MEDIA AS LIFE WORLD

I. MEDIA AS AUTOBIOGRAPHY

When speaking or writing about media we still tend to think in terms of channels to which sender and receiver are connected, a temptingly simple but inadequate definition. Current media theory proposes the "Gutenberg Galaxy" has run its course,that the electronic media itself has become the "message" and its forms are to be understood as "extensions of man"¹ Following Marshall McLuhan and considering the stunning developments of the "new media" theorists such as Neil Postman, media is analyzed not only as a metaphor and representation of knowledge, but as an activity, one shaping our social envoirment and subject to media ecology.² This shift in understanding necessitates a fundamental change in our relation to media, and in our thinking. Yet although the distinctions between reality and imagination, truth and fantasy seem to vanish, and the acceptance of media as an authentic lifeworld the next step, media theory is still reluctant to face this consequence. Signification, representation, the ideology of an independent reality as the measure of truth — these are compelling and long-held presuppositions not easily cast aside.

A phenomenological view, however, allows us to skip over the question of whether the world of new media is real or not and instead describe how the new media shows itself to us. We then become aware of the seductive intensity, the speedy flow, and the open audio-visual textuality with which music videos, for example, "blur previously distinct separations and boundaries, such as those between popular and avant©garde art, between different genres and artistic modes, between past,present and future".³ Artistic media have long been considered as possessing a reality of their own, and the artist's work is often viewed as autobiography. In the new media of cinema⁴ the trend toward self-potrayal is perhaps most obvious. Phenomenologically, such 'writing' of one's life in media reveals its structure as an in-between which is neither subjective nor objective. It fulfills an intentionality which transforms 'objective' material and 'subjective' goals into a living process. A lifeworld is commonly "lived through"⁵ silently, the need to acknowledge is largely unfelt; in the case of mass media however only we can be held responsible for its superficiality. The model of nature with its self-evident presence is replaced by the model of technology which has to constantly give evidence and defend its presence anew.

In the technological age we can not simply live our lives, we have to write — and rewrite — them, or others will do it for us. Having been changed into this autobiographical 'writing', communication can now be defined as authentic, as a responsible style of media. The difference between the "life lived through" and the world of media is still a sharp one in terms of perception, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty indicates,⁶ but is an abstraction in terms of intersubjectivity as the basis of communication. In a lifeworld shaped by technology we consider as humane that for which we as artificial beings can and must take reponsibility.⁷ That society and mass media usually live our lives for us is entirely our own fault and not due to any flaw in the structure of these modes of our existence. We are, by nature, the artificial ones; rejecting our artificiality for a more 'natural' mode of being is a naive denial of our potential as well. Consequently our search need be for the authentic mode of artificiality. The artificial lifeworld created by us in the new media is of itself a fulfillment of humanness — a frightening outlook if one regards American prime time televesion as an example.

II. MUSIC VIDEOS: FROM YOUTH CULTURE TO ARTIFICIAL LIFE

McLuhan's pragmatic children use music videos as their "own comfy space" and as a "radio station for the eyes",⁸ enjoying the pleasure and magic of their youth culture. With the start of 24™hour cable MTV in 1981, music videos became the life style of an entire generation. Dweezil Zapa, the gifted son of a famous father "watches hours of MTV every day",⁹ and he is neither uneducated nor unemployed. MTV alone plays 75-110 clips a week, each with a life span of 9-18 weeks; other channels (Black entertainment Television, to name just one) add to this number. Performers like Michael Jackson and Madonna have attained a personal iconographic power apparent on any street.

In the eyes of one shocked admirer of Plato, the "ambition" of these young people seems to be "to win fame and wealth in imitating the drag queen who makes the music". Professor Bloom denounces music videos for turning life into " a nonstop, comercially prepackaged, masturbational fantasy".¹⁰ And Kuan Hsing Chan, an observer even more knowledgeable in video culture shows deep concern when he writes: "If ecstasy of communication, fascination, desire, schizophrenic corruption of temporality and spatiality, obscenity (of sexuality), collage, quotation, fragmentation and non-unity are the key terms to describe MTV, then we have moved from the question of 'what does it mean' to 'what does it do?'"¹¹

Since music videos are at the core of todays youth culture, such harsh reaction to their seeming corruptive influence is predictable. Every youth culture antagonizes mainstream culture, criticizes the parent generation, and develops its own language and gestures, invents its own style and idols. Undeterred by the intended shock effect of the new and unfamiliar, by the strangeness of certain appearances, a phenomenological approach will continue asking how the phenomenon of music videos shows itself to us, as long as it remains unknown. It should be noted that music videos are appreciated outside the youth culture as well. Station VH-1, for instance, is geared specifically to adult audience. Music television is one of the few media hybrids interactively using other telecommunications media and live events for two-way communication in order to spark imagination and interest of its viewers. These channels are continually re-evaluating and re-defining themselves, and in so doing retain the vitality of the avant-garde.

III. INNOVATIONSIN COMMUNICATION: THE PHENOMENON OF MUSIC VIDEO

Music Videos are made for nearly every single released today and have become a major force in the music market. The leading channel MTV reaches 36 million people. Music videos have influenced, changed, colonized, cannibalized, and merged other types of media. And the viewer has become a collaborator. Music television seeks the constant feedback of its audience, altering its programming accordingly. Music videos seem to be a postmodern response to Richard Wagner's "Gesamtkunstwerk", the attemp to unite the arts in the grand opera. Though music videos are only 'operetta' they should not be underestimated: there is no question that this new medium is here to stay. Michael Jackson's recent 17-minute video "Bad", directed by none other than Martin Scorcese, is a clear indication that music videos are about to break out of their rigid format.

A phenomenological awareness is less interested in the content of the music video — decisive is rather the way it manifests itself. That many music videos represent "male street culture, social rebelliousness, and fantasies of female conquest",¹² and that there is an answer from a "female culture" is not our concern here. Music videos are clearly an integral part of contemporary youth culture and for this reason alone an interesting field of research for both sociologists and semiologists. Nonetheless, our line of questioning will be the inovations in communication which music videos indicate apart from and beyond their role in youth culture, changes in the way we communicate with ourselves and with one another. This development is by no means restricted to music videos. But perhaps most visible in music videos — or perhaps they are simply the most fun to analyze! Their colorful and anarchistic texture, filled with shock images, their visual variety and ability to cut through clutter stimulates a sense of creativity too often missing in the technological life world.

Before we consider the phenomenon of music videos in detail, I would like to stress the point that music videos belong to cinema and its aesthetics. The movement-image is, according to Deleuze, the basic unit of the cinematic discourse. This unit, a totality encompassing time and space not only makes the difference of opposing entities clear, it also allows them to be experienced as separate and distinct yet belonging to the whole. The movement image, as a process, does not destroy the identity of the cinema, of movement and image. In the mode of unity the instant and the whole, immobility and change, self-awareness and a sense of the other are experienced in their discretness as two differing and dialectically joined moments and, precisely through this relation, in their oneness. The cinematic movement-image gives us together and as one unit both the instant (i.e. the smallest perceptual unit of the shot) and the whole (which is our sense of change, flow, and duration).¹³

The music video is grounded in this a-centered unity of the movement-image which allows us a communication in-between. The characteristic modi of such communication are manifest in the music videos and can be understood as creation of a life world in which mediation becomes the reality. Our music video examples will include performance clips as well as concept clips. We shall be viewing two iconographic videos in which the performer is spotlighted: Prince's "You've got the look" and Michael Jackson's "Bad". Both pieces are edited, but you need to see only a few minutes to get the point; the details deserve our attention. In their shortness and compactness music videos reveal a structure often similar to that of a poem. Viewed in its entirety the concept clip "Dear God" from XTC offers a unique opportunity to find out how the problem of theodicy has changed since the time of Leibniz.

Let us now examine music videos within the modern structural perspectives of time, space, matter, language, person, and truth in relation to their postmodern counterparts of presencing, rupture, hyperreality, writing, happening, and exposure.

1. FROM TIME TO PRESENCING
Time in music videos is created by cutting and montage. At first glance, performence clips seem to deal with real time, and concept clips to have more freedom in time disruption.¹⁴ But how do music videos generate a sense of time? The rhythm, the pulsating beat, constitutive of most music videos, defines time. The driving, unrelenting beat, whether of sound and/or the visual beat marked by the rapidity of the image's movement, creates a time without past and future.The " reign of the presence"¹⁵ is obvious and total. Even quotation of the past as Madonna's "Who's that Girl?' is merely material for an overwhelming universal coexistence, a time process of pure moments which could be called presencing.

The power of this presencing in music videos literally wipes out the sense of space. The stage character of the environment makes space appear artificial and interchangeable. The idea of progress which can create space has been abandoned in music videos. The beat, the gestures, the drive may still be rebellious but ultimately go nowhere. Prince's cruising and Michael Jackson's "loose — limbed prowess" demonstrate a stunning formalization of street rap, the art of movement without moving, a flowing with the beat in stillness. XTC's "Dear God" may seem to be narrative in composition and have a beginning and an end, but this impression is contradicted by the video's surrealistic elements. What we have is the presence of a nightmare without end and a narrative continuing on like a broken disk.

2. THE ABSENCE OF SPACE: RUPTURE AND DECENTRALIZATION
A sense of space provides security and helps satisfy our desire to determine our place in the world. Merleau-Ponty points out that space is the distance between the body and the objects which create our own sphere.¹⁶ Emotional distance allows us the experience of being the center. In music videos space is present in absence only, as rupture and decentralization. Immediate access to emotions and images destroys any sense of personal. Behavioral as well as spatial scope have diminshed. The "global village" realizes the end of distance: where barriers have fallen there can be no space. And the ruthless use of even the most expressive symbols has forgotten space. Rupture, experienced through distortion, need not be spectacular, as in heavy metal videos, it can be achieved through subtle changes, all the more effective. The video "Dear God " goes out of tune; this is effected by (a) varying shutter speed, (b) reversing tape direction, and (c) varying playback speed. Relevant to disorientation, Deleuze notes the viewer of cinema is acentered, lacking a fixed point of view. Technical manipulation in music videos and a "floating" viewer together create the rupture of personal space and a spreading out of presence. Temporality has become ever more important, incorporating all that which has formerly the realm of spatiality.

3. THE PERCEIVED WORLD: MATTER AS HYPEREALITY
The slant of distortion is how music videos perceive our being™in-the-world, but this is not a pessimistic view. In fact it reveals a multiperspectivity which gives us more authentic world than the fake narratives of print media and television. The layerings in the beginning of Prince's video create, by superimposition of different perspectives, hyperreality which is according to Merleau-Ponty more real than reality. Out of Michael Jackson's rumble dance on stage of a New York subway platform in which film, music and dance are equally balanced, emerges a coherence in dissonance which is the material side of most music videos. Even "Dear God" is a realistic look-alike, only to turn surrealistic after a few moments.

4. WRITING THE DIFFERENCES OF LANGUAGES
Music videos can be viewed as an example of Jaques Derrida's criticism of our traditional logocentrism with its predominance of the verbal language. The lyrics are composed of jokes and puns, intending to be self ridiculing and confusing. Difference, not identity, is at stake. The equality of verbal, visual, audio, and body language breaks the spell of meaning and reveals the whole of language which is beyond our instrumental grasp. Disconnection, distortion in pitch, and contradiction are on all levels the movens/ stimuli.

Critics have attacked the non-narrative structure of music videos as impotent, unable to create an authentic lifeworld, and as an escape into the abstract. But the fact is that STOP MAKING SENSE creates a life world in its own right experienced and shared by millions who view music videos. Michael Jackson has been accused of "evading reality" and seeking an "occult solution",¹⁷ but his streetwise dialogue is meant to overcome a ghetto reality by stylization. This creates an artificial lifeworld in which communication is split and re-split in an interchange rather than the writing of differences, the play of non-elimination, and changes in perspectives are needed in a lifeworld shaped by the violence of identity.¹⁸

Even the concept videos which have a message do not usually preach it, as we can see in "Dear God"; it is not a straight forward theodicy, but a tricky process of thinking without abstraction.

5. ICONS, PERSONS, AND LIFE HAPPENING
Commonly understood, a person is defined as a certain life history, developing an identity in an intersubjective communication. Perhaps the most startling observation in music videos is that despite the personal iconographic power of the performers, the process of identification is not encouraged. This is not to say that there is no strong business interest in repeating the hero identification attributed to youth culture. The popularity of the "Madonna Style" was notorious and visible through the USA.¹⁹ But there are some significant differences worth noting. Icons such as David Bowie, Prince, Michael Jackson, attempt to diffuse their role model and obliterate (to some extent) race, sex, and age. Icons celebrate the bad and ugly, scorning the dictates of a traditional aesthetic. Michael Jackson looks very much like a yelling women! Involvement in a peer group becomes non-personal; it is no longer an interpersonal but an interfunctional relation, an interchange of performer, viewer, producer, engineer. Music videos suggest a life as life happening, and the icons offer keys to this lifeworld of music videos much closer to art than to so-called reality, that which we conceive to be reality. Make it happen, let it happen! Without history, without future, without present, only happenings exist.

6. THE EXPOSURE OF TRUTH
The play of the revealed and the unrevealed (and the never to be revealed) is the play of truth as disclosure, according to Heidegger.²⁰ Music videos do not intend to be true, and in their elusive concreteness reveal what a direct approach would miss. When our interpretational models of meaning disappear quite a different view of things open up to us. Music videos expose a lifeworld which already exists but is still hidden from a knowledge which knows too much. Does this mean Michael Jackson is exposing the bad as a fundamental, Prince the ambiguity of appearance, and XTC the absurdity of the human condition? Much too simple. Music videos can not be utilised for meaningful messages. The creative how is the "message". Music videos offer an exciting example of a concrete comprehension and critical thinking of a kind which leads to discovery not meaning. Amazement and wonder are not eliminated from this process, on the contrary, they are "traces"(Derrida) of and toward a world on the horizon of technology.

IV. CONCLUSIONS

Should mankind live to see its future (which is not very likely) music videos can be considered as the first hints of a lifeworld shaped by the conditions of a fully developed technology. We pride ourselves on our state-of-art technologies, blind to the actual primitiveness of these advancements. Present technology is still in its earliest development stages. The high technology of coming generations is a self-evident life technology functioning as naturally and imperceptibly as the techniques of breathing and walking. Outwardly this technological world organized by a computer society, urban living, automated production, genetically engineered organisms, etc. will appear much more the same as our world today. But the human attitude will be totally different. That which compells us to live in unrecognition, as instruments, that which makes our life inhuman, can by the same token develop our authentic human potential, given the opertunity to enfold within a non-instrumental manner of living. Human beings will be considered — as were the ancient greeks — to be able to assume responsibility for their "bios" and act free as artists, whatever their work may actually be. This life would be a truely artificial life and the fulfillment of humanity. This life style will be characterized by a wider range of life techniques which we cannot yet imagine — but it is likely that music videos will expose to us some of the future modes of living. Like Moses, we shall never set foot in that promised land, but music videos, although only an accompanying phenomenon of contemporary life, give us a strobe-light glimpse of a lifeworld already here but not ours.

Notes

• ¹ Marshall McLuhan: îUnderstanding Media. New York : Signet books 1964.
  
• ² Neil Postman: Amusing Ourselves to Death. New York: Viking Books, 1985.
  
• ³ E.Ann Kaplan: "History, the Historical Spectator and Gender Address", in : Music Television. Journal of Communication Inquiry, Winter 1980(10/1), p.6.
  
• ⁴ This term is used to describe the unity of film, television, music, photography, and video. Cf. Gilles Deleuze: Cinema 1,Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,1986, chap 4.
  
• ⁵ Maurice Merleau-Ponty : Phenomenology of Preception, trans. Colin Smith, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962.
  
• ⁶ Maurice Merleau-Ponty : "Film and the New Psychology", in:Sense and non-Sense, ed. Dreyfus, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964, p.48ff.
  
• ⁷ Carl Mitcham: "Responsibility and Technology: The Expanding Relationship", in: Technology and Resposibility, ed.Paul Durbin,Dordrecht: Reidel, 1987, p. 5-39 ; cf. now: Wolfgang Schirmacher: "Homo Generator: The Challenge of Gene Technology", in the same volume, p. 203-205.
  
• ⁸ Barry Walters: "Like it or Not : MTV Lives", in: The Village Voice, June 2, 1987, p.39.
  
• ⁹ US, March 9, 1987, p.54.
  
• ¹⁰ Allan Bloom: The Closing of the American Mind, New York:Simon & Schuster, 1987.
  
• ¹¹ Kuan-Hsing Cheng: "MTV: The (Dis)Appearance of Postmodern Semiosis, or the Cultural Politics of Resistance", in: Journal of Communication Inquiry, Winter 1986 (10/1), p.66
  
• ¹² Lisa A. Lewis: "Female Address in Music Videos", in: Journal of Communication Inquiry, Winter 1987 (11/1), p.74.
  
• ¹³ Cf. Deleuze : Cinema 1, op. cit.
  
• ¹⁴ Cf. B. Walters: "Like it or Not: MTV lives", op. cit.
  
• ¹⁵ David J. Tetzlaff: "MTV and the Politics of Postmodern Pop", in: Journal of Communication Inquiry, Winter 1986 (10/1), p.83.
  
• ¹⁶ Cf. Merleau-Ponty: "Film and the New Psychology", op. cit.
  
• ¹⁷ Stephan Holden: "The Dark Side of Peter Pan", in: The New YorkTimes, Sunday, Sept. 13, 1987 (Pop View).
  
• ¹⁸ Jaques Derrida: Margins of Philosophy, ed. A. Bass, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982, p.3f.
  
• ¹⁹ Lewis, op. cit.,p.80.
  
• ²⁰ Martin Heidegger: " The Turning", in: Heidegger: The Question Concerning Technology, trans. William Lovitt, New York: Harper & Row, 1977, p. 36-49.
  

My special thanks to Carol Froehlich, Producer, BMG New York, for her assistance in the selection and editing of music videos discussed in this paper.