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Interaction versus Integration 141
itself is (at least partially) an effect of a medium. In this view there are no
pre-given subjects with an experience of the real. There are no transcen-
dental contexts which pre-exist other contexts and determine how they
are experienced.
In Thompson’s case it is embodied, mutual contexts which are seen
to pre-exist the extended contexts, and these former contexts structure
how we engage with the latter contexts. Moreover, the extended contexts
mediate our attempts at re-creating local contexts, even when they may be
separated in space and time.
The position of the individual in these settings is very much con-
ceived logocentrically. Intentionality, the idea of being a language-user,
and even the idea of being a subject at all, is tied to this essentialism.
In contrast to this, medium theory suggests that individuality is an
effect of the medium itself. Such an idea was really first glimpsed by
Adorno and Horkheimer’s account of the culture industry, which they
describe as ‘a circle of manipulation and retroactive need’ (see Chapter 2
for a discussion).
Althusser’s model of ideology-in-general is also interesting in this
regard. Whilst, ostensibly, he was interested in the formation of identity
in ideology as an unconscious structure, his account purveys a ‘constitu-
tive’ account of subject formation. There are no pre-given subjects with an
experience of social reality; rather, they are constituted by an apparatus of
integration. Althusser named the mechanism of this apparatus ‘ideology-
in-general’. Ideology-in-particular is the name given to the content of
ideology, a question of consciousness, whereas ideology-in-general describes
the very operation of ‘calling’ or hailing individuals as subjects of a
system of broadcast.
For Althusser, therefore, a particular mass media kind of identity is
peculiar to the structure of broadcast, but not of interactive networks of
communication. Althusser does not theorize the forms of reciprocity and
identity formation produced by extended telephony or letter-writing. The
Internet, too, had only become fully operational in the year that Althusser
died. But network integration in general was for him an inadequate
terrain for examples of interpellation. Interpellation only occurs within
‘one-to-many’ apparatuses.
It is only recently, in the development of the theory of the avatar, that
accounts of subjectivity constituted in extended interactive mediums
have also come to the fore. In this view, the medium-as-environment does
not simply hijack a former kind of identity, but constitutes a new kind of
identity which lives a kind of virtual life. The TV channel surfer, the Internet
avatar, the writer and reader immersed in the text, etc., are each an exam-
ple of this relationship. Implicitly, therefore, medium theory espouses an
account of the subject, rather than the individual.
The concept of the subject is one which has emerged in post-
structuralist studies of power, language and ideology, but has recently
been incorporated into accounts of on-line identity. Sherry Turkle (1995)