Medium Affect Desire: Hybridising Real Virtual and the Actualised through Affective Medium Ecology

Underneath the turbulent surface of the ubiquitous media-scape lies an even more agile and aggressive set of relations. A central figure in this turmoil of desires seems to be the asignifying sign, which has a hybridising liaison with both the realm of the real virtual and the realm of the actualised. The main question is what does it want? This new materialistic, non-anthropocentric liberty of affect is creating an arena of strange attractors and other topological vector fields in which our own unconscious drive is as effective as that of the steel ball in a pinball machine. Could we isolate the intrinsic drive of the medium from its subservient position in the aesthetic, freeing its desire from the anthropocentric dominion? What does it Yen for? Perhaps this gap is not meant to be filled, as it is this yearning what it yearns for. The asignifying sign cannot be isolated, it is neither here nor there, yet it is conditionally omnipresent, it inhibits the gap, its desire is to affect.

creating an arena of strange attractors and other topological vector fields in which our own unconscious drive is as effective as that of the steel ball in a pinball machine.How, then, can we isolate the intrinsic drive of the medium from its subservient position in the aesthetic, freeing its desire from the anthropocentric dominion?
The point of departure lies in the concept of metamedia, which is not to be mistaken for cross-media, trans-media or multi-media.In all of the latter categories, the particular media specifics are combined, connected and transposed to achieve a higher goal, to create a stronger expression of communication.
A specific denotation of meta-media is found in the reversal of media-philosopher Marshall McLuhan's conception 4 of meta-media, referred to as 'the totalizing effect of media'.Media theorist Lev Manovich 5 expounded this concept by referring to it as a field of new interactions between form and content in the field of emerging media, and the convergence of technology and medium.
Elaborating specifically on a particular part of the meta-media system is the state that occurs when a certain concept, belief, or idea is heavily present, or cultivated to such an extent that it dominates all other potential notions.This state of the 'real virtual' 6 -as opposed to virtual reality -saturates the mental-medium (the concept is therefore often referred to in terms of highly volatile media, like air or ether) to such an extent that the mere expression of it can only be demanded by a particular medium.

Yen
Amongst the most difficult words to translate into English are the Portuguese word Saudade and the German word Sehnsucht, which -to a certain extent -cover the same lemma.Deeply rooted in romanticism, they both express a resilient and intense longing for something or someone, which comes with the admonition that this state does not necessarily require an actual object of desire: yearning for yearning's sake is an independent, auto-referential condition.The English expression, yen, dates from the era of the passionate consumption of opium, and indicates the intensity with which the 'prolonged unfulfilled desire or need' would have been felt, although the reference to physical addiction does not include all its capacities.
It is exactly this unfulfilled-ness which French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan 1 calls Spaltung, an equation involving two prosaic human drives (appetite and demand), leaving a definitional gap for desire, which is not (able) to be satisfied. 2It is in this part of reality -the part that is not materialised, the part we call the virtual -that we find another vector field moving towards the one containing our mundane tendencies.Political theorist Jane Bennett calls it the vitality of (nonhuman) bodies, by which she means 'the capacity of things -edibles, commodities, storms, metals -not only to impede or block the will and designs of humans, but also to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities or tendencies of their own'. 3This exposes a mayhem of non-anthropocentric desires, Medium Affect Desire: Hybridising Real Virtual and the Actualised through Affective Medium Ecology the failure to include this auto-referentiality.Social theorist and philosopher Brian Massumi's critique on Baudrillard focuses mainly on the reversal of signification -the substitution of signs of the real for the real.In Baudrillard's state of hyper-reality, signs would no longer represent or refer to an external model, but only stand for themselves and refer to other signs.In the words of Massumi: In the absence of any gravitational pull to ground them, images accelerate and tend to run together.They become interchangeable.Any term can be substituted for any other: utter indetermination.Faced with this homogeneous surface of syntagmatic slippage, we are left speechless.We can only gape in fascination. 10sides that, the logic of this reduction hinges again on the structuralist premise that there would be one type of systematic, with only one type of classification -regardless of which classification is used -that probably largely disregards the perspective of the beholder.Yet it would be unwise to approach this mechanism of the asignifying sign through a phenomenological or existentialist gateway.According to Deleuze and Guattari, the concept of art lies in its potentiality: it is not what it is, it is what it creates in percepts and affects.Percepts are not perceptions and affects are not affections.
In the words of cultural theorist Claire Colebrook, 'A percept is that which would be perceived, and an affect is that which would be felt.' 11w, then, to prevent structuralism without becoming rudderless, how to get to the middle ground, not too close, yet not too far either?First we need to exit the realm of representation.In order to do that, philosopher Gilles Deleuze proposes overthrowing Platonism, which in his words means: […] to raise up simulacra, to assert their rights over icons or copies.The problem no longer concerns the distinction Essence/Appearance or Model/ Copy.This whole distinction operates in the world Information is the pivoting point between the actual and the virtual, in this case the virtual is overflowing with concept, leaving no option than to crystallise in some type of medium.This crystallisation is contingently obligatory for the emersion of expression.
From the non-anthropocentric point of view, the question is, what does the medium do?What does it want?What does it yen for?
For this expedition we have to distinguish a multitude of layers within the definition of medium.If it were still possible to search for the smallest signifying part within a tangible medium, the question arises whether that systematic would fail when going digital.Moreover, since the medium operates on the verge of the physical and the virtual, we need more abstract points of reference: the medium as the extension of man (effect), the medium as substrate (capacities), the medium as crystallised sensation (real virtual), and the medium as entity (desire).All of these are parameters for examining the overarching quality of the medium: the affective capacity of the medium (affect).Therefore we need to identify a medium-message system that excerpts itself from the realm of representation and signification: the asignifying sign.

Simulacra
The asignifying sign is not reducible to any other sign, yet neither it is a simulacrum in the Baudrillardian sense 7 since it only simulates itself in relation to itself (and not to anything it is not): it is auto-referential by nature.In the Lacanian tripartite division it would be named the 'real'; 8 it would escape from philosopher C.S. Peirces infinite semiosis. 9The asignifying sign would be the ultimate instrument for examining its affective effect without 'pollution' from any semiotic systematic.Logic would dictate a search for an image which contained no meaning at all.For this, the asignifying sign should be stripped of any meta-language, narrative, context or symbolism, refusing any instruments of analysis.The main criticism of Baudrillard's four-stroke layering would be the aggregation of its parts (its individuals).
A third position could arise from the recognition of (medium) large, non-human entities that do not possess a social nature by default, but which form the true agency of society from which both social structure and individual activity emerge; this so-called 'meso-reductionism' could be attached to scholars such as Giddens.But this is not what we are looking for.DeLanda elaborates on Deleuze's assemblage theory (he calls this a 'neo-assemblage theory' or 'assemblage theory 2.0').The key component of this theory is the acknowledgement of entirety as the relations of exteriority.This means that any assemblage consists only of the relations between its components, and these relations are determined by the capacity of the components to interact.These capacities might be offered by the components' properties, but they can never be reduced simply to that.After all, the capacities are also dependent on the interaction within the assemblage.On the other hand, any component is always part of many assemblages, so therefore its properties can never explain the relations that are exterior to its body, let alone explain anything about it as a whole.This whole does not exist out of the connections of its components in a formally logic way, that would make the component a logically necessary part of that totality (and assuming a predeterministic position, the whole is then supposed to be prior to its own existence).Rather, these relations are 'only' contingently obligatory in order to create the whole.
In addition to this, DeLanda defines the concept of assemblage along two dimensions: 'One dimension or axis defines the variable roles which an assemblage's components may play: from a purely material role at one extreme of the axis, to a purely expressive role at the other.' 18 The second measurement defines 'variable processes in which these components become involved and that either stabilize the identity of an assemblage […] or destabilize it'. 19The stabilising processes are referred to as of representation.The goal is the subversion of this world, 'the twilight of the idols.'The simulacrum is not degraded copy, rather it contains a positive power which negates both original and copy, both model and reproduction.Of the least two divergent series interiorized in the simulacrum, neither can be assigned as original or as copy. 12e danger in this reasoning is to assume that images start with their 'physical' appearance; it is rather the consumption that proves their existence.
If an individual regards an image as an image, than that individual is already primed 13 to see an image.
Psychotherapist and philosopher Felix Guattari suggests 'It is simply quite wrong to regard action on the psyche, the socius, and the environment as separate.' 14And as it is impossible to prevent Deutung at any level.It is wise to define simulacra in a detached and abstract way (as opposed to the concrete and direct Baudrillardian approach).At this point, Deleuze's definition of simulacra seems to suit best: 'those systems in which different relates to different by means of difference itself.What is essential is that we find in these systems no prior identity, no internal resemblance'. 15ye' of the beholder Secondly, to reattach the human to the aesthetics would also demand a search for the middle ground (the excluded middle), 16 and for this it would be helpful to consider philosopher and artist Manuel DeLanda's position on reductionism.17 26 This gap, this yearning, can well be understood in a natural context or in a context of growth and experience; to engage in such systems even seems unavoidable, just for the purpose of learning itself.
But when we look at a system in which the exposure to a body of the sublime is not incidental; i.e., manmade and deliberately frequented, then something else must be at work, since it is evident that the yearning is not felt because it occurs as part of the experiencing of the sublime, but more likely because of the sensation of the yearning itself.
The yearning is not meant to be stopped -it is the yearning that we yearn for.To a great extent territorialisation, and the destabilising processes as deterritorialisation. Thus, to prevent any (post-) structuralism, it will always be essential to include 'The "Eye" of the Beholder' (EotB) -note that eye is already a metaphor -which indicates the abso- Besides this, the canvas would never be empty to start with (as Deleuze puts it, we always start in the middle; thought has no beginning, just an outside to which it is connected).To steer away from any over-or misinterpretation, or actually, from any interpretation at all (the asignifying sign operates on the pre-conscious level), it would seem preferable to forcefully, perhaps even violently, attack our modes of perception.The empty canvas leaves too much room for interpretation; the abstract image makes it even worse.It becomes really serious if the artist starts to believe in the independent state of Deutung 34 as the genesis of the deeper.Painter Kasimir Malevich wrote after a visit from his friend, the poet Velimir Khlebnikov, 35 who was heavily involved in calculating laws of causality: The numbers that Khlebnikov has discovered [in my paintings red.]suggest that something powerful lies within 'Supremus'; an inherent law governs this sphere, perhaps the very same law that has guided world creativity.Through me passes that same force, that same mutual harmony of creative laws that governs everything.Whatever existed heretofore just wasn't the real thing. 36is raises several questions since Malevich's suprematism was oriented towards the circumvention of the system of sense-making, as he adequately stated: one might wonder if this system is fundamentally different from the system of desire.
Lacan distinguishes desire from need and demand.Desire is the excess produced by the enunciation of need in demand.'[D]esire is neither the appetite for satisfaction nor the demand for love, but the difference that results from the subtraction of the first from the second, the very phenomenon of their splitting' (Spaltung). 27Hence desire can never be satisfied, or as sociologist and philosopher Slavoj Žižek 28 puts it: 'desire's raison d'être is not to realize its goal, to find full satisfaction, but to reproduce itself as desire'.Can we boldly replace that desire with our yearning, or vice versa?That would imply that the yearning for the sublime equals the demand for love minus the experience itself. 29If we regard the sublime as a proto-theory of singularity 30 and widen the definition of desire to 'a process of production without reference to any exterior agency, whether it be a lack that hollows it out or a pleasure that fills it' 31 then it would make a perfect fit.According to Deleuze, the work of art is first and foremost a machine that produces a sensation: By means of the material, the aim of art is to wrest the percept from perception of objects and the states of a perceiving subject, to wrest the affect from affections as the transition from one state to another: to extract a bloc of sensations, a pure being of sensation. 32is is the quest at this moment: the appearance of the asignifying sign, also known as the punctum 33 (or to be more precise; the pre-punctum without the studium), also known as the singularity, formerly known as the sublime, is the precise topic of this paper.

Natures of pervasion as sets of relations
The central premise in this experiment is that the asignifying sign is most likely to exist in an environment which is highly charged with (visual) information, probably containing a multitude of existence.It is when time is only expressible as a singularity, which, in the words of architectural theorist Sanford Kwinter, can be understood as 'those critical points or moments within a system when its qualities and not just its quantities undergo a fundamental change'. 39The asignifying sign is a singularity par excellence.Bear in mind that this is only generated by the accumulation of all mediated notions.Presupposing that non-human bodies would have desires, then the question would not be, 'What desires do they have?' but, 'What desires do they have under which conditions?' Or, to be even Under Suprematism I understand the primacy of pure feeling in creative art.To the Suprematist, the visual phenomena of the objective world are, in themselves, meaningless; the significant thing is feeling, as such, quite apart from the environment in which it is called forth. 37is apparent conflict between sensation and sense-making, suggests that we need to start at the other end; we need to overwhelm our capacities with information, overload our circuits.To stack meaning upon meaning, sign upon sign, semiotic on semiotic and convention on convention beyond the point at which the system collapses, to the point where we simply can't make any sense out of it.
That is the precise moment the asignifying sign appears.However, this moment has nothing to do with duration of time, it is the moment chronos (in its It is the trace the snake leaves in the sand after it moves through it, it is the shadow cast on the wall.
Therefore we can never totalise all kairos into one chronos.
When Deleuze writes that 'the crystal reveals a direct time-image, and no longer an indirect image of time deriving from movement.It does not abstract time; it does better: it reverses its subordination in relation to movement', 38 he is expressing that exact moment when aion is addressed solely on its very about representation.
Although Deleuze is obviously referring to media as part of a much bigger system than what is being directly dealt with here, it cannot be denied that the structural changes in society with respect to the role of the media will affect our efforts to incorporate the role of the media from the times of Guy Debord.
With the acknowledgement of this impossible unifi- The spectacle presents itself simultaneously as all of society, as part of society, and as instrument of unification.As a part of society it is specifically the sector which concentrates all gazing and all consciousness.
Due to the very fact that this sector is separate, it is the common ground of the deceived gaze and of false consciousness, and the unification it achieves is nothing but an official language of generalized separation. 47e effects of exposure, the endurance of the spectator, and the seemingly distant state of the events, create a different mindset, a different mental model.A result of spectatorship in the Debordian sense could have been that the passive-participant felt confirmation in the fact that all problems could be solved in ninety minutes, that cars did not need gasoline, heroes did not use the bathroom and dark alleys were always dangerous.These notions were not mental models when they were initially presented, but became so when they became part of a view that was reflected in the organisation of a social covenant such as modernity.By constantly reinforcing comparable notions in a society, obviously more precise: 'I never desire something all by itself, I don't desire an aggregate either, I desire from within an aggregate,' as Deleuze explains. 43The definition of the aggregate (assemblage) should also come from within the assemblage itself.
Amidst the techno-social avalanche in which media transforms into an amorphous, ubiquitous entity, it is not surprising that the cry for reconnection with the non-mediated generates a revitalisation of a desire for the lived incident.Incorporating strategies such as dérive 44  such notions take hold, regardless of their origin -if there ever was an original.We need to reassess our relation to the media in the same way we need to reassess the relationship between the individual and the social: the media has become part of our environment.To assume that one can still maintain a certain distance and have some degree of control over the media's influence is rather dangerous: awareness of the socio-political implications is not a topic of the media, the media is the topic.According to Felix Guattari: The decisive factor, it seems to me, is the general inflexibility of social and psychological praxes -their failure to adapt -as well as a widespread incapacity to perceive the erroneousness of partitioning off the real into a number of separate fields.It is quite simply wrong to regard action on the psyche, the socius, and the environment as separate.Indeed, if we continue -as the media would have us do -to refuse squarely to confront the simultaneous degradation of these three areas, we will in effect be acquiescing in a general infantilization of opinion, a destruction and neutralization of democracy. 48

Conclusion
This article does not strive to reach a conclusion; that is, the answer to its central question: what does the medium want?'Medium' can be seen as sets of relations, an interplay of thresholds that use information, blocks of sensation, to hybridise the virtual (as in real virtual) and the actualised.
Medium is always a conditional ecology of (non-) human capacities and desires, and therefore it is already plural from the start.It is the yearning that is the central force of interaction -the true interaction between medium and man works not through narrative or representation, it emanates through the asignifying and the affective.In order to be able to move towards an understanding of its workings one has to become part of that same system, since only from within the action comes the action.It would only make sense to classify a medium on the basis the present.Each is complex and is valid for time as a whole.' i the ground of knowledge: something through or by means of which a thing is known.
ii the cause or ground of the existence of a thing.
DeLanda distinguishes what he calls 'macro-reductionism' whereby the existence of individual persons is acknowledged, yet the assumption is made that they would have completely co-opted the values of a higher social order or class to which they supposedly belong (individuals are products of society, pars pro toto).He refers to the work of Durkheim, Marx and Parsons in this respect.Unsurprisingly, the opposite position would be that of 'micro-reductionism', which states that 'society as a whole' does exist, but only by the grace of being the surplus of Virtual and sublime The third and final element to consider is how the asignifying sign relates to the realm of the virtual and the sublime.As Deleuze points out: Aesthetics suffers from an agonizing dualism.On the one hand it designates a theory of feeling as the form of possible experience; on the other, it marks out a theory of art as the reflection of real experience.In order for these two meanings to join, the conditions of experience in general must become the conditions of real experience. 24But how does this work when the experience is not yet experienced, if it is still in the pre-conscious phase?To approach this topic we return briefly to philosophy scholar Daniel W. Smith 25 as he summarises Deleuze's theory of Sensation: In the 'Analytic of the Sublime', the faculty of the imagination is forced to confront its own limit, its own maximum: fated with an immense object […] or a powerful object […], the imagination strives to comprehend these sensations in their totality, but is unable to do so.It reaches the limits of its power, and finds itself reduced to impotency.This failure gives rise to a pain, a cleavage in the subject between what can be imagined and what can be thought, between the imagination and reason.
luteness of actuality and psychological temporal conditions of the author casu quo the interpretant, and his or her existence in the assemblage (Ironically we need a sign to indicate this: ).Now this is where it becomes very interesting in terms of the asignifying sign.Following painter Francis Bacon, the sign has a very brutal quality, it can bypass our consciousness, prevent any interference by the brain whatsoever, and go straight to our nervous system.This occurs before recognition, automation and classification.At the very moment it acts in this way, it deterritorialises the system to which it also belongs (a semiotic system for example) to such an extent that it will not be able to hold its position in the assemblage; it has become a free radical. 20This is the 'moment' before causality kicks in -without causality there is no chronology -it is a state of non-chronological time. 21This is when the Eye of the Beholder is not yet assured; or to be more precise, it is in fact ruptured (Deleuze calls this the 'fissure').The fissure of EotB can be understood as the birthplace of the crystal image. 22It is the ratio cognoscendi of time.How to understand could not exist without those who understand.Obviously the asignifying sign can only exist very briefly, its own appearance creates a point of reference and changes the field in which it appears.But since the Dynamic Interpretant 23 is born every split second, these instances of existence appear unconnectedly continuative, at best categorised by their capacity to affect (affordance).Should an asignifying sign survive its own appearance, the moment it shows, it will act self-referentially.(symbolic) narratives, various (visual) semiotic and semantic systems, and many denotative and connotative layers.The logic in this comes from the proposition that any constructed image has no representational value at all, representation does not exist, returning here to the real virtuality through the work of psychologist J. J. Gibson: 'Images are neither necessary for thought nor for perception!' As a consequence of this, there would be no fundamental difference between the empty canvas or the saturated photograph, the image itself does not provide the modes of perception.
discussion has no relation to the transition of time in mediated form.Any mediated distortion of time solely indicates the transition of the temporal and spatial conditions of object/subject; namely, the artificial conversion of the here and now, into the everywhere and always.Media Media theorist Thomas Mitchell 40 goes straight to the heart of the discourse when he claims: 'Images are like living organisms; living organisms are best described as things that have desires (for example, appetites, needs, demands, drives); therefore, the question of what pictures want is inevitable.'Yet according to the initial premises, this argument lacks two essential elements; firstly, the issue of representation.Following Bennett, we would not need any comparison to a living body to deal with the question of the desire of matter, even without short-circuiting the matter-image in the Bergsonian sense.Building on the work of sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, 41 we could claim that under the social conditions of liquid modernity, a mediated state of affairs is the closest, if not the only, perceivable shape of veracity.Leaving the notion of pure trueness on a conceptual sheet, we could adopt media theorist Mark Deuze's 42 concept of a life lived not through, but in the media.In that condition, the alterity of all the physical is owned by our individual perception and subjective representation of neutrality, and the closest 'moment of objectivity' appearance as one of the avatars of kairos) stops unfolding out of aion.It is the moment before the causality of logic, consciousness and sense-making sets time in motion, before the transgression from the static universal to the dynamic individual.This is the moment of the fissure in The Eye of the Beholder .The asignifying sign is not only a sign, it is a conditionality which seems more likely to be composed in a highly saturated environment rather than in a low saturated field.The descriptions used here are mere reflections of the progression of time from the moment it transgressed from aion to chronos.Any shape of kairos stands to chronos, as an Euclidean space stands to a topological space.