The Extramedial "The real Other is different shit." John Sasher Everything is medial. There exists no original, unmediatized situation in which "authentic" human existence can be experienced. That which is not directly audible, visible, or tangible may be stored somewhere, but is still inaccessible to knowbots. The idea that an extramedial remnant still exists is the engine of exclusive tourism ("See Yemen the Different Way"). The extramedial experience is what makes scanning a unique event - "I took the first picture of the Yeti." From this angle, the extramedial is seen as a zone to be conquered, or as a neglected area that can be rediscovered at any time. The idea that an extramedial reality exists is itself an effect of the media, and the first amendment of the media empire. Media do not merely transmit information. They do more than just charge data with symbolic values and meanings. They add up to more than a collection of technological connections. Besides their productive and repressive powers, the media also have a moment of negation. If an extramedial realm exists, it is to be found within the media themselves, not outside them. It can be located at the intersection of two media, between the no-longer of the one medium and the not-yet of the other. In this black hole, they reach the limit of the senses. Conditioning is temporarily lost, the power of the media falters and faulty connections are made which fall outside the domain of information. The content of a medium is the preceding medium, wrote Marshall McLuhan. An inevitable consequence of this rule is that those who strive for a deeper content always land up at a previous medium. For writing this is the voice; for photography, painting and graphics; for film, photography and the theatre; for radio, the narrative and the concert; for the media package as a whole, it is the opera in its 19th century form of the Gesamtkunstwerk. All possible combinations achieve profundity in the same way. In terms of the present medium, the writer focuses on the enigma of style, the photographer concentrates on the technique of framing light and its relation to dark surfaces, and the filmmaker experiments with the combination of stationary images and the darknesses inbetween. Expressive content is always the result of a retro movement. One must immerse oneself in the medium used in order to hold onto one's creative moment, to prevent oneself from being misled or misused by one's own instruments. Only complete control of one's medium leads to authenticity; in other words, to the totally controlled downloading of its data flows. Authenticity is the obstinate use of a medium's resistances for the sake of ensuring the longevity of an expressive work. "And words obey my call" (Yeats). According to McLuhan's rule, at the boundary between one medium and the next there is an instant when medium A loses its original content and becomes the content of medium B. At that moment, A loses its immaterial function and becomes a mere empty channel, transporting nothing. For a moment medium A is free of information, devoid of content, autonomous, concrete, and thus becomes conveyable material itself. In the transition to film, unique photographs are sequentially prepared and linked on a strip of celluloid. The photograph loses its individual content and meaning: the isolation of a singular instant. Medium B manipulates the emptiness of A to create new contents. Those who negate their own medium do so in order to make it so empty that a new medium must appear and provide a new and satisfactory context for the meaninglessness of the old. Negators do not seek profundity, they seek a way out: that which the authenticists glorify, they have rejected. Their medium is no longer able to function and the new medium has not arrived yet. They gamble on the unpredictable which lies beyond the borders of the old media program. They dare media to prove that they do more than just process information. To track the specific characteristics of a medium, you must find the moment at which it lets go of its content. This happens when the medium has exhausted its program. At this moment of completion, content and medium converge and can be seized as raw material for the next round. What is a climax on the medial level is a moment of panic and inspiration on the user's side. It is the arrival of the unimaginable; the media answer. The experiments of what is called, after the fact, the avant-garde, are never carried out with a specific goal in mind. You are always either too late or too early; only fashion is always on time. Negation fanatically persists in a particular use of a medium, in order to evoke something which is understood as unhappiness with the possibilities of the usual medium. "You can paint like crazy, but so what?" Until the experiments are finished, the medium keeps pumping, churning, shooting, until "it" either comes out or not. "It" is not an experience which results from the mediaworker's subjectivity; it is a techno-effect, an object strategy, a gift from the other side - technological happiness. Happiness is a definitive perception, the experience of that emotion, tuning in to a frequency only you can pick up, here and now. In 1922, Gottfried Benn looked back on the ecstatic time he had spent in occupied Brussels of 1916: "An extraordinary spring, three months completely without comparison. What was the cannonade on the Yser, without a day going by, life trembling in an atmosphere of silence and lostness; I was living on the edge where being fails and the self begins. I often look back on those weeks: they were life, and will never return; all else was rupture." Those weeks will never return because they remain stored in the stories of the Rönne and the poem "Caryatid" which Benn wrote during those months. His medium, writing, had him completely under control, and he, it. The result was absolute prose, sovereign poetry. As he makes the connection between his body and his medium, between A and B, between self and being, across all rifts, Benn locates this experience on the brink between life and death. In this atmosphere of silence and lostness, Benn has nothing to contribute and no defence; he is in the position of the photograph, a single image on a strip of celluloid: a part of the larger whole that effaces individual existence and renders it productive. The establishment of media connections, the moment of absence of any media message, comes through in the sphere of experience as the link between being and self. The media link gives him his own moment. For a time he balances on the brink between humanity and media. Media start out by taking over previous media as content. On television in the 1950s you could see plays lasting all evening (including intermission); in virtual reality the first things built were stark office interiors. But then someone discovers, or makes a medium discover, that something different may be done with the old material; this is the only possible way to hint at a mystery that was missing from all previous media. It adds a zone to the province of experience or renders one newly accessible. But as soon as the medium reveals its mystery, it leaves the transition from the previous medium behind it and becomes sovereign. When a medium is no longer anything but a medium and brings its unique moment into play, it no longer forces the data it is supposed to transport and exerts no pressure on those who are tuned in. Benn wrote poems "without faith, hope or love." In Benn's Brussels experience his medium brought something to life which did not exist as long as his medium was sovereign; in anthropological terms, something that was dead as long as the ritual was not performed in which the dead and the living are interchanged, the silence and the words on paper. The ritual of wandering and writing in Benn's "three months completely without comparison" kept his life livable and ensured that he was more than a survivor. It offered a way out and a way back; it kept his world alive. In 1949, Benn wrote in the introduction to his first work: "In general I do not know what I am writing, what I plan to do, or how something arises in me, in the past or now; I only know when a work is finished. But the whole is not finished. 'The crown of creation, the swine, the human,' writes my friend Oelze, dissuasive and doubtful; it is a decisive verse in this book. Not only diabolical, but un-Goethian, it tastes of sulphur and absinthe, but I return to it throughout my life in my work." To precisely what was he returning? After cutting up 2,000 cadavers in medical school, young Benn lost every bearable image of humanity. Everything became quite still; six poems were entrusted to paper - his first. Art appeared out of the emptiness after the body-as-a-corpse, after the total negation of the body as a medium for life, and the emptiness answered and became the voice of his poetry. The medium of poetry chose him. The connection between the disappeared body and the written text was the media link which Benn had put into writing. Whether he wanted to or not, in order to write each new poem, Benn had to return to the gate of the morgue in which he had emptied the body forever in order to turn it into poetry. To be able to write a handful of consoling lines, Benn always had first to see the total deterioration and corruption of life behind that one dissecting-room door which was meant for him - which had chosen him. Everyone has such a door. It is one's point of view. Benn cut the medium of the body to ribbons and landed up in the medium of poetry. Thus the body (his own as well as others') became the basis of his language. The "media" in their current form are also searching for the door to the next medium, to an outside, though they seem far removed from that point. Contemporary media still derive their content from exteriorities; they want to be filled, to try out their whole program. The mass media are still at the stage in which they must destroy all the material they have sucked in to be able to function. Those who allow themselves to be placed in the picture or recorded "die" in the process, lose their corporality, their presence in one place and become a collection of bits that can be transmitted everywhere at once. These vampire media have not yet found their special mystery outside material reality. Only when they have passed through the full dematerialization can they enter into the immaterial. The media already make up a system in which humans are no longer necessary, except as fodder for the scanner. In the media network humanity is more of an irritating obstacle, a jamming station, a noise generator, than a condition of its existence. If the media really want to feel the rush of their own functioning free of static they will have to get rid of the human being. The power of the digital media is that they produce images, sound and text solely through mathematical formulas. They do not need an outside world to live off at all. The extramedial is that which, however complete the media are in their techniques of representation and however the users control their medium, can never be expressed, never understood within the performance of the media package in question. The media exclude the extramedial from the domain of knowledge but at once make it possible to experience it - as that which is missing. And that is the special moment of a specific medium. You can only hear silence when the voice does not speak, but speech is only possible with silence. The extramedial is like a model of the atom: if a three-dimensional representation can be made of it then it has not been understood, and still it is the basis of all that exists. The extramedial appears as the negation of the information in a medium. It is not the bit of data that has appeared in a certain situation in front of and behind the camera, not the thing depicted in the photograph, but its photogenic quality. Without photography, no one would have known that some faces, postures, and elements of the landscape, in a certain light and from a certain angle perhaps, possess something which is invisible without the photograph: they are photogenetic. But this says nothing about what is depicted in the photo. Photogenius is technological happiness. When the photographer glances over the contact sheet, it is this power which determines the final picture. What was a representation (the photograph) metamorphoses into something which was never present in the thing represented (photogenius). In movies, the photogenic effect is known as the third meaning: that which is left over after you have analysed a movie sequence's importance within the story and its symbolic interpretation. An alarm clock, the bun in someone's hair, a pair of slippers, sheets on a clothesline. The added value, the presence of death, that silence. Evoked in the text of photography, language, film, or video, in narrative forms or symbolic contents, but remaining outside either range, no matter how far it is stretched. And it is precisely because of this that it is stretched. The extramedial is the most uncritical category imaginable, and the most rigid. Only from within another medium can the special moment of one medium be discovered, but what that special quality is can be expressed in neither of those. It exists only as a connection between two media, and what the photograph sees in the film is different from what the film sees in the photograph. But there exists another special moment, when a photograph is viewed from within painting, writing, sound, or the tangibility of things. The content of a medium is the user of that medium. Communication does not exist. Two media touch, each registers what is perceptible from its own perspective, and they experience this as communality in the recognition of the other's medium-specific moment. That is understanding: A sees in B what only A can see in B and B says nothing back, seeing in A what only B is capable of seeing in A. If there exists any communality on this planet then it is that which is fundamentally incommunicable, extra-informative, non-medial, recognizable only as the shift from one medium to another. This misunderstanding generates creativity as no other factor can. In transactions, we find each other, we build things. Just as a director can be called a nostalgic nationalist at home and a prominent artist who takes cinema to a new level abroad, misunderstanding is the vehicle for cultural transmissions. The extramedial is not a subjective, psychological reaction, but a physical experience generated by the media. Take the third meaning in movies. In black and white movies, the third meaning appears as an erotic effect. The hyperproportional enlargement of a face on the screen creates the effect of the face getting so close to you that you are tempted to kiss it. A combination of acting and lighting divests the face of all recognizable expression and gives it its physical power. Garbo and Dietrich did not need lascivious glances to inspire physical reactions in the audience. Color close-ups have no such effect, but achieve the same by showing the full body. Madonna manipulates viewers' bodies, not with her face, but with full-length shots. With her it is breast and thigh movements that do the job. Considered from within the media themselves, the extramedial is not the third meaning or the photogenic effect; it is the bodies of the users. Hence the camera's obsession with endlessly circling the body. Everything and everyone must be forced into the picture, completely, live if possible. In movies, bodies are extra-informative: the images, the informative, may touch the bodies but never penetrate further, which is why the audience never tires of seeing more movies and keeps an industry in business. Media actively seek ways to realize their extramedial, which is the only possible form of corporeality for them. But the click does not simply happen once enough bodies are in the picture. It happens only when Meaning III comes into play. It is more than quantity or quality, it is a hook you get stuck on. Media cannot create material bodies; at best they boost physical awareness. Media produce only subsequent media and carry the secret of their approach around with them. The secret of still photography is movement; the secret of movies is the omnipresence of television; the secret of television is its autonomously generated digital images and the autarchic standstill of biological and chemical drugs. Seen from the body, all images are external. The body got by just fine without celluloid and the silver screen, but the visual media could not do without the bodies. This changes only with the arrival of computer graphics and psychedelics. The old media did not reveal the existence of some universal mystery, quite the contrary: they showed that every empty space contains its own mystery, its own extramedial, the secret which can only be detected through that specific medium, just like language discovered silence. In every use of media, the connection is what's important. "Make it new" (Ezra Pound) means making an old medium contemporary by linking it to a new one, as Pound did in his Cantos. "We must be absolutely modern" (Rimbaud) means exactly the opposite: leave behind the old media and be absorbed into the new. All media that have existed up till now could be put into language. Even cyberspace made its debut in book form (William Gibson's "Neuromancer"). Language absorbed as many older media as television had and flourished, while photography and film had a tougher time. For the time being, the language program remains universal, or at least as wide-ranging as that of digital data. In media theory there is no death; it is a vitalist theory. Media merely have a line to dying and the spectacle of it. Death is not medial. Nor are there really any near-death experiences here. The extramedial is not the same thing as this unmedial, for the extramedial is unthinkable, impossible to experience without a media interior. The extramedial is the negation of the information content of media; death is the negation of the media themselves. The extramedial is the experience of that which is not information, but death is the realm of that which cannot be experienced. Perhaps death is not even the limit of experience, but more like an offshore island. It is as easy to communicate with the dead as with the living; each discovers his own. Snapshots of ghosts, zombie movies, knocking on tables, closed rooms for angels, muffled voices on tape: no medium is afraid of making the dead speak up in a format we can understand. But just as the living have given up the search for a definition of life - the impossible question - the dead remain silent about what death is. They have nothing to say to each other about it. On August 10, 1941, Klaus Mann sits in New York. It is a hot summer, and everybody has left the city. But he has to stay and work on the fifth issue of Decision, the magazine he's started for American and exile literature. Heat. Not a sea breeze that blows. He opens his journal. The last entry dates from the 29th of July. Hitler's army has just invaded the Soviet Union: "How quaint, this Hitler. He has made a mistake, a decisive one. This is the beginning of the end." The friends and family members he usually hangs around with, the interesting contacts and encounters, have all departed for cooler places. August 10th. "Never lonelier than in August ..." In the space beneath the lines about the invasion in Russia, Mann notes down a vague memory, an almost clichéd quote. Just a sentence. Then he begins to remember the name of its source and, then and there, he writes down two couplets by Benn that have stayed with him: "Einsamer nie als im August Erfüllungsstunde, im Gelände die roten und die goldenen Brände, Doch wo ist deiner Gärten Lust? Wo alles sich durch Glück beweist und tauscht den Blick und tauscht die Ringe im Weingeruch, im Rausch der Dinge, dienst du dem Gegenglück, dem Geist." Counterhappiness. Something in Klaus Mann has changed. Me and that fascinating life of mine. Nothing but success. And nothing achieved. One columnist among many. Everything came too easily. Always listening to others in order to learn something. Always intoxicated by things and exchanging glances and what comes after. Yet this doctor of ours ... Is Decision counterhappiness? Is it enough that I can no longer stand to go on for the sake of happiness? Why am I not in the service, like Tomski [his friend]? Calls every weekend from training camp: marching, shooting, angry sergeants! And me so lazy. He envies me that. Is this freedom? Klaus Mann thereupon encodes the metamorphosis he is undergoing as follows: Decision is not enough, writing articles is not enough, I want to write something bigger, something magnificent: a book! He has always lived in a literary milieu, and now it produces a literary encoding of that which is beginning to flow in him. And the atmosphere of friendship he has always lived in inspires him to write: "... so that I will have some news for Tomski when the person-to-person call comes from Savannah. 'Imagine! The first chapter is practically finished ...'" After writing this sentence, Mann suddenly gets up and walks outside. Gottfried Benn had written his verse on September the 4th, 1936, in Hannover, almost as an affirmation of what Klaus Mann wrote to him in 1934 about his partiality to the Nazis: "If some high-ranking minds do not know where they belong, those fellows know precisely what does not belong with them - the human spirit." Benn sent the poem that same September 4th on a postcard to his friend Oelze. It was first published in his "Ausgewählte Gedichte" ("Selected Poems," 1936), which Klaus Mann reviewed in 1937. On that occasion he had remarked: "Is it not obvious that he [Benn] is lately disappointing himself, isolating himself, finding himself disillusioned, that he has manoeuvred himself into an impossible and awkward, even grotesque position? Because the Nazis do not want him, and have an unmistakable instinct against all his qualities? Because he can no longer find an audience in Germany, since the few readers he had have been deported or silenced? Now he is a surly army medical officer in Hannover; hardly an enviable situation." But, he added, it no longer matters; Benn is a bypassed station. Until the poem resurfaces in him years later, an articulation of the hardly enviable situation of an army doctor who knows that his few readers have been silenced. And a shift occurs in Klaus Mann. An assurance. This poet, and all my interesting acquaintances here, forget them - only the work itself counts. The great work. Mind your own business and let others do theirs. When Mann returns to his quarters he continues to write in his journal, whiskey and soda at his side: "But what sort of book? This is a serious moment. I know it is. Seriousness is something I feel deeply. I want to write a serious book, a sincere book. Can a novel be totally serious, totally sincere? Perhaps. But I do not want to write one, not now, not at this moment. I am weary of all the literary clichés and tricks. I am weary of all the masks, all the tricks of simulation. Is it art itself that I am weary of? I do not wish to play anymore. I wish to confess. The serious moment - that is the moment of confession." And he decides to write a book in English: "The Turning Point," later translated by Mann himself as "Der Wendepunkt," supplemented by his wartime journal entries. Mann is undergoing a period of metamorphosis, the completion of an oeuvre: a completion which consists of the negative version of his own existence, including his books, not considered as something he has lived and written, but as material meant for treatment on a higher level, the level of autobiography. And in this new space, finally he no longer needs to be brilliant. The strictest criterion. But what does the absolute poem do to Mann, what does an old medium do when it becomes the content of the next? Rilke explained this in one of his absolute poems, forty years before Mann experienced it. In this poem Rilke described a sovereign medium: a perfect statue from antiquity, completed by the disappearance of the head, arms, legs and sex. There was only a torso: closed in on itself, without so much as a glance outside. Hermetic. Rilke's description of this medium was itself closed, everything fit in with everything else; his total control of language led to a total authenticity of expression. But having finished his perfect description, he bluntly followed it with the sentence, "Change your life." All at once, an exit is offered. The "change your life" experience of seeing/reading/listening to sovereign media - that was what Klaus Mann had experienced. He realized it, and took the consequences. Of course, Rilke's sentence is an ambiguous one. There are infinite ways to interpret its meaning. Does it mean: change your life so you can create sovereign art yourself (as Rilke did); leave your wife and child, go wandering? Or is it: change your life so that you and your life may become sovereign? Or maybe it means: O statue, change and become flesh. But for those who are touched by this absolutist magic, such hermeneutics are only a part of the game. "I do not wish to play anymore" (Mann). Change your life: in this moment of completion there exists an opening, here and now, which beams the sovereign medium through. The change has already begun. You are already an other. Later, the astonished discovery follows: I can no longer imagine life without that poem, without that day, without that shape which appeared in the doorway and suddenly made me realize what a fool I had been. The fact that the absolute takes no notice of what goes on outside reaffirms the person who observes this about his own life; that is the change. From this eternal and universal longing to be elsewhere, to be delivered of oneself, one moves to the security of being here, at this single point in space and time, in this ego, in this being. Only those who are completely at one with themselves are capable of the metamorphosis which leads them to ecstasy and changes them. This is completion. Hermeticism is the production of discontinuity. A space appears beyond self and being; metamorphosis begins. Something from elsewhere, from outside, appears in the present. It. The unspeakable. An atmosphere of silence and lostness. Technological happiness. Sovereign media. A line read. A beam of light. But it was an insanely clear day. A silhouette before a window. I thought: is it you? Human consciousness shifts from one medium to another and becomes aware of its mediality at moments of transition. Where one medium ends and the other begins, for an instant there exists no medium. The unencodable presents itself; the unchanneled, the silence of the godhead, the inhuman. Space, Spaces of possibility. Unearthly silences. This extramedial is negativity. Negation is the unencodable that flows through a medium and causes its collapse. Only those who destroy their medium can express that which needs to be expressed; that which has no expression exists outside the media. Therefore, sovereign media combine the medial with the media's destructive urges and demand perfection from every medium, for perfection is the best destruction. Then the next medium reveals itself. ??