Media Theory in Japan ed. by Marc Steinberg and Alexander Zahlten

Abstract

Reviewed by: Media Theory in Japan ed. by Marc Steinberg and Alexander Zahlten Hoyt Long (bio) Media Theory in Japan. Edited by Marc Steinberg and Alexander Zahlten. Duke University Press, Durham NC, 2017. xvi, 423 pages. $114.95, cloth; $30.95, paper; $28.95, E-book. When future cultural historians look back at this moment in humanistic inquiry, they will almost certainly point out its decisive "media turn." The genealogies of this turn will be traced to still earlier moments, whether the rise of postwar communication studies and catalyzing figures such as Marshall McLuhan; the deeply materialist strain of Freidrich Kittler's media archaeology; or the collapse of all media into "new media" through the common denominator of the digital screen, à la Lev Manovich. Wherever its origins are located, our current media turn will stand out as the moment when various past strains of media studies achieved critical mass in the North American academy, combining to form a common language legible across diverse fields and areas of study. As W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark Hansen declared in 2010, "We are, it seems, all practitioners of media studies, whether we recognize it or not."1 Media Theory in Japan, a set of essays originating in a film theory conference in 2012, reminds us that this is only more true today, highlighting in particular how far media studies as a new academic lingua franca has penetrated area studies. It also reminds us of all the ways this language remains a tower of babel. As it has risen in prominence, a fundamental concern of media studies has been how to delimit the study of media when all aspects of social and cultural interaction come to look mediated. Does one focus on media as an empirical and technological form? Does one look to the representational worlds that different media create? Or are media best viewed ontologically through the social relations they knit together and the knowledge formations they make possible? While not entirely independent, an emphasis on any one approach yields different insights and requires different methodologies to demarcate the horizons of interpretive possibility. This task of demarcation [End Page 490] is the first challenge that editors Marc Steinberg and Alexander Zahlten confront in their introduction. For them, the potentially infinite array of objects that media studies addresses is reframed as the twin problems of how media have been thought about over time (i.e., media theory) and how this knowledge is mediated by space, specifically the "technological, historical, institutional, and cultural practices that form the ground" (p. 3) of the space called Japan. Of primary concern are not media objects as they coconstitute the human condition but the thinking of media as itself an effect of shifting "medial conditions of production" (p. 7). That this volume will strictly be a meta-history of media is reinforced by the editors' warning that the essays "do not treat individual media as a set of channels or technologies to be covered each in turn. The reader will not find a procession of media commodities or institutions, from woodblock prints to newspaper to film to radio to film to video, and so on, each afforded a distinct chapter" (p. 25). Every book must choose a frame, and media theory certainly demands our attention as much as the study of media objects. The implication that the two frames do not belong together, however, is a curious one. The same media turn of which Media Theory in Japan is a part has also generated important new histories of channels and technologies, commodities and institutions, by Japan studies scholars, including monographs by Michael Bourdaghs (music), Seth Jacobowitz (stenography and writing), Thomas Lamarre (television), Paul Roquet (music and sound), Atsuko Sakaki (photography), and Kerim Yasar (sound). This is an equally lively, and equally theoretical, wing of the current media studies tower of babel. So why provisionally cordon it off? Or rather, what definition of "media theory" is proposed by this act of division, and what are its implications for the future study of media in Japan? While Steinberg and Zahlten frame the volume as a collective engagement with media as epistemology (albeit a materially conditioned one), the contributors address this...