Imagining an overall monograph length study reduced to a single wordy poster. This is very incomplete.
Initial Postulates
- A ←→ B
It would seem that we begin with two distinct entities, A and B, that somehow come into relation. - A ← C → B
A and B enter into relation via a third term, C. C represents a dimension of mediation. It serves as an interface and prosthesis. It acts as an intermediary, suggesting a curious combination of solicitous passivity and unnerving agency. While it may dutifully link together A and B, it can also lead their relation astray and most certainly renders it in its own particular terms. The question then arises whether C itself constitutes an independent identity, as notionally solid as A or B, or whether it only emerges through the relationship between the latter? Linked to this, of course, is another question concerning whether A and B can be properly said to exist prior to this or any other specific relational context? According to Hegel, for instance, existence in itself can only ever be notional and abstract. Determinate identity emerges dialectically – through a relation to other things. Which leads to yet another question, very legible in terms of traditions of post-structural criticism, can existential precedence properly be ascribed to A and B, or is C not awkwardly positioned as the paradoxical origin of the two terms that it draws into relation? - (A ← C → B) = D
The relation of A to B through C constitutes a fourth term, D. D represents the overall medial event in which A, B and C all gain their uncertain determinate identity. Very importantly, when we speak of D we are not referring to an object as such but to a complex context that involves not only entities but also processes and relations. D appears at one level as a field of manifestation, but also at the same time as one of veiling and withdrawal.
Theses Proper
- The notion of media and mediation extends beyond its contemporary association with forms of technological communication to involve much broader frames of experience, manifestation and interaction.
- Technological media is emblematic of vital features of mediation, but also runs the risk of projecting, in contrast, a pure terrain of intimate experience unaffected by mediation. Media appears, in this context, as a convenient bogey, an exterior force that constantly undermines our inner faculties and resources. And so, cast as neatly exterior, the intimate play of mediation that is characteristic of both human experience and material interaction generally is forgotten.
- So often the insistence on social determination. The social, it is suggested, is the chicken that produces the media egg. It is the hidden dimension of agency that enables inanimate media to appear as an active agent of social change. In this manner, the media – and the field of mediation – is denied any genuine social agency. No greater criticism than “technological determinism”.
- Better, perhaps, to think of the gauge boson – the fields of particles that carry forces between entities, in the process conveying and manifesting fundamental natural interactions. Or perhaps to think of the mechanisms that enable signaling between living cells. These modes of mediation owe nothing to the invention of writing or the printing press or mobile communication devices.
- Doesn’t this risk, however, abandoning a precisely critical interrogation of media and mediation? Doesn’t it link the notion of media spuriously to natural processes that cannot possibly be subject to historical change, that offer absolutely no potential for enlightened social transformation? How to answer this? Yes, this is a thinking of mediation that reflects upon the limits of the human and acknowledges our emplacement in processes that shape and exceed us. But this acknowledgment is also profoundly social and political.