Meta BlogNote

My blog has been very silent during this month, but honestly, I wrote like hell…
I finished my paper concept on conceptual, material and discourse metaphors, which now has been submitted for the ICA conference 2006 in Dresden, in the Philosophy of Communication division.
In fact, with this piece I outlined the base of my theoretical framework regarding metaphor theory, so I am very satisfied.

Meanwhile my 'metaphor club' (a lose association of people researching metaphors in technology, science and culture) is preparing two panels for the 4th European Biannual Conference of the Society for Science, Literature, and the Arts, called Close Encounters. We probably will do something called 'beyond Lakoff & Johnson', and in this context I will present the stuff on material and discourse metaphors.
Meanwhile, my half year course teaching period had started, and my course New Media New Citizenship is on the road again…

Alexandre Leupin on Saussure and the digital character of language:
"The technology of the Internet confirms Ferdinand de Saussure's discovery that language, taken on the level of signifiers, is only a series of relative and negative differentials, which can be written minimally as [0,1]: from the outset language was already digital". The computerized virtual world that those two basic elements can create is "a continual prolongation of what we have always termed cosmos, i.e. the linguistic fiction of our perceptions ? In this way, the Internet does not constitute an epistemological break" (Leupin, 2000).
Leupin, Alexandre. 2000. 'The End of Sex', WWW:
http://rhizome.org/thread.rhiz?thread=607&text=1624

Chesher on the concept of invocational media:
"Computers are invocational media. Using a computer is related to speech more than to travel. Data are invoked by a command, a call or a click on an icon. 'Invocation' is a kind of speech act by which a supplicant calls to a greater power for immediate aid. Traditionally invocation involves magic or a deity, but it is a useful metaphor for how computers allow people to 'call up' data'" (Chesher, 83-84).
Chesher, Chris. 1997. ?The Ontology of Digital Domains?. In Virtual Politics. Identity & Community in Cyberspace, David Holmes, ed., London: Sage, pp. 79-92.

My eyes hooked on the following sentence in Katherine Hayles' book My mother was a computer: 'Beds, even more than telegraph offices, are notorious sites of the exchange of information.' (p.83) Beds as medium unorthodox but true, not only in the literature narratives Hayles talks about.
Perhaps I just made things too difficult regarding what we call a medium. I concluded it was impossible to define medium universally applicable but now I doubt. Why not defining a medium as any site (state, thing, place) which enables the exchange (coding/decoding) of information? It can be a tool, a device, a system, electricity, light, a bed, a body… Depending on the context anything can function as a medium, and thereby becoming a medium. Mediation then is an intricate process in which something is functioning as a medium. Another universal definition…

Still, the reduction of a process (of mediation) to a state, thing or place can be seen as ontologizing. The above universal definition of medium is in fact a definition of ontologized media. Though ontologizing is a productive epistemological movement, I still hold that this movement should not be reproduced in the analytical concepts which serve to clarify the processes involved. Mediation then is a better starting point.

So, we have recognized ontologized media (the raw material by which remediation as conceived by Bolter and Grusin operates, which I extended with a notion of demediation), and we have 'becoming media', the translation of anything into a medium, which I dubbed transmediation.
Intermediation – which was the term I thought I 'invented' in my earlier notes and did give a lecture about, is then the whole system of ongoing mediations (i.e. remediations, demediations and transmediations).
Surprisingly Hayles comes up with the same term, in the context of what she analyzes as the interactions of different worldviews of code, of writing, and of speech: 'These complex and entangled interactions are what I call ?intermediation,? a term suggested by Nicholas Gessler.' (p31).¹
Damn it, I did not invent the term

1. The article of Gessler Hayles refers to in a footnote is called 'Evolving artificial cultural things-that-think and work by dynamical hierarchical synthesis' http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/geog/gessler/cv-pubs/03naacsos.pdf (↩ back to text ↩)