Meta / Dia : Two Approaches to the Medial

To say that conceptualizing “medium,” whether as entity, process or relation, is a philosophical challenge is an understatement. Media are at once a connection and transfer point between discrete elements and also that which maintain or define their separation. McLuhan’s “the medium is the message” reminds us that media also offer messages and vast possibilities for signification, while they themselves evade such meaning. The medium of a blank page or screen, of course, does not signify. But perhaps media are more like Heidegger’s “language which speaks,” or Wittgenstein’s language games, or even McLuhan’s own “extensions of man?” This chapter addresses these and other possibilities, using the material and performative dimensions of Nietzsche’s typewriter and typewriting (as something that “works with [us] on our thoughts”) as a touchstone. Rejecting notions of medium-as-language, medium-as-prosthesis, even medium-as-mediator, the chapter conceptualizes media through reference to the Greek prefixes meta- and dia-, seeing media as a kind of metabasis or leap, or a diabasis, a transition actualized within materiality itself, as a kind of osmosis or “shining through.” In this sense, media refer to a modality, a quality of performance, rather than to a given entity, process or relation. Media appear as a type of practice integrated into our processes of perception, knowledge and recognition, but that in its materiality and technicity also disrupts and unsettles these processes.