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intermediality in media philosophy Kat er i na Krti lo va a lot HaS Been Said aBout interMedia in tHe paSt deCadeS: “intermediality” has been specified in all kinds of intermedial relations and all kinds of things—techniques, artworks, performances, methods—have been called “intermedia” or “intermedial.” But it is the subject matter of intermedia in media theory, rather than the more or less fashionable term, that we want to examine. Intermedial relations have always been part of our culture: images and texts, for example, have interacted from ancient times until today. Religious practice always involved different “media”—a Catholic mass, for example, can be considered an intermedial event par excellence. On the other hand, intermedia can only be analyzed as “(inter)media” from a certain theoretical perspective that is only a few decades old. It is true that media have always existed, but it is also true that there weren’t any “media” before media theory. This ambiguity about the subject matter of media theory is essential for media theories based on philosophies such as poststructuralism, deconstruction, Foucauldian archaeology, or systems theory,1 summed up in the notion of media or “the medial” as in between (the German Dazwischen):2 something in the middle, at the same time means and mediation (Mitte, Mittel, and Vermittlung). “Media” in this approach are linked to concepts or rather models such as “structure” or “dispositif,” taking on the difficulty of defining this kind of concept and its subject matter. Media 38 Kate ri na Krt ilo va provide tools to handle, perceive, and reflect the world and at the same time, act as mediations. They are, let us say, formations of the real which is always already “informed” (in the way Vilém Flusser uses the term in Towards a Philosophy of Photography 23), accessible only in certain forms of representation, “culture,” in language, “facts,” symbols, institutions, discourses, regimes of the sensible (Jacques Rancière)—image, text, music, dance, and so on. Media are not mere (passive) objects–they are rather reflective structures, as Lorenz Engell points out in “Tasten, Wählen, Denken. Genese und Funktioneinerphilosophischen Apparatur,” providing perspectives, techniques of signification, agencies by which they can be analyzed. There have to be media to see an “image,” a “film,” read a story—the perception, thinking, behavior has to be “pre-formatted” to understand these (cultural) forms as such—which becomes clear when people from other civilizations are confronted with these specific forms, techniques, codes, modes of signification. Just thinking about media concepts, “reflecting” media, thinking in philosophical terms, and writing we use media, which are thus “barely comprehensible within a global structure or process that they have themselves constituted or at least conditioned” (55).3 This example of a medium, or more precisely the mediality of medium—let us say writing—shows that a medium of this kind can be grasped: in self-reflective processes. A lot has been written about writing and thought about thinking, but there are many more media that can be observed as second-order systems (Lorenz Engell analyzes especially films and television in this way; Bruce Clarke and Mark Hansen as editors of Emergence and Embodiment outline the role of second-order systems theory in contemporary philosophy, media, and cultural theory). At this point the focus on media shifts to mediality and instead of intermedia we have to use intermediality, which is really a retranslation of the German equivalent of intermedia—Intermedialität—into English and a rewriting of the (continental) European concept of intermedia into Anglo-Saxon media theory. In a nutshell: first, “medial” reflection always includes multiple perspectives, it transgresses a linear subject-object perspective; and second, all we can perceive, reflect, and handle are forms, not the medium itself—in Niklas Luhmann’s distinction. The medium cannot be reduced to its actual forms, but cannot be accessed without them. Above we have described the image, film, text, writing, thinking in concepts and philosophical terms or philosophy and media philosophy as media—a rather vague concept of “media” even as a philosophical concept of a medium. It is clear that “media” in this perspective are not mass media or new media or old media (at this point the media start to be difficult to define), but they also cannot be reduced to “forms of representation like theatre and film, nor technologies like print or telecommunications, nor symbolic systems like writing, image or number” (Engell/Vogl, “Vorwort” 10).4 [3.21.104.109] Project MUSE (2024...

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