Notes On the Streaming Metaphor

Counter to conventional histories of streaming media that have only more often than not culminated in pessimistic narratives of mastery and technocapitalistic exploits, this essay takes Neil Postman's cue, "the medium is the metaphor," to rethink an aesthetics of streaming by way of its tropological configurations. Specifically, approaching our language for media as a primary site of mediation, it pursues a speculative and semantic longue durée of the idiomatic "stream" — one that traces our vernacular for content-on-demand not to the media industry but to natural philosophy and early experimental psychology — to probe the ways that the concept's evolutionary trajectories have formed and informed our contemporary technico-sensory experiences. At the same time that it unravels the philosophical aspirations, transdisciplinary concerns, and historico-material imperatives implicit in this capricious term, hence, it surfaces the notions of space, movement, and sense-cognition that have long been collapsed therein. In so doing, it charts an alternative hydrology of consciousness that, while speculative, may be exemplified through Apitchatpong Weerasethakul's purportedly "unstreamable" Memoria (2022). After all, posited at the limits and the ontologizing plenum of the metaphor, the film's deployment of its polysemy — particularly by agglomerating streaming media in its diegesis — denaturalizes our relations to our technological sensoria. Conversely, as this essay argues, what it comes to demonstrate is an aesthetic pedagogy that plumbs the depths of our conceptual labor, attuning us anew to the transductive juncture between technics and embodiment, the rational and the real, and structure and phenomenality.