Transparent Immediacy -- Impossible?

At the end of chapter three in Remediation, after plowing through the lengthy exploration of the “psychosexual interpretation of the dichotomy between transparent immediacy and hypermediacy” (84), all I could say is “so what?” It’s not all that difficult to understand that “transparent immediacy attempts to achieve through linear perspective a single “right” representation of things […] while hypermediacy becomes the sum of all unconventional…ways of looking.” However, the final terse statement at the end of this chapter: “Transparency needs hypermediacy,” caused me to shake my head and wonder. Earlier in the book, Bolter and Grusin told me in the same succinct way that “immediacy depends upon hypermediacy” (6), so it was no jump to conclude that the authors believe that both transparency and immediacy, or transparent immediacy, needs and depends upon hypermediacy. But there seems to be –– maybe unintentional –– a deceptive psychological undertow created by this particular consideration of the remediated ocean we exist in. I feel like I’m being pulled along to accept the “futility of believing that any technology of representation can fully erase itself” (81), which is OK; but I also feel like I’m being pulled toward believing that hypermediacy will always reemerge due to the fact of impossible transparent immediacy.

Now there’s nothing wrong with a healthy fascination, and even a concentrated obsession is all right on occasion, but these authors are beyond fascination or obsession in Remediation. Consequently, their tightly focused vision creates a biased view, so narrow that it fails to take into account a certain reality that simply lies outside the realm of digital technological advancement, mediation, and remediation. This reality has to do with the non–technological transparent immediacy that can be achieved or shared between living, breathing human beings, the transparent immediacy that does not rely on hypermediacy because it does not rely on any form of media at all.

When I read the first page of Remediation, the following sentence nearly leapt off the page: “If the ultimate purpose of media is indeed to transfer sense experiences from one person to another, the wire threatens to make all media obsolete” (3). I remember thinking that media, as they say these days, has always–already been obsolete in the transference of sense experience between people. In fact, under the right circumstances, media isn’t even an issue. It’s superfluous… non–existent. How many times have each of us received a simultaneous impression with another, and with only a look, and sometimes not even that, shared the same inner “sense experience” –– the kind that really counts in human communication –– caused by that impression? How many times do we share this “transparent immediacy” with other human beings every day without any assistance at all from any form of technology? How many truly countless times has this type of “transference” happened over the eons of our existence between human beings engaged in the simple act of intimacy during the intake of a shared sensory perception?

Perhaps Bolter and Grusin’s grand obsession with the theory of remediation does serve a good purpose by “reminding us of the futility of believing that any technology of representation can fully erase itself.” However, I remain convinced that human beings not only have the capacity to engage in transparent immediacy, but that they do it all the time. In other words, in spite of the psychological current created by Remediation and designed to convince me that hypermediacy is transparent immediacy’s only hope, I believe that transparent immediacy does not “need” hypermediacy, and that “the rich sensorium of human experience” (34) is always–already shared during states of intimacy between human beings.