be sensitive to if we are to understand properly the ground from which media mediate. Before we can attempt to leap to ‘new ground’, however, there is the abyss we need to cross – the gap in understanding that confronts such a radical project.

Whilst dismissive responses like that of Edwards are extreme, such individual reactions stem from a recognizable trait often associated with the wider Anglo-American philosophical tradition in which the scientific values of exactitude and measurement are typically privileged over the ultimate value that theorists like Heidegger place upon questioning. Phrases such as ‘glossogonous metaphysics’ are therefore more than merely a scathing critique of Heidegger’s abstruse expression. They are the result of an instinctive recoiling at the scale and unashamedly non-empiricist nature of his theoretical ambition, and, we might add, such name calling, which uses a similarly abstruse linguistic construction, already betrays any purported commitment to empirical fact-finding. Much more than name calling, however, it represents an evocatively florid manifestation of a substantial (albeit somewhat latent and incompletely articulated) objection that goes beyond a mere complaint about style. This deeper source of the objection comes from a long-standing antipathy between the Anglo-American philosophical tradition and that mode of thinking that has come to be known as Continental Philosophy, of which Heidegger is perhaps the main spokesperson or ‘poster child’.

2 The truth of Heidegger

This plethora of information can seduce us into failing to recognize the real problem. We shall not get a genuine knowledge of essences simply by the syncretistic activity of universal comparison and classification. Subjecting the manifold to tabulation does not ensure any actual understanding of what lies there before us as thus set in order. If an ordering principle is genuine, it has its own content as a thing [Sachgehalt], which is never to be found by means of such ordering, but is already presupposed in it. So if one is to put various pictures of the world in order, one must have an explicit idea of the world as such. And if the ‘world’ itself is something constitutive for Dasein, one must have insight into Dasein’s basic structures in order to treat the world-phenomenon conceptually.

BT: 77

Belying criticisms of incomprehensibility, and read with due care and attention, the above statement provides us with a clear rationale for the need to go beyond the conceptual limitations of a scientific outlook that, because of its deliberate constitution, is unable to deal in phenomenological essences that lie outside its self-imposed ordering scheme. For Heidegger, scientific methodology systematically and inevitably overlooks its own motivating impulse and is therefore innately unable to help us see what it already and necessarily takes for granted: ‘Science only ever encounters that which its manner of representation has previously admitted as a possible object for itself’ (BFL: 8). Rather than helping to find ways around this problem, the scientific mode of thought has become the de facto standard of intellectual enquiry through the institutionalization and fetishization of its reflexive blind spot. This occurs at the expense of thinkers like Heidegger for whom Being is the explicit concern rather than merely constituting a neutral container for beings/entities. It is the radical nature of Heidegger’s distinctly ontological approach that acts as the plessor1 that produces the knee-jerk reactions of Heidegger’s most vehement critics.

In its general adherence to a ‘social science’ model of investigation, the field of Media and Communication Studies is dominated by pseudo-scientific aspirations and a consequent tendency to equate truth with terminological/empiricist exactitude. The result is that the full empirical subtlety of the lived experience of today’s mediascape is sacrificed to the requirements of empiricist rigour. It is important to emphasize, at this early point, our deliberate use of the term empiricist rather than empirical. We use ‘empiricist’ to convey the mentality that reduces experience to what is objectifiable and measurable. By contrast, the empirical still includes that which exists but which may not lend itself to easy objectification or measurement. A quick illustration of this point is provided by the phenomenon of desire. Few readers, if any, would deny desire is a powerful part of human experience, but attempting to measure it betrays a misunderstanding of its essentially ineffable nature. In addition, desire is inherently positional; there needs to be a gap between desire and its object – by definition you cannot desire something you already have. Desire thus structures human experience indirectly but no less powerfully and in distinctly real, but very hard to quantify, ways. This is the sort of structuring role that media technologies play in contemporary life, the truth of which Heidegger’s non-empiricist but rigorously empirical mode of thought is particularly well suited to demonstrate.

By stark contrast with the tautological tendencies of a social-science model only able to ascertain what it is, a priori, designed to reveal about mediated phenomena, Heidegger questions what we talk about, how we talk about it and why we talk about it. Whilst media and communications scholars typically displace essential value judgements with an unjustified assumption of instrumental neutrality, Heidegger begins by deliberately alienating things, instituting a kind of conceptual distance paradoxically at the point of obscene proximity. He does this by providing, for example, a close (for some, uncomfortably close) meditation on a seemingly mundane object like a jug and proceeds to render this simple