Access to things

Generally associated with the Gestalt theoryFritz Heider is remembered as a psychologist. He is best known for his work on interpersonal relationships and his notion of causal attribution—which aims to describe how people observe, explain, and judge events they witness or the behavior of others by assigning different types of causes to them. Despite the importance of these contributions, before the recent publication of Thing and mediumnone of the author’s works had been translated into French. This publication can only, in this sense, be welcomed.

However, we should not be mistaken: the text in question here does not fall within the domain of psychology; when he wrote it, Heider had not yet converted to it. A few discreet offshoots of future considerations are certainly visible. The essential, however, lies elsewhere. First published in 1926 in the only issue of the Berlin journal Symposium, Thing and Medium is written by a young philosopher who delivers here a summary of the key ideas of his thesis. Dealing with the problem of the subjectivity of sensory qualities, this research was directed by the Austrian philosopher, author of a complex theory of the object, Alexius Meinong. It will not be surprising to see some of his considerations mobilized in the pamphlet that his student devotes to the problem of perception. Far from being a matter of repetition, this one is characterized by the uncovering of an astonishing theory of the medium, which is seen to be thought in its difference with the thing.

The transitive character of experience

“Very often we apprehend one thing through another” (p. 35), this is both the starting point and the keystone of Thing and medium. As obvious as this proposition may seem, the author deplores the fact that the phenomenon it points out has been considered above all in its psychic and subjective dimension. While much attention has been paid to the thorny problem of the relationship between things and their representations, too little attention has been paid to the question of whether “that by which knowledge is brought about does not have, from a purely physical point of view, another meaning than the object of knowledge” (p. 36). This change of direction indicates the path that Heider wishes to help open. The perspective he proposes is based on taking into account the fact that our perception of objects depends intimately on the expedients by which they are given to us.

Simple, this idea nevertheless goes against the grain of our immediate experience; it is generally without seeing it that we cross the dense network of medial processes. This is proof that the latter fulfill their function! They are only important to the extent that they inform us about things and not about themselves. This is the case with light:

It makes no difference to me whether the medium through which I move is traversed by red or blue rays or whether it is traversed by rays of this or that kind (…) I do not hit them, they do not pierce my skin and injure me, they do not suddenly set a sheet of paper in motion or slow down the trajectory of a bullet. (pp. 61–62)

The (theoretical) downside of the coin is that the medium loses all its surprising character, it is easily forgotten in the reflection. This is the paradox of a theory that puts in the foreground something that is “nothing”, but which determines our access to things. Heider therefore invites us to consider the eminently transitive character of experience, the fact that it always takes us elsewhere, however immediate it may seem, however close the objects on which it bears. It is generally not the characters printed on a page or reproduced on a screen that interest us, but rather the text that they deliver to us.

Medium Input

Heider’s thesis cannot be properly understood if we completely ignore the framework of thought in which it emerges. It consists mainly of a critique of the theory of perception defended by the famous scientist Hermann von Helmholtz. According to the latter, sensations are signs of the objects that cause them rather than faithful reproductions of the latter. A trickery of representations results; it is impossible for us to determine whether these actually resemble the objects that correspond to them.

Heider attacks Helmholtz’s thesis by taking as his starting point the criticism that Meinong had already addressed to him: Helmholtz and his disciples set arbitrary limits in the causal chain that they reconstruct. Is it sufficient, in order to understand how the perception of a pencil that we stare at works, to describe what the pencil produces on our retina and the processes that follow at the level of the brain? Should we not consider other processes (those that can be located between the pencil and the retina, for example)? Similarly, why not give the leading role to the source of light that illuminates the object? Is it not rather this that lies at the origin of our perception? And above all, what justifies not pushing this causal ascent further? The incoherence of Helmholtz’s point of view becomes even more evident, Heider adds, when we consider perceptions at a distance, when “our gaze reaches for the stars” or “we hear events that take place far from our ear” (p. 37). In these cases, the object that provokes the sensation does not come into immediate contact with the subject’s epidermis. To stop getting sidetracked, we must acknowledge that “in relation to causation, all the elements of the chain are equal” while “in relation to perception they are not: in this case, there is a privileged element, it is the perceptive element” (p. 39).

The distinction that gives its title to the work then acquires all its thickness. The thing appears for itself thanks to the mediums and the mediums are such to the extent that they shape the appearance of things. The difference between the order of the thing and that of the medium, above all, is neither ontological nor topological, it is functional:

things like glass serve as mediation. (p. 41)

The notional pair also allows us to understand, beyond simple cases, that perceptions can relate to an event that is itself the repercussion of another: the earth turning over because a mole is digging it, the noise of a branch in a wood indicating that someone is approaching… In these circumstances, the thing immediately perceived is only important because it signals something else. It serves as a transmitter, informing about what we cannot apprehend directly.

By following Meinong in his concern for realism and his critique of the Helmholtzians, Heider in fact turned away from the category of object or at least from its centrality.

Scope of the Heiderian approach

It is doubtful whether the debate presented above (despite its obvious value in terms of the history of ideas) or even Heiderian considerations on wave phenomena are sufficient to explain the renewed interest that we are experiencing today. Thing and medium and which is evidenced by the publication of the essay in book form, in 2005 for the German edition and today in French. It is better then to turn to certain implications of his general thesis. The foregrounding of the medium can indeed seem promising in terms of thinking about technology or art. However, due to its length (around sixty pages), Heider’s text indicates more than it explains.

Physical measuring instruments (the barometer, the thermometer, etc.) are, for example, briefly examined. They are thus described as capable of both following the external movements that correspond to a phenomenon and of translating them in a regular and regulated manner. They are therefore characterized by the fact that they possess their own legality. The intuition is fertile, but we remain here on the threshold of a thought of technology that, unfortunately, remains unfinished. The purely functional approach to the medium puts aside, in the examples mentioned, the fact that they are specific precisely because they concern technical objects. However, nothing prevents us from combining a subtle consideration of this particular status with a thought of the environment – which is what Gilbert Simondon’s mechanology will do.

The evocation of certain sensitive qualities of the medium (plasticity; flexibility; the power, more or less great, of fixation, etc.) leaves a similar impression. We perceive the possibility of a reflection on art. As Heider suggests, the artist knows more or less consciously that he plays and composes permanently with mediums. Thus the painter “applies his oil paint on the canvas, he works, through the intermediary of his material transmitters, with the intention of his painting” (p. 92). A few passages devoted to photography or cinema complete the discussion. They consider the art object from what allows it to give itself to us and the meaning in what contributes to making it take shape. But if the medium weaves the aesthetic experience as much as the usual, we would like to understand how the specificity of this one is produced.

Heider a pioneer?

Given this importance given to the vectors of all transmission, one will not be surprised by the recent rediscovery, in the field of media studiesof this text which had a rather limited resonance when it was published. Context aside, because the development of mass media only exploded in the decades following the writing of Thing and mediumit might be tempting to find in Heider’s pamphlet a prefiguration of Marshall McLuhan’s theses. In To understand the mediafor example, the Canadian communication theorist gives the media a prominent place: he claims that they end up being more important than the content of the message they carry. However, it is not so much the phenomenon of mediality that interests McLuhan as certain specific communication media – printing, radio, television…

E. Alloa, who signs the translation and the introduction of the text, is therefore right to warn us against the retrospective illusion that lies in wait for this kind of reading. His warning does not amount to affirming that the text would be limited to what the author wanted it to mean. Rather than looking for similarities, it is better to give new vivacity to the Heiderian impulse. Putting his program into action, E. Alloa sketches, from Heider, a “grammar of mediation” (introduction, p. 26). He details for example the idea of ​​loose coupling, that is, the relative cohesion of the elements of the environment that allow the latter to deform more or less under the impact of things. He also evokes the fact that the medium, heteronomous, does not have the initiative of events. He also insists on the fact that this is all the more effective when it is forgotten and therefore on its invisibility or transparency (which increases with habit) as well as on the noise, which bursts in when the medium reminds us of itself (the crackling of a radio, for example). Finally, he underlines the play of plasticity and fixation (thus the walker’s steps will leave their imprint on the sand, but not in the silt). In this sense, we can read this French edition of Thing and medium as the vector of a theoretical program that goes beyond it: to propose a contemporary philosophy of the medium — and with it of the perceptive environment that together composes subject, object and medium.