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MCS34310.1177/0163443711434298Kubitschko and KnappMedia, Culture & Society

Commentary

Media, Culture & Society

An invisible life? A response

34(3) 359364
The Author(s) 2012
Reprints and permission:
to Mark Deuzes Media life sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0163443711434298
mcs.sagepub.com

Sebastian Kubitschko and Daniel Knapp

Goldsmiths, University of London, UK

To begin with, we want to articulate our appreciation for Mark Deuzes highly topical and
often provocative arguments circulating around the role media plays in contemporary
social life. In his recent edited publication Managing Media Work, for example, Deuze
once again shows a grasp for bringing together decidedly relevant issues (see in particular
Lovink and Rossiter, 2011). We therefore wish to state at the outset of this response that
we do not disagree with Deuzes observations as such, but rather object to specific theo-
retical presuppositions and proceedings that guide him to disputable diagnoses.
In his most recent commentary, entitled Media life, Deuze (2011) puts forward the
overarching argument that media has become (omni)present to a degree that people no
longer live with but in media. Accordingly, following the author, a comprehensive
theorization and understanding of societal life is only achievable by the means of
media ontology (Deuze, 2011). Deuze, without a doubt, is right in pointing out that an
increasing number of people around the globe live a media-saturated life.1 It is clear that
media as technical pieces of engineering and as social and economic infrastructures
have become an essential part of the infrastructure of modern life (e.g. Bowker et al.,
2010; Krotz, 2009). Relationships are handled via social media, commerce is increas-
ingly streaming through digital routes, governments use the internet to communicate and
consult, and mass-media outlets are structuring and ritualizing the lives of uncountable
people around the globe.
That much is clear; indeed that much is exceedingly apparent and has become a
truism of contemporary research. Accordingly, the provocative element of Deuzes
argument cannot be found in his emphasis on the ubiquity of media.2
As echoed in the title of our commentary, it is rather the conclusion drawn from his
omnipresence thesis that prompted this response. In outlining his central argument in a
well-written style, fused with metaphorical anecdotes Deuze links this omnipresence
with an intriguing characteristic of todays media: their invisibility.

Corresponding author:
Sebastian Kubitschko, Department of Media and Communications, Goldsmiths, University of London,
London, SE14 6NW, UK.
Email: s.kubitschko@gold.ac.uk

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360 Media, Culture & Society 34(3)

Critique of Media life

Consequently, a central deduction perhaps the central deduction of Deuze reads as
follows: As media become pervasive and ubiquitous they become invisible (2011:
137). This, for Deuze, has far-reaching consequences. The moment media become
invisible, our sense of identity, and indeed our experience of reality itself, becomes
irreversibly modified, because mediated (2011: 140). Let us take a closer look at the
idea of invisibility.
Deuzes understanding of the invisible character of media is predicated on the assump-
tion that the omnipresence of an object makes it invisible. In this context he reverts to the
words of Friedrich Kittler and concludes that the key challenge of communication and
media studies in the 21st century is, or will be, the disappearance of media (2011: 137).
While we can appreciate Deuzes thesis, we see a different reality in the making, which
is based on the dialectics between visibility and invisibility.
To commence our critique of Deuze, it might be helpful to go back in time and to cite
Ludwig Wittgenstein who, in relation to linguistics, described invisible processes as
follows:

The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and
familiarity. The real foundations of their inquiry do not strike people at all. Unless that fact
has at some time struck them. And this means: we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most
striking and most powerful. (2009 [1953]: 56e, 129)

This line of thought is by all means intriguing as well as comprehensible. Yet, it is

important to note that Wittgenstein here is talking about language or, more specifically,
grammar; an aspect of life that systemizes and structures the way language is employed
to a degree that actually makes us what we are, human beings. Can the ubiquity of
media and grammar be set on the same level or treated as equivalent categories?
Certainly not!
Furthermore, it is worth stressing that Wittgensteins argument does not have an
explicit ocular connotation. It does not refer to visibility as such, but to cognitive per-
ception more generally, hence the inverted commas we have placed around the term
invisible above. This points towards a wider conceptual problem in Deuzes argument.
As Martin Jay has highlighted, vision has a deeply intertwined, yet complicated rela-
tionship with language and culture as a whole. Notwithstanding the cultural and histori-
cal variability of vision (Foster, 1988), much of European intellectual history possesses
an ocular-centric stance, in which vision is attributed primacy among the senses. Visual
metaphors serve as a culturally constructed shorthand for cognitive perception as such
that also manifests itself linguistically. Consider the relationship between the visual and
time in the German Augenblick, English expressions such as I see and it appears to
me or in French the voir in pouvoir and savoir (Jay, 1994: 13, 8).
In the absence of a clear definition of invisibility, Deuzes argument reads more like a
disappearance of media from consciousness at large, rather than the absence of cognitive
perception by specifically visual means. Moreover, in considering invisibility of media
as a central feature of media life, Deuze does not juxtapose it with the notion of visibility
and how visibility may have been constitutive of, or integral to other configurations of

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Kubitschko and Knapp 361

media and society. In this vein, Deuze sidesteps the wider discourse on the role of vision
in modernity and its critique through an anti-ocular discourse, which has been well-
documented by Jay (1994). In sum, these conceptual issues call into question the pro-
ductiveness of Deuzes invisibility concept, at least in its currently published form.
Whether upon closer scrutiny Deuzes invisibility may turn out to be a distinct
concept or a metaphor for cognitive perception, the relationship between the omnipres-
ence of media and its disappearance remains unclear. It has been argued convincingly
that media are increasingly utilized in explicit strategic and deliberate manners. Indeed,
there is a substantial body of research coming from various strands of disciplines that
challenges the premise that individuals make use of media in an unreflective, uncon-
scious or entirely passive manner (Juris, 2008; Sassen, 2008; Sundaram, 2010; van de
Donk et al., 2004; Kubitschko, 2011). In other words, societies have by far not entered
a state where everyone has internalized the interface to the point whereby they forget
about it; a scenario indicated in bestseller literature like William Gibsons Spook
Country or Daniel Suarezs Daemon.
People do not live their lives in an invisible grid that disables any form of critical
reflection. Social action is (still) taking place in and through the media (see Carpentier,
2011: 70).
As contrasting the disappearance of media with grammar as a hidden aspect of
everyday life has demonstrated, there is no evidence for why this disappearance from
consciousness should be a temporal question at all an inevitable progression corre-
lated to an ever-growing pervasion of everyday life with media. Deuzes notion of
media life therefore does not answer the question in what forms quantitative changes
also entail qualitative alterations. This is reminiscent of the early discourse around the
Information Society, in which an increase in the volume of information served as
evidence for a qualitative change in the structural constitution of societies. Such an
argument has been widely criticized (for an overview, see Webster, 2006).
To avoid misunderstandings, we do not mean to suggest that invisibility does not
constitute a significant aspect of media studies, among other disciplines. Quite the con-
trary, in a world where basic procedures are increasingly automated, interconnected,
data-driven and influenced by some might even argue dependent on infrastructural
media that function to a large degree according to non-perceivable logics of algorithms,
invisibility or non-visible processes are exceedingly relevant.
Black-box algorithms that determine individual credit scores, high-frequency stock-
trading bots, software that optimizes automatic dispositions in supermarkets and search
engines based on self-improving algorithms, to name a few examples, have profound
consequences for the lives of large segments of the human population. In addition, infra-
structures and the functioning of (electronic) devices, due to the breathtaking speed of
innovation, are increasingly non-transparent for laypersons take, for example, todays
radio-frequency identification (RFID) or tablet computers in relation to the former tin
can phones.
There can be no doubt that peoples everyday perception of the world is, to an increas-
ing degree, influenced by elements that are invisible or at least not perceivable in a
direct sensual manner. But is this what Deuze has in mind when he talks about the invis-
ibility of media? There is no clear answer to this.

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362 Media, Culture & Society 34(3)

In addition to these notions of invisibility, there is also a vast amount of literature

written by scholars who are concerned with issues around the increasing relevance of
visibility in contemporary societies from political scandals (Thompson, 2000), online
surveillance (Andrejevic, 2007) and reality TV (Dubrofsky, 2007) to more analytical
issues (Brighenti, 2007). This is not an alternative scenario to that of invisible processes,
but a complementary one, as for instance the conflict between self-exposure on social
networks and data-mining of such visual profiles illustrates. Deuze shows no intention to
further elaborate this field or to gather productive elements from any suspenseful
tensions between visibility and invisibility. In contrast to Deuze, we consider that a dia-
lectics of visibility and invisibility would open up a space for investigating the relation-
ship between sensual perception and the lack thereof on the one hand, and agency and
democratic engagement on the other. As it is presented in Deuzes approach, invisibility
instead threatens to fall prey to a holism in which the possibility of an agency that acts
on and through media is not considered.
In addition, Deuzes conception is indistinct about the competing perspectives
involved: invisible from the point of the audience, the user, the producer, the hybrids of
these characters? What is missing entirely, then, is any sense of materialization in rela-
tion to the mediatization of the social. As Robin Mansell (2010) has argued recently in a
conclusive manner, it is important to consider mediatized actions in relation to offline
consequences for economic, political and social action. Following Mansell we strongly
believe that answers will not be found in vague, metaphorical notions of media but rather
in empirical work that incorporates the wider social terrain and which, by looking beyond
the borders of its own discipline, aims to conceptualize the influence of contemporary
media in more complex and comprehensive ways.
In this sense, Deuze fails in utilizing the theoretical potential of the genie he has
unleashed or at least approached. It can be said, then, that beyond the lack of empirical
rootedness, his notion of invisibility lacks theoretical precision, leaving it unclear what
the consequential effects of media life are or could be for the wider social terrain. As will
be shown in the following, this lack finds its roots in the authors media-centric approach
as well as his non-explicit understanding of media.
It has become common wisdom that, in the face of unfolding socio-technical change,
scholars have to perform a balancing act in which they generally endeavour to overcome
the opposing pitfalls of agency and structure, social constructivism and technological
determinism. Medias role in the constitution of social life falls into just this ambivalent
area of investigation. Deuze deliberately or unintentionally does not succeed in
keeping the balance. According to Deuze, using an ontology of media life for theorizing
and operationalizing the way we see ourselves and the role we (can) play in society
(2011: 139) is the logical step towards a holistic understanding of societal life.
Consequently he goes along with the tendency in both academic and popular writing
about media to speak as if media were the social, as if media were the natural channels
of social life and social engagement (Couldry, 2008: 96). This is not to deny the pat-
terned, highly routinized ways in which media contribute to the social world. Media
indeed have become inserted into permanent positions within everyday routines. Yet
Deuzes notion of invisibility almost constructs a mystification of media. Instead of
specifying which of the many tools, spaces, technologies, infrastructures and institutions

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Kubitschko and Knapp 363

constitute media, the overarching term media life is used as a container with a vast
capacity. Once he or she enters this storage place the reader experiences a nebulous
vagueness that encapsulates media from the materiality of flows to, through and from
individuals, collectives, institutions, infrastructures and technologies. Due to his implicit
equation of media and the social, and the conceptualization of media as a unique force
with a single logic, a further explication of what media is becomes redundant for Deuze:
media is not only everywhere but is also everything.
While one might argue that this is all just pedantry, we would like to point out at
this stage of our response that this under-conceptualization in relation to invisibility
and media is highly relevant. It is particularly so once the considerable influence of
theory on practice is taken into account; more precisely, the idea that theory shapes the
questions researchers ask is critical for the task of anticipating answers, and serves as
the repository of previous research results (Rueschemeyer, 2009). Consequently, broad
generalizations or non-transparent depictions of elementary terminologies hardly
advance discussion in any scholarly debate.
At the same time, it has to be noted that the constricting form of an article, of course,
does not allow for much more than declaiming hypotheses about such multifaceted
notion. All the same, in the given space of his commentary Deuze does not open up the
difficult causal questions about how and to what extent media materials work in the social
world (Couldry, 2006: 15), but instead devitalizes such questions by removing any exte-
riority to media. All the more it will be interesting to see how Deuze (forthcoming) is
going to elaborate this concept in his forthcoming book-length publication.

Conclusion
Critical to our argument in this response is the fact that, echoing Roger Silverstones
(1994) critique of Actor Network Theory, Deuzes media life (2011) points towards the
fundamental embeddedness of social life in media and communications technologies, but
it does not offer the basis for a critical examination of social order nor a new theorization
of social action. Accordingly, Deuzes concept does not do justice to the dimension of
action, predominantly its reflexive and creative dimension; that is, the idea that in
democracy as an institutionalized revolution innovation is an everyday occurrence
(Joas, 1996: 49). The ultimate implication of media life is that there is no room at all for
the emergence of spaces for democratic engagement and agency through the utilization of
contemporary media as any form of reflexivity and engaged creativity perishes in an all-
defining, unapproachable invisibility. It is worth noting that this is also true in relation to
academic practices. How would it be possible to take an external perspective to media life
and critically reflect upon the field as an object of research when there is no outside?
As has been articulated across this response, Deuze manages to theorize invisibility as
a vital aspect of media studies and social life in general, but fails to construct a transpar-
ent terminology or concept. The authors share the opinion that invisibility, as a field of
empirical and analytical investigation, is a stimulating field in the context of media
research as well as its surrounding disciplines, but that a dialectics of visibility and invis-
ibility augments its analytical potential and reintroduces those spaces for democratic
engagement and agency that we were missing in Deuzes conception.

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364 Media, Culture & Society 34(3)

Notes
The authors would like to express their gratitude to the editors of Media, Culture & Society, in
particular Raymond Boyle, for helping to stimulate debate in the field. Sebastian Kubitschko
would like to thank Goldsmiths Media and Communications Department for their generosity and
confidence.
1 It is important to notice that people is an expression that names both the constitutive political
subject and the class excluded from politics (see Agamben, 1998: 17680).
2 Although Deuzes argument leaves aside profound issues of locality, access, resources and
skills.

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