Chapter 1

Introduction: TheGeopolitics
ofMedia Studies
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NormFriesen andRichardCavell

The study of cultureincluding media culturereached an epochal moment with

the acknowledgement that cultures are situated, and, to that extent, plural. This situation was at once ideational and geographicala cultural geography, in short,
which became increasingly concerned with the location of culture (as Homi Bhabha
put it). With this realization, the Enlightenment notion of a universal culture could
no longer be sustained, and this is an especially important principle in the study of
media, whose very ubiquity leads ineluctably to the idea of mediation as the new
great universal. This volume of essays, written by an international roster of major
practitioners in the field, acts as a cogent rebuttal of the notion that mediaand
theories of mediahave an untrammeled spatial and temporal scope. As Harold
Innis asserted half a century ago, media have spatial and temporal biases, and this
volume is, in many ways, an inquiry into these biases at all levels of production.
The very idea that the study of media might have a geographical bias serves to
remove media studies from a triumphalist notion of progress (old media being
supplanted by new media which spawn new media theories, and so on; cf. Chun
and Keenan 2006), and to re-mediate media studies in terms of geographies, nations,
and institutions. Foucaults work of the 1970s served to introduce the notion of radical disruption into our ideas of cultural production generally, where the motive force
was revealed to be not enlightenment but power. Curiously blind to media per se
(Kittler 1999: 94), Foucaults work nevertheless had an orthogonal influence on
1980s cultural theorists such as Bruno Latour (1986), for whom the role of technologies in the production of knowledge took on a powerful dimension, to the point
that machines themselves were granted agency, a move which resonates with the

N. Friesen (*)
Boise State University, Boise, ID, USA
e-mail: normfriesen@boisestate.edu
R. Cavell
University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016
N. Friesen (ed.), Media Transatlantic: Developments in Media
and Communication Studies between North American and German-speaking
Europe, DOI10.1007/978-3-319-28489-7_1

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media theories of McLuhan (to whom Latour expressed an agonistic relationship

(Kuklick 1986)) and even more so with the late Friedrich Kittler, the most important
media theorist since McLuhan. The parallel to Latours theories in media studies
would be the materialist moment heralded by the publication of Hans Ulrich
Gumbrechts and Karl Ludwig Pfeiffers Materialities of Communication (1988).
This collection focused on the concrete technical preconditions for the emergence
of meaning, the conditions for the possibility of interpretation and understanding
themselves. These developments in media theory had one point of origin in
McLuhans notion that the medium is the message, perhaps the most (willfully?)
misread of his dicta; whatever else it meant, it announced the end of hermeneutics,
and it is this death knell to traditional critical models within humanistic inquiry that
can serve as the agonistic point of origin for the institutional study of media.
A geography of media studies, then, is concerned with the geographical, institutional, and national co-ordinates of mediatic inquiry, but the present volume insists
that these concerns be translated through a local/global dynamic, such that the terrain it maps is tectonic and trans-locational. Speaking of the transatlantic, attention is consistently directed to the trans, that is, on sites of dynamic interfusion of
cultural vectors, while maintaining the central focus of the present volume on two
specific sites of hyper-active media theorization: North America, especially Canada,
and Germany. This conjunction is historically justified, as the present volume argues
forcefully, even where the outcomes of media research differ radically, as in the
inquiries into orality and literacy of Innis and Kittler.
Geographically, Canada has often been said to have embraced communications
as the strongest fiber in what is otherwise a dispersion of a small population over a
vast territory. The proposition that Canada is a country that exists by reason of
communication (H.J.Boyle as quoted in Babe 1975: 5)that Canada has a
uniquely symbiotic mediatic constitutionhas come to be labeled technological
nationalism (e.g., Adria 2010). While the image of a people stranded in a hostile
and unforgiving terrain, terrified that they might have forgotten to charge the batteries in their BlackBerries, is a fantasy, the notion that the spacetime dynamic posed
particular problems in Canada resonates to the present day through our experience
of time zones, invented, in fact, by a Canadian. And it was the role of communications in establishing modern Germanyno longer to be the informem terris of
Tacituss Germaniathat attracted the Toronto scholar of orality and literacy, Eric
Havelocks, attention, the day that he heard the sound of Hitlers voice emanating
from a loudspeaker set up in the street (as Winthrop-Young and Wutz 1999 have
noted).
Was this a manifestation of the German Sonderweg, translated into mediatic
terms? Was it part of Germanys special and tragic historical path, leading only
circuitously to liberal democracy? Such a national Sonderweg is traced not only in
the mediatic shaping of German politics and history recalled by Havelock, but also
by theorists of media themselves. In 2009, the Media Studies department at the
University of Siegen hosted a conference whose title asked specifically whether
media studies represent ein Deutscher Sonderweg? The answer, according to
observers of this short-lived discussion, was an uncomfortable but unequivocal

1 Introduction: TheGeopolitics ofMedia Studies

no. As Claus Pias puts it in his chapter in this collection, the Sonderweg discussion
was unavoidably clumsy, with the protagonists feeling their way along via a mixture of personal anecdotes, vague histories of ideas, and national-cultural innuendo;
as a result their conclusions lagged behind available historiography. (insert page
#?).
This Sonderweg thus turns out in one sense to be rather like Heideggers Holzweg:
a wrong track or a cul-de-sac (Young and Haynes 2002: ix)a blind alley of
dubious, dilettantish distinctions in which the posthumous Heidegger seems increasingly implicated himself. However, the term can also have positive connotations: a
Holzweg can also be one that leads to a clearing, an opening, a place of illumination
or Lichtung, the clearing of presence. This clearing is the site both of being and of
unconcealment, aletheia or simply, truthalthough it is not directly accessible as
such. It is also here that we find technology: Technology comes to presence in the
realm where revealing and unconcealment take place, where truth happens (2002:
319). But technology, reached through this path, includes not only Heideggers
familiar examples of the Rhine-River dams or the peasants shoes. It also includes
the mechanization of hand-writing in the form of the typewriter: In the typewriter
we find the irruption of the mechanism into the realm of the word, Heidegger
writes. The typewriter leads again to the typesetting machine [It] veils the
essence of writing and of the script[,] transform[ing] the relation of Being to [mans]
essence (1992: 85).
Heidegger is not only situating media technologies and techniquesprinting,
typewriting, handwritingfirmly in his ontological history or Seinsgeschichte; he is
also unlocking the great repressed of philosophy, namely, the subject of mediation
itself. Even though Heidegger recommends avoiding and renouncing the typewriter, his ontological analysis of this machinery presents the initial steps toward
the insight that all philosophy has actually been the philosophy of mediafrom
Platos critique of writing and poetry to the end of the book and the beginning of
writing in Derridas Of Grammatology (1974).
A concomitant of the approach taken in the present volumeone that focuses on
the transitional and the multi-locationalis that questions such as what is a
medium? or what is the origin of media theory? are inoperable. Mediation
remains so fundamentally central to our understanding of ourselves and the worlds
we have made that it tends to remain invisible, as McLuhan suggested all total environments were fated to be. The question of what a medium is thus remains historically and culturally bound, apt to change with the scenery. It is in any case a question
having to do with process, rather than with a product. Similarly, the foundations of
media theory shift with the questions one asks: Plato is foundational, but so is
McLuhan. And if all philosophy is philosophy of mediation, Nietzsches Birth of
Tragedy merits much greater attention than it has received in media theory, its
Dionysian and Apollonian modes leading, directly or indirectly, to McLuhans
hot and cool media. It should thus come as no surprise to find a number of
authors in this volume placing their thoughts on media directly within the ambit of
classical philosophy, for example Krmer and Mersch. The institutional traditions
of the German university make this a natural association; in Canadian media the-

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ory, this approach is largely confined to Innis, and hence the later Kittlers tendency
to refer more easily to Innis than to McLuhan, who tended to save his philosophical
speculations for his letters. For example, there is McLuhans 1971 letter to Claude
Bissell, where he writes that all technologies whatever, have for 2,500years been
excluded from philosophy (McLuhan etal. 1987: 429), a comment that so
impressed Kittler he spent two essays discussing it.
It would be a misconstrual to suggest that media theory in Germany began with
Kittler, just as it would be to suggest that McLuhan represents a mediatic ab ovo for
North America. Friesens and Darrochs chapters go some way toward correcting
this misconception. In the case of Germany, there are at least two early contributions
which need to be highlighted: that of Vilm Flusser on the one hand and of the
Frankfurt School and its progeny (especially Hans Magnus Enzensberger) on the
other. Flussers life was truly transatlantictaking him from Prague to London, So
Paulo, France, and Germanyand his media theories are concomitantly sui generis,
such that their exclusion from this volume should not be surprising. Flusser wrote
in German as well as Portuguese, and after the publication of Towards a Philosophy
of Photography (1983in German, 2000in English), he enjoyed the life of an academic celebrity in Germany until his untimely death in 1991.
Enzensberger and the Frankfurt School offer a valuable foil for the media theory
in this volume. Frank Schirrmacher, author and the editor-in-chief of the Frankfurter
Allgemeine has recalled that it was McLuhans work that provided an alternative to
the invariable negativity of the Frankfurt School:

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[McLuhan served as] an antidote If one was interested in culture and media, he was an
antidote against a form that was then very strong in Germany, possessing great moral force.
This was the critique of the consciousness and the culture industry. We all know the names:
Adorno of course, Enzensberger, the Frankfurt School (Scobel 2011)

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It is against the insistence that media are simply mechanisms of ideological falsification and manipulation that Schirrmacher and others of his generation instinctively recoiled. This insistence, and the responses to it, are central to postwar
German intellectual history. It begins with the Dialectic of Enlightenment in 1944,
in which Adorno and Horkheimer broadly dismiss radio, film and television as
products of pernicious culture industries. The truth that they are nothing but
business is used as an ideology to legitimate the trash they intentionally produce
(2002: 108). This truthand others on offer in the Dialectic of Enlightenment
was rediscovered and updated by the left in the 1960s. In the hands of the poet and
critic Enzensberger, the monopolization of culture became nothing less than the
industrialization of mind and of consciousness itself, and unlike Adorno 20years
earlier, Enzensbergers target was none other than Marshall McLuhan: this charlatans most famous saying the medium is the messagetells us that the bourgeoisie [has the] means at its disposal to communicate something to us, but that it has
nothing more to say (2002: 271). The consequences of such an unequivocal dismissal of McLuhan as an apologist for the mediatic status quo is described in the
chapters by Pias and Leschke: it effectively put the German reception of McLuhan
on ice until the late 1980s, when Enzensberger himself changed his stance toward

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1 Introduction: TheGeopolitics ofMedia Studies

McLuhan (cf. Gemnden 1998: 73). And now, some 40years after Enzensbergers
review, even more has changed. The bourgeoisie is a less compelling political category than, say, bisexuality or the biosphere, and Enzenberger himself has served as
an apologist for the nation (re)building projects of the US Republican right. In this
context, it has almost become a point of pride to say that one was taking McLuhan
seriously in the 1960s or 1970s.
This is the intellectual background for the rise of Kittlers maximalist theory of
mediation: media determine our situation (as cited in Winthrop-Young and Wutz
1999: xxxix). Although he has been recently memorialized as the Derrida of the
digital age (Jeffries 2011) and a teacher of an entire generation (Poschardt 2011),
Kittler did not establish a school of media theory as such. Instead, he stands at the
forefront of nothing less than a newly founded discipline, Medienwissenschaft, the
study or science of media. Some 50 academic departments dedicated to this science have been founded in German universities since the 1980s, with the attendant
journals, textbooks, conferences and other forms of academic production following.
(The Canadian Communication Association for its part lists 22 programs in communication studies on its side of the Atlantic.) The connections between this new
German discipline and Canadian theories of media and communication are rich and
complex. This is evident not only from Kittlers work, with its considerable debts to
McLuhan and Innis, but also in the theoretical developments of subsequent generations of German media theorists, including those whose work is included in this
volume.
The intellectual currents underlying these developments run deeply and are far-
ranging. They involve figures such as Sigfried Giedion, whose professional life
traced routes (as Friesen and Darroch show, below) from historical studies in the
Parisian Bibliothque nationale with Walter Benjamin to meetings in Toronto with
Edmund Carpenter, and their multidisciplinary Culture and Communications
Seminar. Of course, also deeply implicated is the work of the Toronto School itself
(Carpenter, McLuhan, Innis and others) and more recent scholarship in German
media that has crystallized around the work Friedrich Kittler. Kittlers work has
been labeled as an extension of the contributions of Innis and McLuhan; and like
many German media theorists (and McLuhan himself), Kittler was originally
trained as a specialist in literary studies. The importance of McLuhan and Innis in
the work of Kittler and other German media theorists is widely acknowledged in
Germany; however, it has been little explored on the opposite side of the Atlantic.
The chapters in this book focus on theoretical developments of significance on
both sides of the Atlantic, as they converge and diverge in a variegated cross-cultural
geography. We dont for a moment in this volume mean to imply that the only media
theory of note in Europe is German. Turings and McLuhans heirs are to be found
in Renato Barilli, for example, whose work on mediation has found purchase in the
writing of Umberto Eco and (surprisingly) Antonio Negri; Derridas philosophy can
be read as a profound meditation on mediation that is being continued by Bernard
Stiegler and Jean-Luc Nancy. Their work provides a necessary context for this book,
but remains beyond its explicit scope.

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In bringing together these different developments and traditions, this collection

does much more than present a new and colorful chapter in the international
reception and interpretation of Innis and McLuhan. As already indicated, the text
gives an unusual geographical emphasis to media theory and to theorizing itself,
both of which (with a few exceptions, e.g. Cavell 2002) are generally assumed to be
relatively independent of place, and of historical and cultural specificities. This
book also represents a unique addition to English-language texts related to Kittler:
although selected books and papers of Kittler have been translated, the present volume contains a number of essays responding to and building on Kittlers work.
Finally, and most importantly, this book introduces readers to the new field of
Medienwissenschaft in German-speaking Europeits debates, discourses and
modes of self-legitimation.
The essays collected here begin with chapters by Pias and Schrter which provide overviews of the theoretical and disciplinary terrain of Medienwissenschaft,
providing the necessary background to recognize how Innis, McLuhan and the
Toronto school have been situated and mobilized in it. The next section traces historical transatlantic connections leading to Marshall McLuhan, with essays by
Friesen on the constellation as a metaphor in Walter Benjamin, Sigfried Giedion
and McLuhan, and by Darroch on the relationship of Giedion to McLuhans Culture
and Communication Seminar group in Toronto. These discussions are given a still
broader context with Heilmann and Gibsons essays on the orality/literacy dynamic
attributed to classical Greece in recent historical and theoretical work. Mersch and
Cressman undertake in-depth analyses of the ontological and material dimensions
of media and mediation. Finally, Leschke and Krmer offer differing ways of understanding the recent past of media theory, and on that basis propose possible future
directions for research. In what follows, these contributions and their organization
in this volume are outlined in more detail.
The first section of this volume, Theory and Nationality of Media, offers essays
that examine, each in its own way, the internal constitution of German
Medienwissenschaft. The first traces the diachronic axis of recent cultural history,
and the second works synchronically, focusing on more recent attempts at self-
definition and intradisciplinary self-differentiation. The first chapter, by Claus Pias,
begins by asking pointedly Whats German in German media Theory. It invokes
the metaphor of a multi-generational family history in articulating its response, one
that begins with brave and pragmatic founders, passes through intermediate work of
reinforcement and reflection, and concludes with radical questioning and renewal.
Pias self-identifies with the second of the generations in German media studies
the generation given not only to the consolidation of the enterprise but also to dispassionate inquiry into it. In a sense, the subsequent chapter by Jens Schrter builds
on Pias account by emphasizing the commonality of questioning, reflection and
critique at nearly all points of the media studies enterprise. For example, tension and
contention mark its relationship to student curricula and skill sets (and what is
required by media industry employers), its internal constitution (expressed in part
through a gradually expanding list of sub-specializations), and the requirement to
link theory and philosopy together with rapid developments in media technologies

1 Introduction: TheGeopolitics ofMedia Studies

themselves (to mention just a few pressure points). However, these challenges and
uncertainties are described by Schrter in the context of a larger and explicit, even
manifest, certainty: Schrters own successful compilation of an extensive Handbook
of Media Studies, and its publication by a major German academic publisher.
Indeed, Schrters chapter is an adapted version of his introduction to this 570 page
tome, which contains contributions by many of the authors included in the present
volume.
This books second section, McLuhan Transatlantic, includes chapters by
Friesen and Darroch focusing on the transatlantic influences on the coalescing
thought of Marshall McLuhan. Friesen uses Hans Blumenbergs notion of metaphorology to venture a speculative long-shot: That Benjamins (and after him, Adornos)
famous image of the constellation might have found its way into the titualar metaphor of McLuhans 1962 Gutenberg Galaxy. The key for Friesen, as for Darroch, is
Sigfried Giedeon. Both Friesen and Darroch direct attention the following observation by Giedion, that the meaning of history arises in the uncovering of relationships [and] like constellations of stars, they are ceaselessly in change. Every true
historical image is based on relationship. It may be difficult for those familiar with
Walter Benjamins Arcades Project, particularly with its convolute N, to miss
echoes (albeit diluted ones) of Benjamins account of his own historiographic
method. In personal correspondence with Giedion, Benjamin declared the historians work, at the time, to be nothing short of electrifying (as quoted in Benjamin
etal. 2005: 832); and references to Giedions work punctuate Benjamins own
unfinished masterpiece on the Paris arcades. Another deeply appreciative reader of
Giedions work (particularly his later Mechanization Takes Command) was, of
course, Marshall McLuhan, who was subsequently to introduce his own Gutenberg
Galaxy as offering a mosaic [or] constellation of events undergoing kaleidoscopic transformation (1962: emphasis added). It is just possible, then, that through
Giedion, Benjamins celestial imagery later reappears as one of McLuhans own
cosmic configurationsone that first takes the form of the Gutenberg galaxy, then
the Marconi galaxy, and finally (among German scholars at least), the Turing
Galaxy (Coy: 1995). What is certain, Friesen concludes, is that all three historians
celebrated the notion of anonymous historya phrase invented early on by
Giedeonand that they obviously also shared a common, eminently modernist orientation to cultural history, one that refused to subsume any set of historical relationships to a common, unifying narrative or principle.
The focus on Giedion is developed further in Darrochs chapter, specifically as it
appears in McLuhans earlier thought, and the work of his Toronto collaborators in
the 1950sincluding Edmund Carpenter and Jacqueline Tyrwhitt. Darroch highlights these and other connections, showing the transatlantic debt owed by number
of McLuhans central conceptions (excluding that of the galaxy), not only to
Giedion, but to Giedions doctoral supervisor, the Swiss art critic Heinrich Wlfflin.
The years of McLuhans career that are the principle focus of Darrochs chapter are
those when his thinking on media and culture can be said to have matured and
gelled, when McLuhan was initially exposed to the thought of Harold Innis, and
also when McLuhan entered into fecund collaboration with Edmund Carpenter,

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Jacqueline Tyrwhitt and other participants in the The Culture and Communications
Seminar. These collaborations were to bear fruit in the form of the interdisciplinary
journal Explorations: Studies in the Culture of Communication. As Darroch
explains, Tyrwhitt, a friend, translator and editor of Giedion, introduced some of
Giedions newer writings to the group. It was one of these writings, The Beginnings
of Architecture, that as Darroch notes first broached the notion of acoustic
space, an idea that (in combination with visual space) came to be central to
McLuhans thought.
The third section in the book, Greek Recursions, offers two chapters that consider the confluences of media theory and the Western philosophical tradition, especially as they have staked their claim in the terrain of classical Greece. Till Heilmann
critically examines Innis and Kittlers celebration of ancient Greece as the origin of
a kind of alphabetic singularity and the zenith of cultural achievement. Twyla
Gibson, in turn, deconstructs the possibility of a single, originary moment of alphabetical literacyand the demise of any pre-existing natural oralitywhether in
Homer, Plato or elsewhere.
Both Innis and Kittler, Heilmann points out, developed an interest in ancient
Greece later in their careers as a response to concerns that were very much contemporary. Both were concerned with the fate of academia and of their respective
nations during periods of runaway mediatic and technological change. Whether this
change was the rise of mechanization or the hegemony of Microsoft, Innis and
Kittler saw different versions of Greece as offering a countervailing ideal or possibility. In diametric opposition to Innis, Kittler saw it as his mission to expel the
human spirit (Geist) from any province where spirit, humanity, history once were
at home (1980: 12). And since spirit, humanity, and history are commonly seen as
originating in classical Greece, Kittler develops a radically novel account of the
alphabets Greek origins. Kittler looks not to the alphabets kinship to the spirit of
the spoken word, but to its structural, combinatory and recursive characteristics to
establish its superiority: It is not a transparent mediator between time and space
biases, but instead, a universally interoperable and reusable codecan omnicapable
encoding and decoding device for rendering both audio and visual data. The same
set of some two dozen characters was used by the ancient Greeks for musical notation, as a number system, and of course, as a record of phonetic events. Kittler goes
much further than this, however: The Greek alphabet, in its interoperable, recursive
universality, allowed aletheia, truth itself pace Heidegger, to shine through in language, mathematics and musicin everything that is relevant, in short. [T]he
Greeks, and they alone, Heilmann quotes Kittler, had with their alphabet a medium
that made true the logos itself in its gathering or joining (insert page number).
To the grand narrative arcs implied in such sweeping claims, Twyla Gibsons
chapter offers a powerful antidote. It highlights the faultlines and sutures evident in
these narratives of civilizational rise and recovery, and shows how Greek culture
had no single, pure graphemic origin. A classicist by training, Gibson does this by
focusing on a type of recursion in a range of Greek literature. In this case, her concern is ring compositions, pervasive in the Homeric epics, and believed by Kittler,
Havelock, Ong and others to be one of the key mnemonic techniques signaling the

1 Introduction: TheGeopolitics ofMedia Studies

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oral derivation of these texts. This circular composition presents a multilayered narrative patterning, one in which the overall plot of a text is organized into s ymmetrical
sequences of topics that progress step-by-step in a chiasmic A-B-C-D-C-B-A
cycle (insert page number). As Gibson explains, such recursive, chiasmic patterns
are not simply part of a standard mnemonic apparatus needed to guarantee the
preservation and fixity of transmission [of] the Greek tribal encyclopedia
(Havelock 1962: 42, 119). Such forms, Gibson emphasizes, are found in the work
of Plato, who (according to Havelock, Ong and others) is the exemplar of the new
literate culture of Greece (Ong 1991: 167168). Instead of prefiguring the rigid
visual linearity of Western rationalism, Plato, it turns out, was just as much mimicking the rhetorical figures resonating in tribal acoustic space.
The fourth section of the book, Materiality and Ontology comprises essays by
Darryl Cressman and Dieter Mersch. The ontological and broadly philosophical
dimension highlighted in these two chapters (but also evident in others) marks a
pronounced difference between North American and Continental media theory.
Cressman (while himself not a Medienwissenschaftler) opens his contribution by
discussing an eminently philosophical phrase appearing relatively early in German
media theory: the mediatic a priori, a repurposing of the Kantian transcendental a
priori, (i.e., the form of all possible experience). The mediatic form or precondition
refers specifically to the various ways in which media always already make possible and condition the production and circulation of information, knowledge, and
experiences in everyday life (Klck 2005). Like the Kantian a priori, the mediatic
conditions of a given age provide the form for many contemporaneous cultural possibilities and production of that era. However, these conditions are not simply formal, as the Kantian analogy suggests, they are also material and in this sense also
ontological. This fact provides Cressman with access to the thought of Innis, perhaps the most soberly philosophical of established North American media theorists,
who saw the material conditions of dominant media (specifically their space or time
bias, their longevity or portability) as definitivenot only for regimes of thought or
culture, but for the imperia mundi in which they arose. In his Innisian analysis, the
materiality in question for Cressman is that of the time bias of the nineteenth-
century symphony hall, and the space bias is of print-based sheet music and popular
music criticismboth of which are exemplified for Cressman in Amsterdams late
nineteenth-century musical culture and the contemporaneous construction of its
Concertgebouw.
Merschs paper has as its central material reference point the typewriter, a device
becoming publically available at the same time as the Concertgebouw was becoming a part of Dutch musical culture. Mersch looks to German philosophical speculation on the typewriter, but not to Heideggers uncategorical refusal of the irruption
of mechanism into the realm of the word (1992: 85). Instead, he turns to an
earlier, but more nuanced observation by Nietzsche. Canonical in German media
philosophizing, this observation consists of a single but penetrating sentence: Unser
Schreibzeug arbeitet mit an unseren Gedanken (literally and ungrammatically: our
writing device works with on our thoughts). Written or rather, typed, in 1882,
when incipient blindness was forcing Nietzsche to write using one of the first

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commercially-available type-writing devices, such an observation suggests that the

realm of the word is always-already contaminated, or rather, constituted through
material mechanisms or devices and associated practices. In working with us on our
thoughts, Nietzsches writing devices do not simply transfer or translate our thoughts
onto the page, but perform with and through us, rendering device and thought inextricable. Merschs exegesis of this phrase, however, serves only as a prelude to an
in-depth examination of the metaphyics and ontology of mediation itself, particularly as it has been constructed around the Greek prefixes meta- and dia-. The first
configures mediation primarily as transmission, as a passage over or across. The
second, as evident in the word diaphanous, emphasizes passage throughand in
so doing, offers of the possibility of theorizing mediation not as translation or transcription, but as performance, an assertion that Mersch elaborates at some length.
The volume concludes with two chapters that suggest new directions on the
media theory map. In McLuhan and Medienwissenschaften: Sense and Sensation,
Leschke considers the real and possible significance of McLuhan on media studies
in Germany from the 1960s to the present day. In Sybille Krmers The Messenger
as a Model in Media Theory, a metaphysics of the messenger is proposed, specifically as a way of overcoming the dominance and mutual exclusivity of communication as either dissemination or consummation. Leschke begins by asking after
new possibilities for media theory in the light of the recent and active German
reception and reworking of McLuhans thought. He responds by making a point that
is articulated in a number of different ways in other chapters, and in so doing,
Leschke can be said to enact the consolidating, reflective gesture characteristic of
Pias second generation: Through an evaluation or characterization of the recent
past of media studies, Leschke advocates a new direction for the futurea move
away from a hermeneutic emphasis on particular media technologies (e.g., film,
gramophone, typewriter), and towards a study of the forms and genres of media.
Just as Krmer would see the metaphysics of the messenger as offering new possibilities for the study of media and Mersch a new performative emphasis for this
field, Leschke sees this future as prefigured, however faintly, in McLuhans emphasis on the senses and on form. Such a way of studying media, Leschke says, would
focus on the senses and their intensities on one hand, and on the Gestalts, formulae
and patterns that media make available to the senses on the other. Using McLuhans
views of mediatic change as a guide, he concludes that viewed in this frame, mediatic developments would tend toward typological and structural homology and
homeostasis, rather than irruption and revolution.
In Krmers discussion of two dominant but opposed models for mediation
dissemination versus consummation, transmission versus interpretation, or postal
versus eroticone may recognize distinctions from Mersch, Leschke and other
contributors, all the while moving in the ambit of contemporary theoretical discourse, from Derrida to Barthes. As the invocation of these last two theorists suggests, Krmers interest is in the social and cultural significance of mediation, and
her initial analysis of erotic (hermeneutic) and postal (transmission) theories of
media run the gamut from Plato through Jesus of Nazareth to Levinas. What is common to both dominant modelsthe hermeneutic and transmissivehowever varied

1 Introduction: TheGeopolitics ofMedia Studies

their implications and articulations, is the need to reduce or eliminate heterogeneity.

For the postal model of transmission, heterogeneity takes the form of the noise; in
the case of the erotic, it occurs through the elimination of any intervening third.
Krmers proposed metaphysics of the messenger, however, is premised entirely
on the introduction of such a third into the scene of mediation and communication.
And the perfect messenger, Krmer reminds us, is to be found in the metaphoricity
of the angel. Krmer concludes her chapter, and thus this volume, by invoking the
image of the dying messenger, and in this she points to the grounds of a new metaphysics. Humanity need not be conceived in a secular age as Homo Faber or Homo
Economicus, but perhaps instead in terms of topos of the messenger: irrevocably
cultural and linguistic, but at the same time heterogeneous and ultimately
transient.1
In this way, media can be said to determine our situation not only on the level of
materiality and metaphor, but in terms of our anthropological, ontological fundament: We may well be carriers of messages neither meant for our eyes, nor perhaps
even legible to them.

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1
Krmer expands on this in her 2015 book Medium, Messenger, Transmission: An Approach to
Media Philosophy from Amsterdam University Press.

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