Reconstruction Vol. 11, No. 4
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Talking to Yourself: Garfield Minus Garfield as an Introduction to Techno-Companionship / Andy Engel
<1> A year ago while surfing the Internet, I came across a website called Garfield Minus Garfield (GMG), operated by artist/businessman Dan Walsh. Walsh began received notoriety for his adaptations of the popular Garfield comic strip in which he removed its title character [1]. This act results in Garfield’s human counterpart, Jon Arbuckle, alone and talking to himself in the now empty space of the strip. A radical transformation occurs because of Garfield’s deletion that serves to emphasize the crucial role Jon and Garfield’s relationship plays in our perception of the world within the strip. Walsh begins the site with a concise description of the portrait he is constructing:
Garfield Minus Garfield is a site dedicated to removing Garfield from the Garfield comic strips in order to reveal the existential angst of a certain young Mr. Jon Arbuckle. It is a journey deep into the mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness and depression in a quiet American suburb [2].
Jon, alone and talking to himself, reminded me of a familiar scene but one I was unable to initially identify. Finally, I realized where I had seen something similar to the solitariness of Jon’s performance: cellphone users. Almost everyday we see people talking to themselves, often in the most public of places: lobbies, buses, hallways, and even occasionally restrooms. Often they are expressing inane details about their days or comments on their location, but just as often they are sharing intimate details about their lives. And yet, when I witness someone talking on his cellphone I rarely, if ever, have the same impression of isolation and depression that is present in Jon’s case. Why?
<2> The easy answer here is, "Well, of course, it is because cellphones connect people. Someone on a cellphone is having a conversation with someone else, somewhere else”; or, as Adriana de Souza e Silva puts it: " Mobile phones virtualise space by enfolding distant contexts into the present context,” and as such different spaces and contexts become blended (15). This view is formed as much from our understanding of the technologies involved in cross-spatial capabilities of telephonic and cellphonic communication as it from our uses of both. In this essay, however, I take a step back from this perspective of the cellphonic user and instead view the act of mobile communication from the same distance with which we view Jon and his transformation. As an observer of both the emotional and relational reshapings brought about in GMG, I was struck by the ease with which my perceptions of the strip and Jon shifted. Similarly, taking an observer’s perspective toward individuals on their cellphones provides a different take on the cellphonic medium. This perspective runs counter to much of the research done with respect to cellphones, which focuses on the tension between the competing conversational relationships within cellular and physical mediums. In an effort to broaden this discussion, this essay explores—by adding the perspective of the observer to that of the user—how our understanding of the cellphone as material device is shifting as it becomes a relational participant in its own right. Ultimately, my goal is to show that cellphones can and should be understood as companion devices similar to the animal companions described by Donna Haraway. Exploring the cellphonic medium as the relationship between the user, the observer, and the companion expands the current conversation about cellphones, which is predominantly focused on the experience of the first-person user.
<3> GMG, which hinges on the removal of a man’s companion animal for its impact, goes directly to the heart of the perceptual shift in cross-species relationships today. Similarly, the framework reserved for companion species can expand previous discussions of cellphones by defining them as another species and therefore as possible techno-companions. Questions that underlie this essay are: How does the presence, or removal in the case of GMG, of an individual’s companion affect how we perceive him or her? To what degree do cellphones fill the role of companion species? And, what can we learn about our media practices by taking the perspective of observers of technological usage in addition to the perspective of active users? One brief answer to this last question is that focusing on the position of the user often leads to discussions of social etiquette and long-distance communication, whereas focusing on the position of the observer raises more intimate questions about perception, connectivity, and companion relationships (human-to-human, human-to-animal, human-to-machine, etc.). In short, I argue that the perceptual shifts of GMG can be used to construct a framework for exposing companion qualities in other relationships that include, but are not limited to, our cellphones.
<4> The following exploration of techno-companionship is divided into five parts. Part one consists of a formal reading of GMG in order to outline the often ignored or unseen contextual and relational evidence about the ubiquity of companions today. My goal in this section and throughout the essay is to use the role of active observer, in place of objective researcher, to demonstrate perceptual changes in the relationship between user and device. Part two looks at some of the current research on the usage of cellphones and their presence in social spaces. Sound plays an important role in this section not as a medium of communication, but rather as a medium for distinguishing the boundaries—inclusive as well as exclusive—of relationships. Part three examines animal companion relationships—inspired by Jon’s relationship with Garfield—using the work of Donna Haraway and her definition of companion species to ask questions about what it means to assign the label " companion” to cellphones. Part four explores the implications of affect theory in companion relationships. While they largely go unnoticed, the affective encounters with our companions are foundational to how we relate to each other, our animals, and our devices at the conceptual and cognitive levels. Finally, part five addressees the concept of techno-companionship: how it fits in with other trends in media studies, its effectiveness for understanding cellphonic usage, and how recognizing companion relationships with the cellphone has implications for other media devices as well.
Comic Stripped: Locating the Unseen Companion<5> The impact of GMG comes from the Garfield comic strip’s ubiquity in US cultural memory, which makes it a prime example for looking at the omnipresence of cellphones. This ubiquity is important because just as Garfield’s role and his presence are taken for granted, so too are the presence and function of cellphones in public and private settings often assumed without further critical examination. In a very material sense we would do well to begin by asking, What is the cellphone’s role in a given context? And, how does its presence contribute to defining the relationships in that context? I will begin by asking similar questions of GMG in order to construct a conceptual framework for examining the change in perception that occurs when a companion relationship, previously ignored or taken for granted by the observer, is altered. What is Jon’s relationship to Garfield, and what happens when this relationship is erased? What is the traditional understanding of Jon, and how does it change without Garfield? And, most importantly, how is our understanding of the comic affected by the shift from presence to absence of what has come to be an expected companion relationship? These questions will serve as the foundation for the following discussion about cellphones, their existence as expected or unseen companions, and the eventual cultural shift to techno-companionship.
<6> The space of GMG is a crucial point because it functions in a very limited and tightly defined manner. The format of the comic is typically set up as three side-by-side square panels. This is important because with Garfield removed, panels often become empty, repetitious, or oddly organized. The panels were designed with Garfield inside of them, so when he is taken out, the space itself loses stability. This tells us that our perception of the strip’s spatial completeness is based on the relationship between the two characters. In physical space, unlike the comic, framed boxes do not define its limits; however, as I will show in the next section, a conversation in a public, open space carves out a unique spatiality unto itself. The fact that cellphonic space is not disrupted, as in Jon’s case, tells us that the relational component remains intact. It is the relationships, then, that produce the spaces that contain them. Therefore, for physical spaces to resist the discomfort of GMG, they must be seen as containing numerous and varied relationships that test the boundaries of who and what can be considered a relational participant. This begins to answer the initial question about why cellphonic communication lacks the awkwardness we see with Jon: because there is still a relationship present between the individual and someone or something within his present, physical space, namely his cellphone.
<7> If one of the defining characteristics of space is that it is relational, how does this operate in GMG? Or, more simply, what is meant in this context by the term "relationship?” Walsh has a slightly unexpected view of Jon in the newly released book version of GMG, "The funny thing is Jon has always been talking to himself. Garfield never really answers … Jon has always been telling us these things” (Walsh in Davis 6, second emphasis added). If Jon has been talking to us, the readers, then what is Garfield’s role in the strip? Cate Doty notes that Garfield is present often just to keep Jon company. A relationship, in this sense, does not equate to a conversation but simply to a mutual presence or co-existence. In the case of the complete Garfield strip, the readers can see both Jon’s comments and Garfield’s retorts; yet, in both Garfield and GMG Jon can only and always hear himself.
<8> Cellphonic relationships in public operate in a manner exactly opposite to relationships in Garfield and GMG. To observe an individual on his cellphone, we are likewise witness to a relational space (person with device) that is similar to Garfield (person with animal), only now we are the ones who hear one-half of the conversation, not both. Jon’s space falters because the "other” of his relationship is missing; yet, in the case of the cellphone even though the other half of the conversation is absent for the observer, the spatial limits remain. Because the space holds, there must be a relationship—one between the individual and the cellphone—that anchors it. Returning to Walsh’s point about Garfield’s non-verbal nature, we can now see that our perception of Jon changes when Garfield is removed because his relationship—his talking to himself—does not correctly match the design of his space. An individual talking to himself should be perceived as a spatial anomaly, missing a relational or companion anchor with which to define himself within a given context. The fact that the individual on the cellphone does not appear anomalous is evidence that there is a relationship at work, and a relational space with its own set of limits, to which we are witness.
<9> Words like "witness” and "observer” occur often in this essay despite the fact that they are slightly misleading in this context. As mentioned earlier, the observer’s point of view gives us a new vantage point from which to understand our perceptual constructions of relationships, particularly those that often times go unseen. However, a question that has remained unasked concerns the agency of the "relational witness”: how much choice does an individual have not to witness a cellphonic relationship? In the case of Jon and GMG, the options are simple: to look at the comic or not. Within physical space, however, the answer gets tricky. Lee Humphreys says that holding a public cellphone conversation " gives the man sitting next to [us] liberty to listen openly to the call” (818, emphasis added). Yet, not listening is much harder to do than not looking. This "freedom” to listen is troubled by the fact that we are audibly included in the relational space, whether we want to be or not, in a way that extends beyond the limits of physical inclusivity. It would seem wise, then, to add qualifiers to our terms as we now find ourselves playing the parts of the " unintentional witness” and the "involuntary observer.” Sadie Plant calls this condition, "enforced eavesdropping” (47). Forced or not, the act of taking in someone else’s cellphonic relationship from a distance is what allows us the best perspective to see how the unseen, ubiquitous relationships define our perceptions of a given situation.
How Rude! : Other Thoughts on Talking to Ourselves<10> Critical works that discuss cellphones and the cellphonic medium identify the relationship between the users and their devices almost exclusively as one of inter-spatial communication. What makes the cellphonic medium unique from other forms of telephonic communication, however, is that it is not restricted to a fixed location. Focusing on issues of spatiality within mobile communication is certainly a valid point from which to work, however, it is easy to become enmeshed in only the one-to-one relationship aimed at human-to-human, cross-spatial connectivity. By stepping back one degree to the position of the (involuntary) observer, we can further complicate the increasing cultural presence of the cellphone. From this position, it is easy to see that we have begun to engage with our cellphones, and other media artifacts more generally, in the same manner with which we engage more "traditionally” recognized companion species. Before taking up this new position, however, it is useful to note the positions other scholars have taken with regards to the cultural role of cellphones.
<11> Paul Levinson, in his discussion of the cellphone, continually refers to an "us.” The cellphone, he says, "gives us not only information, but conversation, anyplace we please” (Levinson xiii, emphasis added). Yes, few would deny the benefits and conveniences that the cellphone provides. However, Levinson’s main focus is on the first-person user, the individual with the cellphone in his hand. What about everyone else present when "we” are taking advantage of this technological marvel? When Levinson does briefly touch on this subject of cellphones in social settings, the example he describes is a scene in a restaurant in a small section not insignificantly entitled, "The Social Intruder.” It is not hard to see how this title itself is a somewhat loaded description for how he sees the cellphone operating in public. Indeed, Levinson’s text often sounds like a primer for cellphone etiquette. At one point he even goes so far as to wag his finger at the device itself: "The cellphone does not know its place. Its ring can be anywhere, just for you even though I hear it, just for me even though you do not want to hear it, and this can be unsettling” (80). The question that follows this feeling of " unsettledness” is again, why? Levinson spends precious little time detailing "your” view of "my” cellular conversation other than to describe it as an " irritation” or an " annoyance” (80, 82). Levinson’s analysis of the cellphone’s development is valuable but skewed to privilege the benefits for the first-person user. Further, he tries to limit the amount of time spent on its effects for those not directly benefiting. How the observer understands the device is a topic Levinson sidesteps, but one that is crucial to understanding the medium’s role in contributing to social contexts at large.
<12> Like Levinson, Plant also writes about cellphones and her work agrees with his on a number of points. Plant describes growing cultural standards for cellphone usage: "In more usual circumstances, people who judge or comment on other people’s mobile use are often contributing to the collective cultural processes by which rules and standards of behaviour establish themselves” (34). Like Levinson, Plant focuses on etiquette within a social space that is collectively created, but largely influenced by, the cellphonic users. Her emphasis is more anecdotal and concerns how cellphones affect non-users rather than how the relationship between users and devices is perceived and understood conceptually.
<13> An example of Plant’s position on cellphone usage is seen when she describes a woman who takes pleasure in speculating about the missing party on the other end of a cellphone conversation she is overhearing (47). This example illustrates the typical view of cellphones, as simply the vehicle for a human-to-human conversation, and all that can be read into such an observation is to complete the circuit by imaging the individual on the other end of the call. This view that relational space is based solely on conversational ties returns us directly to Jon and GMG. If the other member of the cellphonic relationship is physically absent, then relational space should dissolve and we should be left speculating about the person present whom, with a piece of plastic to his ear, is simply talking to himself. Again, conceptualizing the cellphone as only a mediating device denies the possibility of seeing it as a relational component in social contexts, a view that is suggested by the changes found in GMG. This typical misconception further demonstrates the need for a conceptual framework to describe this type of relationship, one that is based on the observations of those witnessing the cellphonic encounter, and one that works to further describe the role the cellphone plays in determining the relationships with users and observers.
<14> By focusing solely on the social implications of cellphone use, Levinson and Plant appear first to list the seven deadly sins of cellphone usage and then proceed to catalog their remedies. Levinson talks about jealousy and irritation, while Plant discusses wrath, pride, and envy (Levinson 80; Plant 34, 49, 70). What is at the heart of the cellphonic irritation and envy that Levinson and Plant describe? More than anything, it is the same thing that makes Jon such a fascinating example, and GMG such a useful explorative lens: sound. In all of these cases it is the concentration of sound—making noise in a space that is supposed to be quiet, talking on your cellphone instead of with your dinner partner, etc.—that causes all of the negative reactions. Michel Chion demonstrates how sound guides us in interpreting the images we see, the spaces we inhabit, or the relationships to which we bear witness. While he deals most specifically with television and cinema, his articulation of the deep connection between sight and sound is applicable here: "In continuing to say that we ‘see’ a film or a television program, we persist in ignoring how the soundtrack has modified perception” (xxvi). Here Chion’s comment provides one possible reading of Plant’s example of the woman speculating about the other half of the cellphone conversation. By focusing on the overheard, cross-spatial conversation made possible by the cellphone, the conversation she can only half hear, the woman ignores the relationship right in front of her between the user and the device.
<15> Unlike Levinson and Plant, our perception of the cellphone-as-device does not hinge on the content of our conversations or even the ability for long-distance communication general. Insisting only on cellphones’ communicative capacities is how the device is typically seen, and my argument here works to challenge and add to that discussion. Therefore, when we consider other perceptual qualities of cellphones, beyond a communication device, what becomes evident are the interactions between two actors (human and cellphone) who are both physically present and how their co-evolving association is reshaping our understanding of their relationship. These interactions between user and device describe a relational site separated from the larger social context. Johan Huizinga’s discussion of the act of play describes just such a separation as "
being ‘apart together’ in an exceptional situation … of mutually withdrawing from the rest of the world” (12). Huizinga also notes that play occurs inside "
temporary worlds within the ordinary world, dedicated to the performance of an act apart” (10). The relationships defined by play and interaction create what Huizinga calls "
temporary worlds,” and are carved out of the "ordinary world” because of the connection formed among participants. When we take note of someone using his cellphone it is in fact one of these temporary worlds, an exceptional situation, created by the material relationship of user and device that we witnessing.
<16> Plant, who focuses largely on issues of etiquette and social patterns, does mention another example that sounds remarkably like Huizinga’s notion of a "world apart” as a sort of cellphonic absence from communal or social relationships. She notes that, "Several Birmingham entrepreneurs say they use their mobiles as means of deliberately absenting themselves from their present environments and so keeping other people at bay” (Plant 62). Whether they have actually placed a call, or are just "faking it,” the entrepreneurs are using their cellphones to help them erect a barrier against unwanted social, human-to-human interactions; they are using their cellphones as instruments of spatial and relational agency. These separate cellphonic worlds come under fire, however, when their legitimacy is challenged by the competing rules of the physical, social space and previously noted cries of irritation, annoyance, and anger (Levinson; Plant). Our annoyance with cellphones is waning given the growing (if grudging) acceptance of the ubiquity of cellphones today, an acceptance that is furthered by the market for the multifaceted networked and "smart” devices like iPhones and Blackberries. And yet, we must be careful not to become lost in concerns about the range of functionality among cellphones especially when our descriptions and understanding of them have not been reevaluated as our usage of them has increased. Functionality has no bearing on companionship. Instead, companionship is a function of our perception of who or what is actively participating in the relationships at hand. Acknowledging that cellphones have affordance beyond just their functional capabilities works against the conceptual hesitation for seeing cellphones as legitimate participants in our relational spaces.
<17> The notion that cellphones effectively remove their users from the flow of social relationships through the creation of separate, more intimate relationships and spaces is not new. The cellphone, says Ingrid Richardson, "is so handily appropriated as a pocket technospace or container, becoming integral to our spatial and corporeal schemas in contemporary culture” (8). While Noah Arceneaux notes that "A technology’s ability to connect, however, also entails the possibility to disconnect, as new relationships and communities can arise that are not bound by the confines of geography of physical space” (26). Both Richardson and Arceneaux locate the cellphone as a container of these new relationships rather than a participant in its own right. As noted above, the space of an "act apart” depends on the relationship between the participants for its coherence. Viewing one of these worlds as an observer from the outside, as in the case of GMG, shows that the absence of one participant fundamentally alters the "space apart.” In the intact Garfield strip, although he does not verbally respond to Jon, Garfield acts as a relational prosthesis. Without Garfield, Jon is left alone, talking only to himself in a space that requires two. It becomes obvious, then, what prosthesis the individual is using to carve a relational space for himself: her cellphone. The capacity of cellphones for cross-spatial connectivity and conversation is, again, not useful for our purpose here of examining the individual’s material relationship with the cellphone itself. Or, to put it another way: intra-spatial relationships are of greater importance than inter-spatial conversations for locating the relational and companion qualities of cellphones.
The Cellphone: A New Species of Companion<18> GMG functions as a useful device for exploring the relational qualities of cellphones and their operation within social spaces because of the disorientation that occurs when a critical lens is applied to the assumed and unquestioned relationship of the comic. Beyond simply the issue of co-presence, however, Garfield’s role leads us down another line of inquiry, namely, how the logic of companion animals—and companion relationships—can help us to better understand the cellphone’s role in society today. Donna Haraway’s work on companion species will be useful here and suggests that when trying to understand the relationship of a man and his cellphone, it is helpful to first understand the relationship of a man and his cat. Some questions that address this issue are: What do we gain from companion relationships? If we are going to qualify the cellphonic relationship as one of companionship, what does companionship mean in the cellphonic context? What are the implications of classifying many of our daily encounters as companion relationships?
<19> In her latest work, Haraway interrogates the meanings of the terms "companion” and " species.” Companion, she says, can convey "messmates,” "a military unit,” or simply "to consort, to keep company” (WSM 17, emphasis added). Recall earlier when it was mentioned that one of Garfield’s chief roles is simply to keep Jon company (Doty). Plant describes something similar in one of her examples where businessmen engage with their cellphones to " keep other people at bay” (62). Haraway defines species, on the other hand, as invoking "a mental impression or idea,” perhaps natural occurrences or perhaps "taxonomic conveniences”; she adds that the term can even be included in a value statement: "‘endangered species’” (WSM 17-8). Above all, these two terms carry with them a sense of togetherness and relationality between two or more sets of actors—for our discussion, human and "other.” "Companion species,” writes Haraway, is a term that "designates webbed bio-social-technical apparatuses of humans, animals, artifacts, and institutions in which particular ways of being emerge and are sustained” (WSM 134). This notion of emerging ways of being” is crucial to our topic of cellphonic companionship because of the constantly shifting types of engagement these relationships produce as a result of the connection between user and device. Haraway writes:
Companion species is a permanently undecidable category, a category-in-question that insists on the relation as the smallest unit of being and of analysis … Partners do not preexist their relation; the partners are precisely what come out of the inter-and intra-relating of fleshly, significant, semiotic-material being. (WSM 165)
Haraway’s point here is that we are defined by our relationships. A (cellphonic) conversation by itself is not significant enough to fill this role of companion because it lacks the materiality to be designated as a partner. Haraway notes: "There cannot be just one companion species; there have to be at least two to make one” (CSM 12). Indeed, in order to accept the relational "spaces apart” of cellphones, we must first recognize the role they play as partners in mutually beneficial companion relationships.
<20> For an interaction to be described as one of companionship implies the presence of both partners in a given setting. In this sense, Haraway sounds decidedly like Huizinga when she uses her broadly defined notion of companion species, of relational partners, as a way of conceptualizing and delimiting spaces:
Species interdependence is the name of the worlding game on earth, and that game must be one of response and respect. That is the play of companion species learning to pay attention. Not much is excluded from the needed play, not technologies, commerce, organisms, landscapes, people, practices. (WSM 19)
The possibility and the permissibility for including cellphones within the boundaries of companion species exist under Haraway’s definition in three ways. First, it fills the material role of an "other” or partner in order to form a relation of companionship. Second, through their interaction, the user and the device mutually define each other. And third, through this mutual usage, the user and the device experience a sense of " worlding,” of creating a "space apart” together, of carving out a temporary space from the space of the larger social context. Returning to the notion of a (conversational) space apart, Haraway writes:
As Ihde puts it, ‘Insofar as I use or employ a technology, I am used by and employed by that technology as well … We are bodies in technologies.’ Therefore, technologies are not mediations, something in between us and another bit of the world. Rather, technologies are organs, full partners. (Ihde, qtd in WSM 249)
Haraway’s citation of Ihde reinforces the earlier rejection of cellphones as simple containers of other mediums, other communications, or other relationships. But where does this conceptualization of cellphones as "full partners” take us? Are there other lenses through which we can approach this question of techno-companions? And, more specifically, through what sort of actions and interactions set the stage for understanding the cellphone as a separate but connected species?
Affect: "A startle without a scare, however, is like a grin without a cat.” [3]<21> Up to this point, I have dealt rather exclusively with social and conceptual methods for understanding the unseen relationships of cellphones and companion species. I have also worked to emphasize how the argument of this essay is distinct from others that locate cellphones as first and foremost a device for communication. However, focusing too intently on cognitive descriptions of carving out "spaces apart” or the engagement with fellow messmates leaves underdeveloped the unconscious decisions, interactions, and connections that underlie these actions, which are important moments of negotiation between any two companions. To this end, this section will explore the affective dimension of our ubiquitous, habituated, and unseen relationships with animals and technologies and the role that communication can and must play when different species meet.
<22> Nigel Thrift discusses the fine distinctions between action, interpretation, and reaction at the pre-conscious level: "Like people, animals use affects to predict the future and make decisions about what to do next; affects provide information about the future and what to do about it. Without affects, cognitive systems collapse” (228). Here Thrift describes affect as having two related capacities. The first is as a future-oriented device, one that takes stock of a current situation, along with previous experiences, in order to determine appropriate future responses. My affective system might ask, What was my response in a previous given situation? Was it useful and productive? If I encounter a similar situation in the future, should I react in the same way? It bears noting that the reactions and interactions I am abstractly mentioning here occur in the instant prior to conscious awareness of an event. Building on this, then, leads to Thrift’s second capacity of affect, which is to establish a foundation for our cognitive actions. Affects provide us with information that helps us assess and adapt to our environment. For our discussion here, my argument is that affect serves to strengthen relations and is the pre-conscious foundation for how we connect to our companions at the conscious level. Connectedness with companions at the level of affect is best understood by the interweaving of three concepts: activation, potential, and attunement. Taken together, they tighten the definition of companionship and in so doing describe a type of interaction that occurs more than we might expect in our daily lives. Put another way, the affective relationships with our companions, which includes our cellphones, is the foundation upon which our cognitive and conscious relations to the world around us is built.
<23> Like a cry of a child or the yelp of a dog, the ring of a phone causes us to jump, to respond, and to silence the call to alarm before we are fully aware of its cause. In an anxious way, these auditory alarms demand our attention as much to silence them as to remove the cause for the alarm. When my cellphone rings in a public space, my first though is simply to stop the noise and only secondarily to speak with the person who is calling. Upon reflection, we might acknowledge that this sound, which is connected to a dependent person, animal, or device, disrupts the other relationships at hand [4]. But where does this initial desire, this acknowledgement of a disruption, come from? Brian Massumi discusses affect in relation to an oft-cited maxim by William James. Massumi says, "We don’t run because we feel afraid, we feel afraid because we run” (36). Massumi continues:
We have already begun to experience fear nonconsiously, wrapped in action, before it unfurls from it and is felt as itself, in its distinction from the action with which it arose. Activation would be a better word than action, because fear can be, and often is, paralyzing. (36, emphasis original)
If we adapt Massumi’s reading of James to our purpose of examining the cellphone, we would say: we do not answer the phone out of a desire to hastily respond to its call, but rather we feel the desire to hastily respond because of the way we are answering the phone. The fact that the relationship we have with cellphones incorporates affective qualities is demonstrated at one level by how we are activated by it. However, the example of jumping to silence a ringer in a public space shows few of the qualities that amount to companionship. How then does the relationship between humans and cellphones move beyond simple, blind activation to the richer exchange of companions? Or, more to the point, how do the other components of affect—potential and attunement—contribute to building companion relationships?
<24> Activation is an easily identifiable moment of affect in our lives: I am scared because I am running; I am anxious because of how I am answering the phone. In terms of companionship, however, activation is also deeply connected to the second element of affect, potential. In the case of the cellphone, this second element is exacerbated by the portability of the medium; the potential for the cellphone to ring occurs not only at unanticipated times but now in unanticipated settings as well. As it is integrated more deeply into our social fabric, and likewise unmoored from any specific physical setting, the sense of the cellphone’s spontaneity is oddly decreased while the sense that it will likely ring is increased and therefore habituated; hence, I now carry my cellphone with me because the potential for it to ring has become so strong. I expect to be in a relationship with it, and therefore I do not want to leave it alone [5]. "To capture spontaneity,” writes Massumi, "is to convert it into something it is not: a habitual function” (33). By appreciating this potential and carrying the cellphone more often, I have increased the likelihood of being activated by it. My companion has changed my usage patterns and has conditioned me to anticipate needing to silence/answer its cry/ring. Together, potential and activation amount to new patterns of connection between the user and device. The fact that it is always close at hand has caused the device itself to evolve as well in order to become better attuned to me, as seen by the increase in its range of capabilities.
<25> What does this attunement, affect’s third element, mean in the context of companion species? How does attunement help to solidify affect as a necessary lens for examining cross-species companionship? Speaking of dogs and humans, Haraway writes, " Flexibility and opportunism are the name of the game for both species, who shape each other throughout the still ongoing story of co-evolution” (CSM 29). Our cellphonic relationships gain much from the perspective that they are composed of two species that continually shape and reshape each other. Or to use Haraway’s terms, we are not talking about the hybridity of the cyborg from her earlier writings, but of her most recent discussions of separate but co-evolving companions [6]. On the one hand, in the "Cyborg Manifesto,” Haraway’s hallmark posthumanist text of the late 1980s, she addresses the relationship between human and machine by introduction a third term, the cyborg, an entity rooted in hybridization and exchange, a "rejoicing in the illegitimate fusions of animal and machine” (176). "Any component can be interfaced with any other,” she writes, "if the proper standard, the proper code, can be constructed for processing signals in a common language…[It] is a kind of disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self” (163). On the other hand, the co-evolutionary opportunism of companion species, which Haraway describes nearly twenty years later in The Companion Species Manifesto, retains the separation between entities; it does not call for common languages or codes for entities to participate with one another and to thrive. She says, "I have come to see cyborgs as junior siblings in the much bigger, queer family of companion species” (CSM 11). The genus of companion species is wider than we first assumed and goes beyond simple ontic or materialist categories. Indeed, the attunement of companions, a non-cognitive process, is the third part of the affective link that preserves species’ unique, ontological boundaries, while also making cross-species interactions both possible and productive [7].
<26> Recently, a friend of mine described a scene he witnessed taking place in his neighbor’s yard. The neighbor’s dog was barking wildly when the neighbor burst outside and in a loud and annoyed voice said to the dog, " Relax!” Certainly, this sort of reaction caused the dog to become anything but relaxed, however, the barking did stop. More than likely, the neighbor’s dog did not understand the word " relax” as a command, and he certainly did not understand its meaning. Instead, he responded affectively to the neighbor’s loud voice and the explosiveness by which he came outside. On the one hand, their relationship functions according to the logic of activation with both the neighbor’s desire to silence the barking before knowing its cause, and the dog’s response to his owner’s surprising actions. On the other hand, according to the logic of attunement, we see that the roles they play in this interaction arose through a form of co-evolution from repetition [8]. The surprise from bursting out of the door is actually instructive about the degree to which the neighbor and his dog are in attunement: the neighbor knows what needs to be said or done, and at what volume, in order to make the dog be quiet; while for his part, the dog knows (or seems to) how far he can push the boundaries before the neighbor gets truly upset [9]. Although the intentions of both the dog and the neighbor are not quite in sync, a connection does pass between them as they have evolved a mutual understanding for how this sort of situation will play out; they are in attunement whether they recognize it consciously or not.
<27> Looking again at Garfield and GMG, then, we see a similar sort of action/reaction relationship of attunement between the strip’s set of companions. Just as with the neighbor and his dog in the previous example, Jon and Garfield’s relationship should not be seen as accidental or random despite the fact that they do not verbally communicate. "Though the two worlds of the spider and fly may not communicate,” writes Thrift, still they are exactly attuned to one another” (156). Beings in relation with one another, Thrift explains, do not have to directly communicate in order to be operating in tandem, to be attuned to each other (156). With this example in mind, let us look again at Walsh’s point from earlier, "The funny thing is Jon has always been talking to himself. Garfield never really answers … Jon has always been telling us these things” (Walsh in Davis 6, second emphasis added). From the perspective of affect, we now see that Walsh’s comment is not wholly accurate. In fact, the reason GMG changes our perception of the strip is precisely because the attunement between companions has been disrupted. Jon alone and talking to himself (and the reader) has a very different attunement feedback loop than when he is talking with Garfield present, and it is because, when he is alone, Jon is lacking a readily responsive companion.
<28> At this point, we might ask, is the cellphone more of a companion when it is being used to play games or surf the web, but less of a companion when it is used to talk with another person? After all, a man may play games with his cat in a similar fashion as he plays games on his phone; he would not, however, use his cat to talk to another person. Does the opportunity for companionship only exist in a particular mode or fashion? I want to resist the temptation to catalog what are companionship-worthy activities (surfing the web versus placing a call, etc), and instead look at the device as a composite or complete entity [10]. Wedding companionship to functionality is not essential, and is in fact unnecessarily restrictive: (techno-)companionship is not identified by the capabilities of a companion, but instead it is signaled by the presence of an actor (device, animal, human, etc.) actively engaged with other actors in a given context. Indeed, Haraway makes a similar comment about dogs, "They are not a projection, nor the realization of an intention, nor the telos of anything” (CSM 11).) At a very material level, the cellphone should be seen as an actor, as an entity, to be dealt with in a physical context. In conceiving of the cellphone as a companion species, we must not see it as a replacement for more " traditional” species (cats, dogs, etc). Yet we must also not see it as simply a container of other technological capabilities (making calls, surfing the internet, video games, etc). While these activities may be largely recognized through conscious actions and interactions, it is their grounding in affect—the combination of activation, potential, and attunement—upon which the foundation of the broader discussion of techno-companionship is built.
Techno-Companionship: I have to make a call, can I borrow your companion?<29> Marshall McLuhan famously declares media to be the extensions of Man. In this essay my goal of describing the new perceptual position of cellphones can be seen as amending and expanding McLuhan’s assertion. In short, as our media—in this case, our cellphones—operate as extensions of our senses so too do they function as our companions, a designation that includes all the qualities we have traditionally ascribed only to animals and other humans. This view provides the opportunity to approach the unseen or undeveloped relationships between users and devices with the new, critical lens of techno-companionship.
<30> One trend among media scholars is to see cellphones as only containers of technology that extend or augment the individual users, and not as full participants that contribute to and alter the actions of their human counterparts. Paul Channing Adams conceptualizes media as extensions of the person, not necessarily the body in a way similar to McLuhan (276). Likewise, James Katz notes, "one effect [of cellphones] may be a psychological ‘emptying out’ of public space—bodies remain, but personalities are engaged elsewhere” (392). For Katz, the cellphone is again held up as a social destabilizer, one that creates a void in communal space, just as Levinson and Plant would also have us believe. Ingrid Richardson, however, puts forth the belief that "every human-technology relation is also a body–tool relation” (205). The emphasis on materiality in Richardson’s comment is much closer to Haraway’s work on the connections between species, and together they begin to open up a new viewpoint about the role of the "tool.” The conceptual shift from tool to species begins to describe a richer framework that holds the potential for agency for all of the participants in a relationship.
<31> How can seeing the relationship of human–to– machine (cellphone) as a companion relationship alter our other potential human/machine/animal relationships? As companions, cellphones operate in a way that goes beyond just filling the role of individual extension, media container, or "dumb tool.” Plant does note that cellphone usage "sends out other messages to the room as well: it says that one is busy and not to be disturbed, and temporarily extends one’s personal space” (62). Instead of being seen as a supposed irritant to others in the vicinity of someone on his cellphone, the fact of having something to interact with normalizes the action of a cellphonic conversation. Plant identifies this feeling of normalcy as an oasis for some:
Many women saw this reflecting their own experience of the mobile as a valuable means of keeping unwanted attentions at bay. A mobile projects an image of self-containment, and can even legitimise solitude: I’m not alone, I’m with my mobile phone.” (42, emphasis added)
The legitimizing of the individual solitariness that Plant describes results from the image of an individual and her cellphone becoming ever more engrained in our culture through repetition that simply cannot be ignored. These habitual acts lead to an increase in the pressure to view the cellphone as a type of mobile, machinic companion that allows us to legitimize our actions through our relationships and carve out space at will.
<32> In GMG, on the rare occasion when there is a telephone in the strip, the anxiety about Jon’s state–of–affairs is diminished. We are satisfied that he is talking to someone; we are relieved that he is talking to something [11]. What are we to gain from seeing our relationships with media devices, and specifically cellphones, as part of the larger discussion of companion species? Does this recognition necessitate a logic of companionship with which to describe our various shifting and ever–present relationships? The simple answer is, yes; however, identifying companion relationships must not in any way be mistaken for seeing human qualities in non– human things. Our non-human companions, whether they are animals or devices, possess qualities of companionship that are as different from each other as they are from the qualities of our human companions. And yet, the fact that we can recognize the broad outlines of companionship with these other species demonstrates the richness of this framework for examining other relationships within a range of contexts (social, individual, geographic, built, natural, affective, digital, etc.). The relations between user and device, between user and observer, even between different observers, all depend upon one another in their various forms for their mutual definition. Conceptualizing cellphones as a companion species allows us to better understand the co– constitutive relationship that is at work and helps to describe what we gain as we begin to recognize this sort of relationship with other media devices as well. Indeed, as Haraway notes:
Never purely themselves, things are compound; they are made up of combinations of other things coordinated to magnify power, to make something happen, to engage the world, to risk fleshly acts of interpretation. Technologies are always compound. They are composed of diverse agents of interpretation, agents of recording, and agents for directing and multiplying relational action. (WSM 250)
Observers, what Haraway call "agents of recording,” are only one of many parts that contribute to companion relationships. The act of observation, either intentional or involuntary, is what has inspired this examination and this essay. And, through Haraway, we see that the observer is part of the companion framework as well. Our witnessing adds to the discussion and we, too, play a role in shaping the relationship across, between, and within communal and cellphonic spaces. Companion relations are not just one-to-one correlations; they connect us all and as we come to recognize the abundance of these relations, our understanding of and participation in these crucial but often unseen relationships will change as well.
Endnotes
[1] http://garfieldminusgarfield.net/
[2] Ibid.
[3] Massumi 40.
[4] I use the word "dependent” here with some trepidation. I believe, as Haraway does, that companionship occurs largely as a matter of co-evolution and that whether partners are equal or have disproportionate amounts of influence over the other should have no bearing on their ability to participate as companions.
[5] Thrift makes a similar comment about drilling and repetition that shows both the connection between action and emotions, and potential as a form of training. He writes, " Of course, affect has always been a key element of politics and the subject of numerous powerful political technologies which have knotted thinking, technique and affect together in various potent combinations. One example is the marshalling of aggression through various forms of military training like drill” (182).
[6] "The human body is what it is because of its unparalleled ability to co-evolve with things,” writes Thrift, " taking them in and adding them to different parts of the biological body to produce something which, if we could but see it, would resemble a constantly evolving distribution of different hybrids with different reaches” (10).
[7] Again, we see this process of evolution as a constant feedback loop: "One thinks of the ways in which human intelligencing has been boosted by the prosthetic qualities of animals and things” (Whatmore in Thrift 161). With the implications here being that these prosthetic qualities adapt and influence us and so forth.
[8] "So affects, for example, occur in an encounter between manifold beings,” writes Thrift," and the outcome of each encounter depends upon what forms of composition these beings are able to enter in to” (179).
[9] My friend also recalled for me Gary Larson, another comic artist, and one of his The Far Side cartoons that is particularly illustrative here. This particular comic consists of two simple panels showing the same scene (a man talking to his dog) from different points-of-view; the joke being that what we say to our dogs, to our companion animals, is not always what they hear, but how we say it within the parameters we have established for this particular relationship. The Larson’s strip jokingly, but insightfully, shows the shifting of verbal communication in the inter-species context. In many cases, if we are trying to connect verbally with our companions, we are not doing so at the level of language.
[10] "Then, it is also crucial to underline the role of things. Of late, the prosthetic impulse provided by the role of things has become a key theme in social sciences … However, objects do far more than represent. … In particular, objects form shields to human vulnerability by extending the body’s circumference. They provide mental and physical resource to allow the body to be in the world, they add to what and how the body can experience, and they have their own agency, an ability to move bodies in particular ways” (Thrift 239).
[11] See Davis 52 for an image of this example.
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