Mitchell William John Thomas - Critical terms for media studies

critical terms for media studies

The question, then, becomes how we delimit media studies and, perhaps more profoundly, what is to be gained by such delimitation. Turning to Wikipedia (why not, given the key role played by new computational technologies in making the inescapability of media, well, inescapable), we find one strategy for dealing with the amorphous state of media studies: minimal definition. Media Studies, the entry begins, is the study of the constitution, history, and effects of media. It goes on to divide media studies (usefully, to be sure) into two traditions: on the one hand, the tradition of empirical sciences like communication studies, sociology and economics, which generally focus on Mass Media, their political, social, economic and cultural role and impact in creating and distributing content to media audiences; on the other hand, the tradition of humanities like literary theory, film/video studies, cultural studies and philosophy, which focus on the constitution of media and question... [how] they shape what is regarded as knowledge and as communicable. Media studies thus comprises any study of media, within any discipline or interdiscipline, and may be subdivided according to the conventions governing research in those fields. These conventions group into two categoriesthe empirical and the interpretivewhich, though far from homogeneous, designate two broad methodological approaches to media as the content of research.

We do not discount the value of such taxonomies. But we and the authors represented in this volume take a somewhat different tack. Rather than focusing on media as the content of this or that research program, we foreground a range of broader theoretical questions: What is a medium? How does the concept of medium relate to the media? What role does mediation play in the operation of a medium, or of media more generally? How are media distributed across the nexus of technology, aesthetics, and society, and can they serve as points of convergence that facilitate communication among these domains? Expressed schematically, our approach calls on us to exploit the ambiguity of the concept of mediathe slippage from plural to singular, from differentiated forms to overarching technical platforms and theoretical vantage pointsas a third term capable of bridging, or mediating, the binaries (empirical versus interpretive, form versus content, etc.) that have structured media studies until now. In a minimal sense, what the emergence of the collective singular media betokens is the operation of a deep, technoanthro pological universal that has structured the history of humanity from its very origin (the tool-using and inventing primate). In addition to naming individual mediums at concrete points within that history, media, in our view, also names a technical form or formal technics, indeed a general mediality that is constitutive of the human as a biotechnical form of life. Media, then, functions as a critical concept in something like the way that the Freudian unconscious, Marxian modes of production, and Derridas concept of writing have done in their respective domains. Though a distinct innovation, this general concept of mediality that we are proposing reveals thinkers from Aristotle to Walter Benjamin to have been media theorists all along. Sophocles had no concept of the Oedipus complex, but after Freud it becomes difficult to think about Greek tragedy without reference to psychoanalytic categories. Shakespeare had no concept of media, but his plays may be profitably studied as specific syntheses of varied technical, architectural, and literary practices. The very concept of media is thus both a new invention and a tool for excavating the deepest archaeological layers of human forms of life. It is our collective attentiveness to this deep, technoanthropological universal sense of media that allows us to range across divides (characteristically triangulated) that are normally left unbroached in media studies: society-technology-aesthetics, empirical-formal-constitutive, social-historical-experiential.