Die Nachricht, ein Medium

With her inversion of McLuhan’s famous dictum that the medium be the message, the author attempts to sketch a concept of mediality that is capable of hosting and accommodating the self-referential agility of medialized instrumentality within an element of communicability. Mediality is conceived as virtual dis-positivity, and its core predication is to receive and index the totality of what can be a formally-symbolic, and hence a communicable, object. So conceived, mediality foils purely logical, as well as purely fictional notions of order and is capable of opening up the possibility of a civic architectonics, one capable of articulating its assemblages with polyvalent and discretely variable elements, and in a multitude of competing manners. In this book, the author traces the possibility of such an architectonics from a diagnostic and cultural-historical point of view.