Media Metaphorology: Irritations in the Epistemic Field of Media Studies

With the evolution of the "new media," the question of a specific epistemic place of the media has undeniably gained in urgency for the history of the discipline. ¹ But it was only the ubiquity of computers in almost every area of society that made it possible to talk about an inclusive "universal medium" that could integrate all media in one digital code. ² And with the revaluation of the "personal computer" as an interactive multimedium, its cultural significance gave rise both to media euphoria and media skepticism. Yet the polarization of critical and affirmative discourse is nothing new. The tendency of cultural critique to demonize technical innovation as life-threatening artificiality can be found in Rousseau and in Romanticism, where it is based on assumptions of lost immediacy. Inversely, celebrating the artifacts of technology as means of salvation also promises a paradise of transparency—without mediation and delay. But the metaphors that restrict the ersatz world of technical media to bodily extension or amputation (hammer equals reinforced fist, camera equals enlarged eye, radio equals amplified ear, and so on) now experience another irritation due to the unspecified and manifold capabilities of digital media, beyond mechanic and organic models. The validity and limitations of any supposed similarity between man and machine are no longer determined by functions of motion and intelligence, as they were introduced in artificial intelligence research, which of course never achieved complete identity of computer and brain.

Nowadays, the arbitrariness of metaphors is owed to the many different possible applications of digital media, since the definitions of their use seem looser and more arbitrary than the precisely defined media of storage or transmission. This ateleologic openness of digital code—heuristically we might call it universal for now—applies to more than just local transformations of how we act with tools. Symbolic acts as such—including language and thought, depiction and representation—are mediatized to the extent of raising the question of the constitutive place of the media. The potential validity of media studies as an independent inquiry therefore depends on coming to terms with the permissiveness of digital technology regarding its use for text, image, or sound, a fact that necessitates theoretical reflections on indifferent transmissibility as such (Übertragbarkeit). ³ As a first step, I would like to demonstrate how the circumscription of this "new" epistemic field layers metaphoric and conceptual interpretations of what decides the mediality of media.

The multiplicity of images and concepts applied to the media stems not only from theoretical or methodological preferences that situate the medium according to the relevant perspective as means of (self-referential) communication, as instrument of information processing, or as its own message. The variability of such metaphors is not limited to the respective range of signification. Rather, it is questionable whether the choice between means, instrument, or message denotes the proper core of the medium, in the Aristotelian sense of a clear and simple idea, or whether these words only represent provisional metaphoric expressions. The question is whether their as-if status is simply the application—innovative, but soon worn—of a meaning that itself stems from other semantic areas (for instance, that of mechanic tools) and is only borrowed for explication's sake. A metaphorology of the conceptual history of the media will be able to distinguish the epistemic fields that remain virulent for contemporary media theories. ⁴ By the same token, there are plenty of indications that an investigation into the place of media also affects the question regarding the relation of concept and metaphor. In this sense, we will sketch out a metaphorology of media. ⁵

First, it is impossible to overlook that the digitalization of media made metaphoric as-if descriptions proliferate. Yet this proliferation correlates with a strange fuzziness concerning the ontological status of the media "themselves": for if one seeks to describe the apparent specificity of a...