Media theory
Poised on the cusp between phenomenology and materiality, media institute a theoretical oscillation that promises to displace the empirical-transcendental divide that has structured western meditation on thinking, including the thinking of technics. Because media give the infrastructure conditioning thought without ceasing to be empirical (i.e. without functioning as a transcendental condition), they form the basis for a complex hermeneutics that cannot avoid the task of accounting for its unthematizable infrastructural condition. Tracing the oscillation constitutive of such a hermeneutics as it serves variously to constitute media theory in the work of critics from McLuhan to Kittler, from Leroi-Gourhan to Stiegler, my interrogation ultimately conceptualizes the medium as an environment for life:by giving concrete form to 'epiphylogenesis' (the exteriorization of human evolution), concrete media find their most 'originary' function not as artifacts but via their participation in human technogenesis (our co-evolution with technics).
Duke Scholars
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- General Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences
- 2002 Cultural Studies
- 2001 Communication and Media Studies
- 1608 Sociology
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Published In
EISSN
ISSN
Publication Date
Volume
Issue
Start / End Page
Related Subject Headings
- General Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences
- 2002 Cultural Studies
- 2001 Communication and Media Studies
- 1608 Sociology