CHAPTER 1

LOVE OF THE MIDDLE

Alexander R. Galloway

On July 7, 1688, Irish scientist William Molyneux sent a letter tohis friend the philosopher John Locke in which he proposedthe following hypothetical scenario. Consider a man, blindfrom birth, who knows the shapes of spheres, cubes, and otherobjects, but being blind only knows them via his sense of touch.If the blind man were suddenly given sight, would he be able toidentify and distinguish between these same spheres and cubesby vision alone?

Known today as Molyneux's Problem, the thought experimentwas one of the central philosophical problems of its time.Any number of thinkers proffered solutions to the problem,from G. W. Leibniz, Voltaire, and Denis Diderot, to Hermann vonHelmholtz and William James. Molyneux's problem was socompelling at the time, and indeed still resonates today, becauseit addresses key questions in mediation, aesthetics, and the sciencesof perception, and in what would become psychophysicsand cognitive science.

While ostensibly a thought experiment about the cognitiverelation between different modes of perception, in this case tactileand visual perception, Molyneux's Problem also speaks togreater issues within the Western tradition. Indeed Molyneux'sProblem is so compelling because it is, at root, the great allegoryof Greek philosophy. What role will vision play in the organizationof the faculties? Can knowledge be gained simply by gainingsight? Is the path of philosophy the path that leads to enlightenment,and if so what role do light and vision play in sucha revelation? In a certain sense, Molyneux's Problem is not unlikethe cave of shadows and the path to light and knowledge describedin Plato's Republic. Just as Plato's pupil must wrestle withthe murkiness of false knowledge and the hope of higher cognitionunified by the light, Molyneux's blind man must determineif and how his newfound sensory ability will aid the communicativeinterplay between self and world.

Author of the Dioptrica Nova (1692), Molyneux helped establishthe modern science of optics, and in particular theseventeenth-century conception of visuality as translucence, asopposed to today's notion that visuality is largely a question ofopaque surfaces like screens or images. Indeed the story of theblind man who learns to see, only to face the risk of being unableto assimilate his visions and thus being dazzled by that verylight, shows the importance of dioptrics in particular (the divisionof optics concerned with light passing through materials)and of optics in general, both as a science but also as a metaphorfor what enlightenment man might be.

A few years earlier, in the 1670s, Spinoza wrote his own allegoricaltale of transformation. It comes near the end of the Ethics,and we might assign it a name, Spinoza's Poet.

Sometimes a man undergoes such changes that I should hardlyhave said he was the same man. I have heard stories, for example,of a Spanish Poet who suffered an illness; though he recovered,he was left so oblivious to his past life that he did not believe thetales and tragedies he had written were his own. He could surelyhave been taken for a grown-up infant if he had also forgotten hisnative language.

Himself a master craftsman in the dioptric sciences, Spinozauses his poet to illustrate a very different kind of illumination.His is a light lost in the shadows. It points not to the Republic butto the Phaedrus, the Platonic dialogue in which Socrates notesthe inferiority of writing to pure thought. Writing is an image ofspeech, Socrates explains, and therefore an image of the self onceremoved. As a mediation of speech, writing is thus something ofa problem for the Platonic tradition. Following Plato, BernardStiegler calls this the problem of hypomnesis, that is, the problemof the translation of memory into physical media supports.With a "grown-up infant" who can no longer speak because he hasforgotten his language, Spinoza gives a play on words. The Latininfans means the non-speaking, from a negation of the deponentverb fari, to be speaking. In this sense, media threaten to renderus speechless, turning us into grown-up infants. The poet'slight is a dark cloud within the self, pure opacity in a forgettingof media.

Each story deals with mediation, and each contains a metamorphosisof the communicative faculties. One is the story ofreason acquired, the other of reason lost. Spinoza's Poet experiencesa collapse into oblivion (lethe), while Molyneux's Seerexperiences a newfound revealing of the world through reasonand sight (logos). The one is about the truth of one's ownMuse, one's own memories. The other is about the journey outof chthonic knowledge (through tactile feeling) and coming toknow reason. Ultimately they represent two competing assessmentsof seventeenth-century modernity.

The risk to Molyneux's Seer is that he will be dazzled by vision,his sense of sight uncorrelated to his sense of touch; the riskto Spinoza's Poet is that he will slip into the psychosis of amnesia,his own expressions effaced and banished from consciousmemory.

If Molyneux's Problem is a modern reinterpretation of Plato'scave, which is to say an allegory about learning to recognizethe world through a reorganization and cultivation of thecognitive faculties, Spinoza's Poet is an anti-cave, a story aboutunlearning and forgetting what one already knows. Spinoza'sPoet is the story of oblivion gained (lethe) instead of oblivion lost(aletheia). Not quite "the death of the author," nevertheless thepoet in Spinoza produces works that he can no longer recognize.It is the ultimate revenge of one's own literary production, theultimate excommunication, the ultimate betrayal by media.

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The goal of this chapter is to tell a story about mediation, to determinea few facts as anchor points along the way, then to makean argument about a very particular transformation in the historicalarrangement of media.

Many will say that mediation is of a single kind, for examplethe single kind of mediation evident in Spinoza's Poet. To somethis single mode of mediation appears sufficient, for it capturesthe basic paradox of media, that the more we extend our mindsinto the world the more we risk being alienated from it.

Others will ratify the single kind, but complement it witha second kind: Spinoza's Poet together with Molyneux's Seer.Again, the two appear sufficient. For every danger of alienationand obfuscation there exists the counterbalance of cultivationand clarity. Even if a person loses his or her communicative faculties,there is the hope that the person will gain them again. Ifthe world falls dark, it will soon grow light.

But there is not simply one kind of mediation. Nor is theproblem solved by adding an auxiliary mode to...