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Television & New Media
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DOI: 10.1177/1527476408325098
2009 10: 130 originally published online 19 September 2008 Television New Media
Arvind Rajagopal
Beyond Media Therapy

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130
Television & New Media
Volume 10 Number 1
January 2009 130-132
2009 Sage Publications
10.1177/1527476408325098
http://tvnm.sagepub.com
hosted at
http://online.sagepub.com
Beyond Media Therapy
Arvind Rajagopal
New York University

T
he media are named over and again as if they could be isolated as con-
veyers of information. But when all perception is mediated, how can they
be separated in this way? Invoking the media is like bringing black and
white magic together; they are the problem and the solution both, like Platos phar-
makon, as if the trouble they created could only be cured through the media them-
selves. If this is correct, it describes a move from media studies into media therapy.
How did this happen?
Consider the kinds of pedagogy media studies tends to offer. A characteristic nar-
rative of media history would proceed as follows. After various rudimentary symbols
came the alphabet, which typically means the phonetic alphabet. A more than mil-
lennium-long lull followed until the print revolution in EuropeChina invented
print but apparently failed to do much with it. With the long-awaited cocktail of the
Protestant Reformation, the phonetic alphabet, and the printing press, modernity was
born, and there was no looking back, except to confirm that history is destiny.
Marshall McLuhan appeared to challenge this teleology, prophesying a retribal-
ization of the world with electric medias tactile effects. Perhaps despite himself, he
made available a plan for the mediatic colonization of the worlds cultures, incorpo-
rating their different sensory ratios as variations within a scheme. Thus, he argued
that older media are subsumed as content within the form of new communication
technologies; thus, oral media become the content of print, while print is rendered
content in electronic media and so forth (McLuhan 1994). Implicitly, nonmodern
cultures with their multisensory modes of involvement could similarly be absorbed
and transcended by a culture that had passed through the phase of print-induced
abstraction and come out on the West the other side, enhanced by the experience,
and now reaching out and in touch with itself and other cultures, thanks to electric
media. Such an account appears to acknowledge other societies and histories but
ends up enfolding them within a formalist account of media development.
Unlike say Egyptian sarcophagi or Byzantine icons, the modernity of modern
media, in the usual understanding, is believed to lie in their immanent power, that is
to say in their physical and technical properties, rather than deriving their signifi-
cance from any external or transcendental authority.
1
The influence that the outer
world sanctions, for example, on the printed book as a document of factual truths or
the moving image as capturing reality, is understood to be contingent and only
reflective of a capacity internal to the technologies in question. Thus, print can
abstract truths from the world, the camera can mirror events, and so on.
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Rajagopal / Beyond Media Therapy 131
In other words, in addition to changing sense ratios, modern media index the shift
in a second ratio, of transcendental to immanent authority, or external to inherent
power. For example, the Reformation challenged the Churchs overriding right to inter-
pret the Bible; the book was supposed to speak for itself thereafter, mediated by lan-
guage and nation rather than by clergy. The kernel of such formulations (and McLuhan
is hardly alone in his view) is nothing less than a theory of secularization and a dis-
covery of the world as it really is (Chadwick 1975). Religion, church, and monarchy
all fall by the wayside, as reason, science, and democracy show us the wayforward.
But such an account treats secularism as an accomplished and settled fact and reli-
gion as part of a history that scarcely needs mentioning. This gets the story backward.
Religion never went away, and in various forms, it is today resurgent everywhere. The
spread of print in Europe was accompanied by a crisis of faith, by the rise of
Protestantism and a series of Inquisitions. Cassette and television culture have been a
major force in the politicization of religions worldwide. The expenditure and attention
given to media technology today resembles magical enchantment or religious devo-
tion, although organized mainly by the market and by interest groups, and combines
worship of technology together with its rapid obsolescence. Meanwhile, it is secular-
ism whose existence is precarious and ill understood, usually circulating as an awk-
ward neologism in translation, avowed by no more than a minority in most societies.
The radical interpretation of the print revolution tended to naturalize the new external
authorities of the nation-state and national language and to assume that the power of the
press was inherent to it and portable, like a turn-key technology, and that its results
(e.g., secularization) could be replicated. In fact, print mediated the formation of national
language and culture and religious as well as secular forces. Strangely, however, print
institutions were usually claimed to be bulwarks of state-approved secularism.
By focusing not just on media but on modes of mediation, McLuhan sought to
displace a technology-centered history. He showed how observing the formal work
of media makes implausible a theory of technology-dependent change. But he did
not consider how sensory mediation itself is not direct and immediate but is shaped
by socialization and by prevailing cultures of perception. For example, the press in
China was incorporated into the working of the imperial bureaucracy there, whereas
in Europe it grew amid the breakup of the Holy Roman Empire and the feudal estates
and came to be correlated with a very different set of effects.
Change across societies is not synchronous with the development of technologies.
In fact, historical change is typically uneven and nonsynchronous and encloses mul-
tiple temporalities: Think of the Amish and the Arapaho alongside other Americans,
or the so-called three worlds, interlinked but developing differently.
The extensive diffusion of print and electronic media throughout the world has
led to an explosion of creative engagements with underacknowledged or underap-
preciated pasts. Part of the complexity of mediation is that multiple temporalities
intersect in a given mediumas in a book, for example. Historicity is not simply
imposed on us but also something we negotiate reflexively as we learn the facts of
past events. The result is that history becomes less of an orthodoxy and more of a
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132 Television & New Media
battleground, as conventional histories are challenged by other accounts.
2
In the
resulting proliferation of viewpoints, however, the question of history risks becom-
ing aestheticized as a kind of personal choiceyour media preference versus mine.
3
Space requires a summary closurewe can return to the beginning. In the begin-
ning was the word. Then, there was a message, and the medium was the message.
The incantatory revelation from McLuhan echoes the oracular quality of the biblical
saying. But there is now (apparently) no reality that transcends the media itselfand
as a result, it is the media that acquire a fetishistic powerand when media studies
is practiced as media therapy, the idea is to use the spell, not to break it.
Notes
1. Part of what renders modernity identifiable is the way in which this distinction between immanent
and transcendent is sustained through an appeal to the everyday, and, as a recent study has argued, is
joined together in the idea of economy (see, e.g., Mondzain 2005; my thanks to Allen Feldman for the
reference).
2. For an argument about the production of history as the attempt by ruling elites to continue their class
struggleand race strugglethrough narratives told from the perspective of the state, see Foucault (2003).
3. Or as a problem for other societies that even a critical theorist can ignore. For an interesting
example where historical alterity becomes a kind of surplus to be ignored, see Deleuze (1992, p. 5).
Deleuze acknowledges how societies of control must coexist with, and rely on, older forms of disci-
pline and punishment than debt, if three-quarters of humanity are to be managed. Deleuze relies on a
neat spatial division of the world to give his control theory its pristine appearance. Implicitly, the Third
World (Deleuze 1992), the only part of the world named in his essay, is characterized by its distinct and
unyielding context. Meanwhile, modes of domination can be subtly reshaped and calibrated with the lat-
est forms of technology in the unnamed part of the world, that is, of course, the subject of Deleuzes essay.
For discussion, see Rajagopal (2005).
References
Chadwick, Owen. 1975. The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century: The Gifford
Lectures in the University of Edinburgh for 19734. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Deleuze, Gilles. 1992. Postscript on Societies of Control. October 59: 5.
Foucault, Michel. 2003. Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College de France, 197576. New
York: Picador.
McLuhan, Marshall. 1994. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Mondzain, Marie-Jos. 2005. Image, Icon, Economy. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Rajagopal, Arvind. 2005. Imperceptible Perceptions in Our Technological Modernity. In Old Media, New
Media, edited by W. Chun and T. Keenan, 27585. New York: Routledge.
Arvind Rajagopal teaches media studies at New York University. He is author of Politics After
Television: Hindu Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Public in India (Cambridge, 2001), which won
the Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Prize from the Association of Asian Studies in 2003, and editor of
three volumes, including The Indian Public Sphere: Structure and Transformation (Oxford, forthcoming).
In 20062007, he was a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington,
D.C. He is completing a monograph on postcolonial political culture in India.
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