?
Building a Discourse of the Medial without Differentiating the Spheres of the Technological, the Natural, and the Human
This article examines the possibilities of constructing a discourse of the medial that involves no essential distinction between the spheres of the technical, the natural, and the human. Because the only area in which this distinction occurs is culture, this article analyzes the status of this distinction, its rationale, and its relevance to reality, as well as various ways to handle sign systems. The author considers theories in which this distinction is made in other ways (A. Gehlen, F. Rapp, A. Feenberg). Without an essential distinction (as in the works of A. Whitehead and G. Simondon), the natural, the technical, and the human can be differ- entiated on common grounds, forming an environment in which permu- tations of all the elements of formation might be called recombinations. The medial is then examined within this combinatorial environment. A special attention is paid to sound and its various theorizations in the media studies of B. Siegert, C. Cox, and E. Ikoniadou.