« In the twentieth century, technology has shown itself to have two consequences in excess of its efficiency and utility. On one hand, it has made and continues to make possible the total destruction of the earth. On the other, it has altered the nature of human discourse by altering the nature of the medium of that discourse. Where discourse is fundamentally altered, so too are human experience and subjectivity. The subject constituted in its relations, through discourse, to an other, is transformed by the new relations to others built into the operation of technologies of discourse.
The central problem of the project is to describe these alterations in the relation between the subject and its other through close analysis of three sets of texts. In order to understand the changes media make in the nature of the other, I first examine three different versions of the same text, each articulated in a different medium: H. G. Wells’ novel The War of the Worlds, Orson Welles’ 1938 version for radio, and the 1954 American film. The relationships among these three texts begins to describe the condition of media subjectivity, and reveals the seat of alterity in the very mechanism of media. I next discover in the contemporary phenomenon of UFO alien abduction an attempt to describe, in detail, the media-altered relation between subject and other. The eschatological dimensions of the abductee’s experience place the relation to the other within the paradigm of apocalyptic experience at the same time that the testimonials and corroborative photographs produced by abductees describe an experience which is fundamentally and essentially conditioned by contemporary media. In order to explain this link between the media and the apocalyptic, I draw upon the phenomenological work of Emmanuel Levinas in Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being. Finally, in Gertrude Stein’s experimental text Tender Buttons, I uncover, rooted, like Levinas’ work, in the experiences of dwelling, the caress, and the commensal, an articulation of the condition of the subject of modern media. The experience outlined by Stein describes an alternative to the essentially threatened and horrified subjectivity depicted by alien abductees. » (Résumé)