Media materialism

Years

1934 to the 2000s

Location

Toronto, Berlin, Paris

Funder

Not a funded programme. Three university scenes with a shared claim, and no common sponsor. The research document records none.

Institution

University of Toronto, Humboldt University Berlin, and the Paris scene around Virilio

Three distinct scenes making one claim: the medium's physical properties structure what a society can think, and therefore who can rule it.

Toronto, 1950s

Harold Innis, Empire and Communications (1950) and The Bias of Communication (1951). Innis was a political economist of staple goods, fur and timber and cod, before he turned to media, which is why his account is materialist rather than literary.

Media biased toward time (stone, parchment, oral tradition) are durable and hard to move, and they sustain religion, tradition and continuity. Media biased toward space (papyrus, print, telegraph) are light and fast, and they sustain administration, empire and territorial control. A monopoly of knowledge forms around whoever masters the dominant medium, and a new medium breaks it.

Innis is sharper and much less quoted than McLuhan, who followed him at Toronto.

Berlin, 1980s to 2000s

Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1986). Media as hardware with military ancestry, and the famous line that media determine our situation. Deliberately anti-humanist, and useful precisely when a media argument has become too comfortable about human agency.

Paris

Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics (1977), and dromology: political power as the control of speed and circulation, the state as an accelerator, and the accident as the truth of the technology. Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (1983): the apparatus programmes the user who believes they are using it.

Older and larger

Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (1934) and The Myth of the Machine (1967 and 1970). The megamachine: the first machine in history was made of human parts, organized by authority, and it built the pyramids without a single piece of metal machinery. The distinction that matters to him is authoritarian technics against democratic technics.

Mumford on the monastery clock is the concrete version of the timetable argument in education and in Foucault. The decisive machine of the industrial age was not the steam engine. It was the clock, and it was perfected by monks.

One short essay to read now

Langdon Winner, "Do Artifacts Have Politics?" (1980). Whether technical arrangements embody political orders, argued through concrete cases rather than assertion. Fifteen pages.