Infrastructuralism

Abstract

John Durham Peters’sThe Marvellous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media and Jussi Parikka’s A Geology of Media destabilise our conventional conceptions of the Earth and media. Their arguments are ontological in nature, that is, broadly concerned with describing what Earth and media are, and they are of a vast range, exploring ground and sky, the edges of geological time-scales, through the minds of whales and into the rocky composition of our skeletons and lungs. The anthropologist Jacob Metcalf once described the feeling of ontological whiplash when learning that we are mostly composed of bacteria. It is a phrase that nicely captures the respective methods of Parikka and Peters. Through their arguments, the immediacy and ubiquity of our media devices and mediated lives are projected into ‘deep time’, the incomprehensibly long durations required to form the material basis of our everyday humble media objects. It becomes difficult to distinguish between nature and technology, media and the morphology of the Earth.