Abstract
To say that conceptualizing “medium,” whether as entity, process or relation, is a philosophical challenge is an understatement. Media are at once a connection and transfer point between discrete elements and also that which maintain or define their separation. McLuhan’s “the medium is the message” reminds us that media also offer messages and vast possibilities for signification, while they themselves evade such meaning. The medium of a blank page or screen, of course, does not signify. But perhaps media are more like Heidegger’s “language which speaks,” or Wittgenstein’s language games, or even McLuhan’s own “extensions of man?” This chapter addresses these and other possibilities, using the material and performative dimensions of Nietzsche’s typewriter and typewriting (as something that “works with [us] on our thoughts”) as a touchstone. Rejecting notions of medium-as-language, medium-as-prosthesis, even medium-as-mediator, the chapter conceptualizes media through reference to the Greek prefixes meta- and dia-, seeing media as a kind of metabasis or leap, or a diabasis, a transition actualized within materiality itself, as a kind of osmosis or “shining through.” In this sense, media refer to a modality, a quality of performance, rather than to a given entity, process or relation. Media appear as a type of practice integrated into our processes of perception, knowledge and recognition, but that in its materiality and technicity also disrupts and unsettles these processes.
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Notes
- 1.
Translator’s Note: Originated by Heidegger, the term “Unter-Schiede” emphasizes the division, the separation as it were (symbolized by the hyphen) that occurs in differing one object from another.
- 2.
See Tholen (2002).
- 3.
Translator’s Note: The German Ur-Sprung (origin) allows for a primordial leap or act and allows for an opening up, as well as a singular appearance.
- 4.
Translator’s Note: Über-Tragung and Über-Setzung both carry with them the sense of transferring something (in the sense of the Latin trans-ferre) e.g., from one thing to another, from one point to another, or from one language to another.
- 5.
See esp. Derrida (1984).
- 6.
See also Mennighaus (1995).
- 7.
- 8.
- 9.
Translator’s Note: Whereas be-dingt can be translated as “conditioned by” it also inherently contains a reference to Dinge or things.
- 10.
- 11.
“And we may not advance any kind of theory… We must do away with all explanation, and description alone must take its place” (Wittgenstein 2001: 66).
- 12.
“If there is to be mediation, the tool itself can no longer function as intermediary but must itself be transformed” (Mitchell 2010: 77).
- 13.
Nietzsche wrote this in a letter to Peter Gast (a pseudonym used by Heinrich Köselitz) in Feb. 1882.
- 14.
Sie haben recht, unser Schreibzeug arbeitet mit an unseren Gedanken. Wann werde ich es über meine Finger bringen, einen langen Satz zu drücken …Können Sie das auch lesen! (Nietzsche 2002: 172). NOTE: Whereas Winthrop-Young translated this quotation as the tools “work[ing] on” our thoughts, I prefer to use “collaborate” here in order to emphasize the mit (with) aspect of Nietzsche’s mitarbeiten.
- 15.
Nun ich möchte gerne sehen wie mit dem Schreibapparat manipuliert wird. …Vielleicht gewöhnen Sie sich mit dem Instrument eine neue Ausdrucksweise an… ich leugne nicht, dass meine “Gedanken” in der Musik und Sprache oft von der Qualität der Feder und des Papiers abhängen (Nietzsche 2002: 229).
- 16.
“the exorcism of the spirit” (a translation of the title of a collection edited by Kittler in 1992).
- 17.
This doesn’t mean that we would debate the possibility of medial self-reflexitivity – art does nothing but that. What is meant, however, is that in the medial, the discursive reflections on its conditions are not the subject of the mediation. Consequently, discursivity and mediality need to be differentiated.
- 18.
Translator’s Note: Be-Wegungen also carries with it a sense of creating paths.
- 19.
See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book 6, Ch.4, 1140a f.
- 20.
(N)ichts ist, was nicht schaltbar ist (Kittler 1993: 152).
- 21.
informationstheoretischer Materialismus (Kittler 1993: 182).
- 22.
…die Geschichte der Seelen und ihrer Nosolgien… das Innere nach außen gekehrt oder eben implementiert hat (Kittler 1995: 10).
- 23.
Was Mensch heißt, bestimmen keine Attribute… sondern technische standards (Kittler 1993: 61).
- 24.
Mit der Universalen Diskreten Maschine ist das Mediensystem geschlossen. Speicher- und Übertragungsmedien gehen beide in einer Prinzipienschaltung auf…. Eine menschenleere Bürokratie übernimmt alle Funktionen, die zur formalen Definition von Intelligenz hinreichend und notwendig sind. The same findings are found in Wolfgang Coy, who says that the computer as a programmable machine becomes the “integrator of all previous media” (1989: 30); the same applies to Tholen, who states that cultural researchers and media theorists unanimously found that in “the age of electronic media and computers… their binary principle circuits” “all previous machines and media” could be emulated (2002:191)
- 25.
Here, from the first page of a corrected reprint posted by Bell Labs http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/ms/what/shannonday/shannon1948.pdf.
- 26.
Although with Hörl it is more in reference to the contemporaries of structural anthropology, linguistics, information theory and cybernetics.
- 27.
Hans Magnus Enzensberger arrives at the same conclusion in Baukasten zu einer Theorie der Medien (Constituents of a Theory of Media). The text triggered a debate that is reprinted in Pias et al. (2002: 264–299). Art projects such as Nam June Paiks Global Groove point in the same direction. In fact, the history of this reception and its fallacies has not yet been written.
- 28.
For his part, Tholen had pointed out a related problem, even when he tends towards the same mistake. Thus he writes: (F)ür die Bestimmung der Medialität der Medien ist die Nähe von Signifikant und Information keine nur vordergründige: Die “kleinste” Einheit – ein Bit – ist nach Gregory Bateson der Unterschied, der einen Unterschied macht. [In determining the mediality of the media, the proximity of significants and information are not just superficial: According to Gregory Bateson, the “smallest” unit – a bit – is the “difference that makes a difference.”] (2000: 187). In the same sense Tholen maintains there is a correlation between digitalness and arbitrariness in structural linguistics – nevertheless he grants language the unlimited priority.
- 29.
- 30.
[D]ie Struktur der Austauschbarkeit und Ersetzbarkeit, die der Sprache zukommt, ist die nicht-technische, uneinholbare Voraussetzung der technischen Medien selbst (Tholen 2002: 187).
- 31.
See translator’s note – Footnote 18.
- 32.
Belting (2008: 23) seems to say something similar. Whereas the word perspectiva is already attested to by Boethius, it first finds its dominant interpretation in view of the mediality of figurativeness as Durchsicht (looking through) a transparent world in Dürer. In turn Alberti associated it with the metaphor of a window: A window, its frame, releases a view, makes us through that sighted, opens up for us our own image space. One can to this extent say: the “perspectives” form performative picture acts; the space that they construct is not created by any arrangement of places and signs, but rather something that can be scanned, controlled and captured through the movement of the eye.
- 33.
In particular Derrida refers to Plato’s motif of the sower, as well as to the older myth of Demeter and the figure of Triptolemos as the cultivators proper. John Peters in turn recognizes the actual productivity of the medial in the dissemination.
- 34.
For initial considerations about these differences see Mersch (2010b).
- 35.
The reader is reminded here that architektonia literally means the “basic” technique or art.
- 36.
With regards to the concept of positing in relation to the performative, see Mersch (2002). In particular, the occurence of a Setzung (positing) is understood to be from the threefold moment of Einsetzung (instantation), Aussetzung (exposition) and Entsetzung (transposition).
- 37.
The return to Plato forms the background for a media theory following Derrida; see esp. Derrida (1981) Part 1 in which both the pharmakon as well as the Chora call forth figures of the ambivalent, which ultimately try to legitimate the “leap” of the “meta.”
- 38.
See especially my examination of Austin and Searle in Mersch (2010b: 240).
- 39.
Regarding modal interpretations of the performative see Davidson (2001: 109).
- 40.
See translator’s note – Footnote 2.
- 41.
Translator’s Note: While Ver-Wendung can be translated here as “use,” in German it also carries the sense of a change or a turn (Wendung) which through the prefix “ver” on the sense of a contortion.
- 42.
Regarding the withdrawal of the medial see my comments in Mersch (2010a: 148–169).
- 43.
In his essay on Bilderstatus Flusser argues quite similarly: This requires the “list” of counter-changes, to outwit the apparatus and by means of “agility” of art or Ars to bring the status of images in the old and new media to light. “Ars is usually translated as “art” but one should not forget the importance of the ‘manoeuvrability’” (Flusser 1997: 77).
- 44.
See also my considerations in Mersch (2010a: 164).
- 45.
Examples of these possibilities might include concrete poetry and more mechanical forms of automatic writing. Speaking of such possibilities more generally, Don Ihde points out: “Technologies, by providing a framework for action, do form intentionalities and inclinations within which use-patterns take dominant shape” (1990: 141). The writing process did indeed become faster first with the typewrite but then all the more so with the computer, so that one’s writing style also changed and became more like spoken language. In the end with the computer – even when we use it as a writing tool – the forming of thoughts and writing go hand in hand, just as at the same time the text becomes something that is permanently re-worked, re-written and corrected, so that it retains, so to speak, the status of a provisional nature or crudity.
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Mersch, D. (2016). Meta/Dia: Two Approaches to the Medial. In: Friesen, N. (eds) Media Transatlantic: Developments in Media and Communication Studies between North American and German-speaking Europe. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28489-7_9
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