medium in ways that were not previous- Specialized Research AI at MIT

medium in ways that were not previous-
ly available to them. It has also called
into question some of the most power-
fully entrenched conceptual polarities
that have traditionally informed literary
studies, and aesthetics more generally:
namely, form/content, ½ction/reality,
author/audience, genre/work.

Much of this development, whose im-

mediate causes can be retraced to the
impact of structuralist semiotics in the
1960s, was already at work long before
Saussure’s notion of linguistic value as
differential signi½cation was rediscov-
ered by Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida,
and Jacques Lacan–to name just a few
of those whose writings contributed to a
new sense of textuality in general, and of
literary textuality in particular.

One of the most prescient of their pre-
cursors was Walter Benjamin. Trained in
philosophy, literary studies, and art his-
tory, Benjamin articulated an approach
to the newer media of photography, ½lm,
and radio. These, in turn, have exercised
an increasing influence upon a variety of
½elds and practices, including those to-
day ranged under the general rubric of
‘cultural studies’ and ‘media studies.’
For many years I have been reading
Benjamin’s writing with an eye to under-
standing just what it was that enabled
him, a scholar trained in traditional dis-
ciplines, to pass so effectively from an
analysis of ‘old’ media to an interpreta-
tion of ‘new’ media. I have become con-
vinced that part of the secret lies in fact
that we must include among the ‘old’
media not just those that were institu-
tion al ized as the objects of academic
‘aesthetic’ disciplines–such as litera-
ture, painting, theater, architec ture, and
music–but also, and perhaps above all,
space, time, and language. (To be sure, the
latter three were also studied by disci-
plines, namely, geography, geometry,
history, and linguistics, but they were

Samuel Weber

on Benjamin’s
‘-abilities’

One of the most important tendencies
to emerge in literary studies over the
past few decades has been the extension
of its techniques–close reading, rhetor-
ical textual analysis, and, more general-
ly, analyzing and interpreting so-called
signifying processes–to nonliterary ob-
jects and artifacts. The results of this ex-
tension have not been one-way. At the
same time that techniques of literary
analysis have re½ned the interpretation
of nonliterary artifacts, confrontation
with nonlinguistic, nondiscursive me-
dia has made literary critics aware of the
distinctive characteristics of their own

Samuel Weber, a Fellow of the American Acade-
my since 2005, is Avalon Foundation Professor of
Humanities and codirector of the Paris Program
in Critical Theory at Northwestern University.
His numerous publications include “Unwrapping
Balzac” (1979), “Institution and Interpretation”
(1987), “Theatricality as Medium” (2004), and
most recently “Targets of Opportunity: On the
Militarization of Thinking” (2005).

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Benjamin’s
‘-abilities’

not instantiated in what might be called
‘aesthetic objects’ as were the former.)

When traditional media are de½ned in

this way, it becomes clear that they are
not simply wiped away or suspended by
some radical “epistemological break”–
a notion derived from the French histo-
rian of science Georges Canguilhem and
popularized by Michel Foucault. Rather,
they come to be recon½gured by the so-
called new media. What is ‘new’ about
these media is thus better understood as
a recombination than as a creatio ex nihilo.
If this conception of the ‘new’ is re-
tained, then it would have considerable
implications for the construction of the
‘new’ disciplines of ‘media studies.’ For
instance, the study of language, litera-
ture, art, philosophy, etc.–rather than
being simply superseded by that of tele-
vision, Internet, ½lm, radio, etc.–would
have to be integrated into those disci-
plines. A major task would then become
selecting and organizing rather than puri-
fying the new discipline of all traces of
the older, so-called obsolete ones. This
would hold true not only for philosophy,
as the study of the history of concepts,
including those employed in aesthetics,
but for other disciplines as well, such as
economics and history (including those
of technology, science, military strategy,
etc.).

From this point of view, the study of

Walter Benjamin that I am currently
completing involves more than the ex-
amination of the work of a single writer
and critic, however interesting. For the
problems that Benjamin’s writing en-
gages and articulates concern an unusu-
al yet exemplary experience of the inter-
play between old and new media. Ben-
jamin, who was extremely attuned to
the problem of experience in its relation
to media, insisted, from his earliest
writings on, that experience could and
should not be reduced to a function of

cognition, exempli½ed for him in the Crit-
ical Philosophy of Kant. Instead, Benja-
min held that experience was a function
not just of concepts but also, and above
all, of language.

This, in turn, required him to rethink

traditional conceptions of language in
order to extricate both the theory and
the practice of language from what he
considered to be the impasse of a cer-
tain humanism, which ultimately sub-
ordinated language as a vehicle either of
meaning or of being–but in both cases of
a problematic and unreflected theology,
however ‘secularized’ its form.

This dual and complementary effort
to rethink language, both as theory and
as practice, impelled Benjamin to devel-
op an alternative approach that would
no longer consider language as either
an instrument (of designation, expres-
sion, or meaning) or a self-contained
logos (creating or performing that which
it named). The alternative toward which
he found himself drawn (although by
no means in an entirely consistent or
deliberate manner) was that of deter-
mining language as a ‘medium’–but in
a sense that broke with the traditional
denotation of the word. For Benjamin,
language as medium was not simply an
interval or bridge between ½xed poles
or places: subject and object, man and
world, God and the universe. Rather, he
developed a notion of linguistic mediality
as a movement of division and of separa-
tion–of what I call ‘parting with’ as the
condition of a sharing and imparting.

All of this, and more, is condensed in
the German word he used, Mitteilbarkeit
–often translated simply as ‘communi-
cation.’ Since Benjamin insisted that we
are not to understand language primar-
ily and essentially as a conveyor belt of
meanings, this translation is unsatisfac-
tory. A more literal rendition is helpful.
When literally rendered in English, the

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Note by
Samuel
Weber

German word says (although does not
obviously mean) something like ‘parting’
or ‘partitioning with.’ Teilen means to
divide; and mit- is generally equivalent
to ‘with’ (or co-). This suggests that lan-
guage divides and divests itself in order
to impart.

But translating Mitteilbarkeit as ‘part-
ing with’ brings to the fore something
rather curious in the English expression.
We normally understand to ‘part with’
as to separate from something, to give
it up or relinquish it. But if this is the
meaning of the expression, then why or
how should it employ the preposition
‘with,’ which usually suggests some kind
of ‘togetherness’–precisely what the
‘parting’ (or even Teilen, in the sense of
division) seems to exclude?

If imparting, ‘communicating,’ is one

of language’s essential functions, then
this can only happen if the medium can
‘part with’ itself in order to ‘impart.’ In
parting with itself, language establishes
a relation to itself–one precisely of sep-
aration, division, alteration. As signify-
ing medium, language only ‘is’ in taking
leave of ‘itself.’ That is to say, of its abil-
ity to stay the same over time, to return to
its point of departure, and thus to be
self-identical in any given instant.

But this is tantamount to saying that

language can never be described or
pointed to in the present indicative. As
‘parting with,’ it is always in the process
of taking leave of whatever ‘state’ it hap-
pens to be in. It is a ‘medium,’ not in oc-
cupying a middle ground between two
poles or two presences, but rather in ex-
posing any present meaning that it seems
to articulate as a potentiality forever to
come–in short, as an ‘-ability.’

It is just this ‘-ability’–which de½nes
the mediality of the medium, whether
language or other–that orients my study
of Benjamin. This ‘orientation’ is, how-
ever, forever changing, just as the notion

of mediality as ‘parting with’ implies
change and alteration. It is therefore ap-
propriate that this ‘-ability’ articulates
itself in Benjamin’s writing practice not
as a noun, but as a suf½x. As a suf½x, it
stamps the noun with the irreducible
quality of possibility.

Perhaps this is why Benjamin recurs
again and again to this suf½x in formu-
lating many of his most decisive con-
cepts. Beginning with ‘impart-ability’
(in German, as we have noted, Mitteil-
barkeit), Benjamin, throughout his writ-
ings, develops a series of such ‘-abili-
ties,’ or, in German, -barkeiten. These
include: Bestimmbarkeit (determin-abil-
ity), Kritisier-barkeit (criticiz-ability),
Übersetz-barkeit (translat-ability), Zitier-
barkeit (cit-ability), Reproduzier-barkeit
(reproduc-ibility), Erkenn-barkeit (know-
ability). As a suf½x, such ‘-abilities’ rel-
ativize the substantive, or noun, that
they follow, and on which they, literal-
ly, depend, to which they are appended.
What is designated as an -ability is thus
never self-suf½cient or self-subsistent,
never fully realized or realizable: its re-
ality depends on the future, but on a
future in which the reader is inevitably
implicated.

To determine mediality as an -ability
constitutes therefore not just a consta-
tive description of a medium, nor even a
performance of it, in the sense of its ac-
tualization. Rather, it entails an appeal to
readers or listeners, who ½nd themselves
addressed by this -ability, to participate
in a process of partitioning that involves
a readiness to take leave of the present
or, better, to allow what is present to part
with itself and to make room for some-
thing else. As -ability, mediality thus al-
ways entails the process by which intra-
mediality becomes intermediality, open-
ing itself to the advent of other media.
From this perspective, the ‘work of
art,’ traditionally understood as the in-

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dividual instantiation of a genre–a ‘nov-
el’ or a ‘tragedy’–tends to appear as the
always singular displacement or transla-
tion of other media. The “epic theater”
of Brecht, for instance, is interpreted by
Benjamin as the staging of what he calls
–or rather, cites as–“the citability of
gesture.” Citability, usually associated
with language and in particular with
written texts, parts with this medium
in order to enter into relation with ‘ges-
ture,’ involving a bodily movement that
points away from where it is situated.
Whether or not this movement is con-
summated depends not on itself but on
others: audience, readers, or interpret-
ers. Benjamin’s -abilities always involve
such an appeal to transformative rein-
scription on the part of those others who
are its destined addressees.

It is no accident that old and new me-
dia converge in Benjamin’s discussion of
Brecht’s theater. Theater spans the gap
between old and new media, between
“cult” and “exhibition value,” as Ben-
jamin calls it in his essay “The Work of
Art in the Age of its Technical Reproduc-
ibility.” For the great resource of theater,
old as well as new, is, according to Ben-
jamin, that of “exposing the present”
(Exponierung des Anwesenden). And it is
such exposure, in which all enclosure be-
comes unhinged, that marks Benjamin’s
theory of media no less than the mediali-
ty of his writing, which is always expos-
ing the established sense of the words it
uses by turning them inside-out.

This is obviously a very different con-
ception of ‘medium’ and of ‘mediality’
than those that are familiar to many to-
day. But to the extent that they provide
an alternative scheme for approaching
the instability of representations in the
audiovisual media, they will hopefully
prove useful for a reconsideration of
those media, including the uses to which
they are generally put.

William F. Baker

on the state of
American television

It elects presidents. It wins wars. It is
both a mirror and an engine of our cul-
ture. Television is, undeniably, an ex-
tremely influential force in our country.
And television viewing has never been
more a part of our lives. Last year, Niel-
sen Media Research reported that dur-
ing the 2004–2005 season, the average
U.S. household tuned in for eight hours
and eleven minutes per day. This is 2.7
percent higher than the previous season,
12.5 percent higher than ten years ago,
and the highest levels since Nielsen Me-
dia Research began measuring television
viewing in the 1950s.

However, instability, invention, and
revision are now at work in every aspect
of the medium–from content to viewer-

William F. Baker, a Fellow of the American
Academy since 2005, is chief executive of Edu-
cational Broadcasting Corporation, licensee of
public broadcasters Thirteen/wnetand wliw
New York. He is the coauthor of “Down the
Tube: An Inside Account of the Failure of Amer-
ican Television” (with George Dessart, 1998).

Dædalus Spring 2007

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