New media research has been subjected to a large number of adopted terminology and neologisms with inadequate results in developing a critical vocabulary and identity of this discipline. This is usually interpreted as an inability of scholars to deal with the ever growing numbers of artifacts produced by new media and phenomena related to the field of new media studies. What often remains ignored is the strange inclination of this terminology towards philosophy and a more elaborate analysis of what is exactly denoted by the expression “new phenomena”.

For some reason, contemporary continental philosophy has a prominent position in new media studies. Other attempts to apply methodologies of established disciplines like Media Studies, Information Science or Social Sciences are generally marginalized. What does this, in many respects unfulfilled, affair between philosophy and technology, mean? By exploring the problematic aspect of this relation often described in terms of postmodern fashion we hope to show it reflects an important attribute of new media writing and not only a trend.

The philosophy often acts as a “genius malignus” for new media theory and its search for methodology. It is “an exceedingly deceitful demon” because it is potent in concepts and constructions that have seduced many of new media theories into techno-optimist illusions and dreams that “laid snares for its credulity”. The same genius, however, leads the new media research into an important discovery that the certainty of “I think therefore I am” and every other philosophical concept should be traversed into the creativity of “I invent, therefore I am”. This metaphorically expresses the main attribute of new media methodology as a performative endeavor. The distance between writing (representation) and its object or between the discourse and the event (emergent technology) simply dissolves in the case of new media research into artistic experiments with writing.

I. Performative Methodology
Philosophy lacks methodology in strict sense because it is a creator of the quest for method and its goal is to keep this position and the ability to bring new types of questions, or to question in unexpected ways. To pose new questions is like to invent a new medium through which different experiences and language games become possible. Philosophy is always a philosophy of “new media” because it constantly searches for new means of expression that will adequately render new phenomena. Philosophical idiolects as well as emergent technologies reinterpret our common experience of the world in new ways and redefine our use of language and other means of communication and interaction. This reinterpretation and experiments should be understood in terms of translation between different languages, disciplines and domains of experience.

Translation is for many reasons a paradigmatic case of the search for new expressions. It is also a very promising metaphor for new media writing, referring to the limits of representation as the limits of our language encountering another language or communication system that is never homogenous. Translation is always an event which exposes both the heterogeneity and homogeneity of languages or systems that encounter each other. The critical engagements of new technologies is like a translation from a newly acquired language that we are still learning and there is no previous tradition of translations. New technologies then challenge our ability to represent them, and force us to invent a new medium of expression by testing the limits of our available languages. These limits of presentation and/or translatability are frequently manifested as a certain self-reflectivity of the medium testing its own limits or as different paradoxes described in this paper as a performativity of writing and language in new media research and philosophy.

Similar problems of unrepresentable (untranslatable) processes, events or technological innovations lay in the background of many discussions in new media theory and determine its theoretical aspirations. Developed in different terms, they reveal an important strategy of overcoming the distance between writing (speaking) and its object in the act of writing itself, a strategy also typical for contemporary philosophy. It is often ambiguous whether this is simply an indication of the unstable object that is difficult to represent or a manifestation of the self-reflective character of the medium itself and exactly how these phenomena are related.

An interesting example of such strategy and discussion in philosophy is the Kantian concept of the sublime and the Lyotard’s analysis of it in relation to the avant-garde movements and postmodernism. While in the case of Kant the concept of the sublime refers to the self reflection and supremacy of our mind (“The Medium”), Lyotard interprets it in the context of the unrepresentable in presentation, a phenomenon typical of avant-garde art and postmodernism (and example of unstable object). The sublime in the context of Kant’s third Critic of Judgment can not be found in nature nor it is a property of some object, but it is property of ourselves, our reason:

Therefore the feeling of the sublime in nature is respect for our own vocation, which we attribute to an object of nature by a certain subreption (substitution of a respect for the object in place of one for the idea of humanity in our own self-the subject); and this feeling renders, as it were, intuitable the supremacy of our cognitive faculties on the rational side over the greatest faculty of sensibility.
(“The Critique of Judgement”: SS 27. Quality of the delight in our estimate of the sublime)

The sublime is the self reflective moment of our humanity and mind, in which the pure reason reveals itself through an act of excess and violation of the boundaries of our imagination and language. The “object” of the sublime can never be exhibited adequately, but it is aroused by the exhibition of inadequacy of exhibition. This is emphasized by Lyotard in his Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime and interpreted as a creativity of the critical thinking that is never determined by any principles but exists as a process of constant search for them.

In similar paradoxical and self-reflective manner the “language” of new media explores its limitations when facing the creativity of technological innovations. We could assume that writing about new media represents a certain type of technological sublimity corresponding to the sublimity in art. In the view of Lyotard’s , postmodernism and avant-garde art are characterized by the same respect for the unpresentable in the representation, for the “unattainable”, that opens a space of infinite creativity. Certain texts, artworks, and we can add to it technologies, are simply not ruled by pre-given concepts but they have a status of events and experiments that search for new rules and concepts. These rules and categories are formulated only after the work is done, a situation that Lyotard describes as a paradox of the future anterior:

A postmodern artist or writer is in the position of the philosopher: the text he writes, the work he produces are not in principle governed by preestablished rules, and they cannot be judged according to a determining judgment, by applying familiar categories to the text or to the work. Those rules and categories are what the work of art itself is looking for... Hence the fact that work and text have the characters of an event; hence also, they always come to late for their author, or, what amounts to the same thing, their being put to work, their realization (mise en oeuvre) always begin to soon. Postmodern would have to be understood according to the paradox of the future (post) anterior (modo).
(Lyotard, 81)

Paradoxes of the future anterior or the sublime are only examples of an important strategy in contemporary philosophy to overcome the distance between the discourse and its object often understood as a singularity, becoming, new entity etc.. It illustrates the creative potential of the language or other system of presentation to convey new meanings and to open a space for new engagements with the “object”. The question of methodology in new media writing and in contemporary philosophy is for this reasons a question of how to identify and how to do justice to creativity and becoming. We could call it a performative methodology because its intentions is to show and even create rather that simply describe. There are many other instances of similar performative methodology in contemporary philosophy: the deconstructive writing of Jacques Derrida, attempts for ontology of the event and unoriginal heterogeneity by Andrew Benjamin, different Deleuzian anti-representational concepts and rhizomatic structure of the emergence of events and individuations, similar concepts in Walter Benjamin etc.

For further illustrations of the performative strategy we can also use the important example of contemporary “methodology”: deconstruction and the “Derridean writing” in general. The so called “deconstructive” approach to philosophical writing by Jacques Derrida is a typical example of argumentative structure becoming a performative gesture in order to address the question and event of singularity and alterity. The artistic and experimental texts like Glas or Postcards break down the division between saying and showing (doing), between the use and the mentioning of the words. Writing and reading become singular events and not simple explanations of what is singularity. This makes these texts unpredictable and open to heterogeneous items and issues, that we can call invention and creativity in the case of new media phenomena.

What is important to point out in these examples is the strange performativity of the language and reflection that identifies something by showing its inability to identify it or by “performing” it in the language (medium) itself. In the context of new media research this performativity has a special meaning since the ultimate example of language performativity are the programming languages and the codes that use signs to produce effects. Language understood as a code rather than a transparent medium always induces experiments and events that break down certain common division between the purely “conceptual” and the “ontological”, between the meaning and acts, the spirit and the matter, the artificial and the natural etc. Computers and new media are the ultimate machines of language performativity, language experiments and paradoxes. New media writing actually uses language (philosophy) in the same manner as computers do it, as programming instructions or codes that in algorithms produce different effects and make new software.

We could conclude on this point, that new media research never simply applies methodology to present given facts because it is an exercise in the limits of our ability to comprehend when encountering new technologies and translate it into more common systems of representation. The technologies as a creative and emergent phenomena always pose a challenge to the traditional ways of presentation, the result of which structures like “future anterior”, “mise en abyme”, “structural phenomenon”, “ontology of an event” and other hybrids and transgressions in our language become visible. The performative methodology is a double move in which we expose the old systems of signification through self-reflectivity and build new precedences through paradoxes. This means much more than only a description or a clarification that reduces new entities to already given systems of presentation and meaning. The objective here seems to be to build a new medium of presentation, a new language enhanced by the contact and the effort to translate something foreign.

II. New Media of Philosophy or Philosophy of New Media?
Lunenfeld’s and Manovich’s performative terminology

The subject of new media research has simply a status of an event, a process, and writing about events, processes and emergent phenomena is challenging for new media theory as much as for contemporary philosophy. The much criticized lack of methodology and its promiscuous symptoms in new media theory, reflect its focus on the limits of our language and its ability to deal with emergent phenomena. This is manifested through various types of performative strategies that are typical for new media writing as well as for philosophy. Writing becomes an experiment that explores the relation between theory and practice, interpretation and performance, structure and genesis and ultimately philosophy and technology.

For this reason it is often hard to decide whether the theories are trying to invent a new medium of “philosophizing” or really looking for a new philosophy that will answer the challenges of new media.When we take for example Lunenfeld’s method of digital dialectic we can see how both of these intentions often blend together. Here the emergent phenomena of technology are developed in terms of interdependence between the dialectic and the digital, synonymous to the relation between theory and practice. Lunenfeld’s method tries to overcome the distance between theory (philosophy) and practice (technology) by reinterpreting the meaning of what is digital and dialectic.

The main goal of this method is not to fall prey to the so called “techno Utopian discourses”. To describe these dangerous discourses, Lunenfeld employs phrase like “hyped” (Lunenfeld, xiv) “sciencefictionalized” (Lunenfeld, xix) “amateur futurism” (Lunenfeld, xix), “rosy metanarratives” (Lunenfeld, xviii), “technical arcanum turned journalistic cliche” (Lunenfeld, 2) etc.. The main weakness of this approach is that it is fantasizing about the implications of new technologies instead of analyzing their present phase and most importantly the unexpected questions and challenges that the present always pose. This distinction is not as banal as it may sound, because it acknowledges that the proper discourse on new technologies is always in a state of “becoming” (connected to the present) and it should not be mistaken for discourses on the future and Utopia that hypostatize certain old topics and hopes: immortality, possibility of purely spiritual existence (virtuality).

While the proper discourse on new technologies is a risky and an open project, these Utopian theories only build a “teleology for the digital age” (Lunenfeld, xviii) and search for transcendental entities like “fully immersive virtual realities” that ultimately ignore the unstable but innovative character of new media. Lunenfeld is willing to admit that it is hard to resist these “redemptive” and “nurturing” motivations of every analysis of new media but such motivations should not stay in our way. To write about new technologies simply means to overcome teleology by constantly facing the limitations of new technologies. It is a confrontation of our theories and concepts with the current practice not an eschatology of the digital revelation.

This position is further described by Lunenfeld as “grounding the insights of theory in the constraints of practice” (Lunenfeld, xv), a constant process with temporal results. Like in other similar definitions2 the method of digital dialectic presents a clear example of a conflict between the medium and its object as a basis of successful inquiry into the new phenomena. We have to invent a new medium of philosophizing by confronting our given theories with the possibilities of new media. These confrontations have a positive effects not only for our understanding of new technologies but also for understanding the limits of our theories.

The new method and a phrase “digital dialectic” expresses this search with the help of a paradox. While the “dialectic” points to the repetitive confrontation of opposite views (theories), the “digital” has a very specific sense of the constantly changing present that overcomes the teleological limitations of the dialectic. “Digital dialectic” is a self-reflective phrase that does what it states even in the case of its own name. Bringing together these two terms means confronting the historical context of the dialectic method (or other theory) with the digital and unstable character of new technologies. This confrontation is the core of Lunenfeld’s method that shows itself even through the choice of a phrase. The process (method) and the theory (name, phrase) merge in this confrontation and present an example of the performative strategy in new media writing.

In the case of “digital dialectics” there is an important consequence on our understanding of new technologies. Digital media are actually something like embodiments of the non-teleological dialectic. They prove that the dialectic does not need to have an end or even a goal as in the case of the traditional use of this word in the context of Hegel and Marx. This is an important point that Lunenfeld makes because it shows that not only philosophy affects how we think about new media but also media influence the choice and the definition of some concepts and theories we are trying to employ. Non-teleological dialectic is a synonym of the “digital dialectic” and the new digital technologies itself. It interprets the dialectical synthesis not as an end but only as the “regeneration of the system” (Lunenfeld’s definition of the digital in opposition to the dialectic):

Capable of indicating two possible states or conditions - “0” or “1” or “off” or “on” - the binary mode of cybernetic calculation might appear to resemble this duality, which is, in essence, the dualism of thesis and antithesis. Resemblance is not identity here, however, and conflating the digital with the dialectic is a mistake. On the digital frontier, the endless alternation of off/on, a system of closed and open switches, never generates a true synthesis; it merely impels the regeneration of the system.
(Lunenfeld, xviii)

When we take into account this comparison of the digital and the dialectic and the reinterpretation of the teleological process of dialectical opposition into a neutral switching of the binary mode, we can fully grasp the potential of Lunenfeld’s method. The digital dialectical as a method breaks down the difference between the philosophy and technology. It does not exist as a theory if it is not applied on something concrete and the concrete cases give new sense to the used terminology. Philosophy is understood more like a methodological machine that constantly “regenerates the system”, the state of affairs between theory and practice, concepts and events in a given time. Such a machine simply grabs everything accessible at the time about the given topic and simply confronts all theories, facts and discourses, the whole range of phenomena, and plays them one against another to see what survives in this tour de force of eclecticism. This is also the context in which we should understand another important metaphor of the “screen grab” operation that serves as an introduction of the digital dialectic as well as any other initial phase of the future research.

The hybridized and interdisciplinary character of discourses on new media have a very similar effect to this capturing of the image on the monitor in a certain moment. In the same way new media theories capture the available discourses and facts that are present.

To make screen shots means to immerse ourselves into the present and expose ourselves to all its ambiguities and conflicts. Lunenfeld understands this as a dialectical move in which “reversals are not simply expected but required” (Lunenfeld, xv). In the course of doing this a very important characteristic of such a confrontation of theory and practice, and writing and technology occurs. There is no end to it and the works always remain unfinished, able to change with the advent of new ideas and new practice, method of investigation and writing. The method does not really server to explain the becoming and the emergent phenomenon of new technologies but it definitely leaves space for it to happen and tries to perform it in the writing or the choice of phrases itself. Phrases like “digital dialectic” or “screen grab” are performative expressions in new media theory and not only descriptions.

Another case in which we will show similar performative methodology is the attempt to develop a critical language of new media by Lev Manovich. To trace such self reflective structures in the case of his methods of “archeology”, “theory of the present” and “digital materialism” may sound surprising because he rarely makes references to postmodern philosophy. This makes his writing more interesting, since it shows that the tendency to involve paradoxes as a critical tool are immanent in new media writing. Attempts to “present the unrepresentable” and to define the language of emergent phenomena like interfaces, databases, computer animation also lead to cases of “argument - performance” and concepts that imitate processes. All these experiments enhance our experience of reading and make it less mechanical. Reading simply becomes an encounter with these phenomena, because language ceases to be an analogue medium of more or less transparent character but becomes digital and infinitely translatable, so that representation merges with simulation as Manovich would describe it in the case of the digital film when compared to recorded and representational film.

In the case of Manovich’s book The Language of New Media these performative structures are present on the level of terminological distinctions he makes: signal versus object (132), data versus algorithm (221), database versus narrative (149), representational technologies and real-time communication technologies (162); as well as on the level of metaphors he employs to structure his book and goals: Vertov’s kino-eye (243, 308), the metaphor of computer program (11) and open source software (333). The functions of these terminological distinctions in the text is the same as in their own context: they convert the representational mode of entities such as objects, data, databases into a real time activities and processes (signal, algorithm, narrative), or ready made elements into modifications in real time.

The role of such writing and method as well as the role of cinema is not only to “capture and store visible reality” (Manovich, 307) or media theory and confirm its “indexical identity” (Manovich, 306), but to construct and create new images (Manovich, 308). While the original state of cinema is understood in terms of simulation of our perception, the later stage of special effects, montage and other manipulation is a realm of creativity, of new techniques that are “used to decode the world” (Manovich, xxviii) and our perception. This decoding as a function of the digital media and new media theories pushes the limits not only of our perception but also our language.

Even the strange introduction to this book (Prologue: Vertov’s dataset) is the most clear example of writing becoming showing, and it is a montage of the whole book inspired by one self-reflective and experimental movie. It mirrors different topics in Manovich’s book and uses the “filter” of Dziga Vertov movie “Man with a movie camera” from 1929. Important fragments from his book are attached to stills from this famous movie that presents the story of the film making itself (from the shooting of the film by the cameraman, to the editing process and the presentation of the movie to the public). The prologue reflects the whole book as well as the logic of media archeology that Manovich tries to develop, in which different media, old and new forms basically merge like in some monad where everything reflects everything else. When we deal with new technologies and media or any emergent phenomenon we have to introduce them in the context of the older forms that present the available languages we have to use for our performative “translation”. The goal of such a translation is not a metalanguage and search for neutral common ground or transcendental entity nor it is a speculation about the future but emptying the space for new experiments.

It is my hope that the theory of new media developed here can act not only as an aid to understanding the present but also as a grid for practical experimentation. (Manovich, 10)

Conclusion
The theory of new media and the contemporary philosophy simply share an ambition to approach processes like emergence and becoming and what is more important to explicate it in the act of writing or relating to it. Neologisms, puns, media or discourse hybrids, they all try to bring together description with being, structure with genesis and philosophy with technology. These attempts to resolve the distance between writing and its object, the discursive practice and the event, have many forms in new media theory.

We can trace such attempts not only in the analyzed methods of “digital dialectic” by Peter Lunenfeld or ,,digital materialism” by Lev Manovich, but also in projects like “hyperrhetorics”, “electracy,” “choragraphy” or “mystoriography” developed by Gregory L. Ulmer, in the critique of technesis by Mark Hansen, and many other concepts like “teleepsitemology”, “remediation” etc.

All these attempts to build methodology tackle different phenomena but their common strategy of writing is similar to many postmodern and post-structuralist texts characterized by performativity, a basic property of every computer code. New communication and digital technologies are technologies of “becoming”, autopoesis and emergence in the sense that their implications are ontological not merely social. Phenomena like collaborative systems on the Internet (P2P technologies) or biotechnology change our social and “natural” reality in a very crucial way that proves the priority of the code over philosophical assumptions about ontology or social definition of ownership. The philosophy of new media should become the “ontology of the code” focusing on the ability of software and digital technologies to challenge the “natural world” (Husserl’s Lebenswelt), social reality and other intuitive ideas.