Mediality as a Mode of Existence: Technologies, Bodies, Matters

Abstract

While Nelson Goodman’s Ways of Worldmaking does not address a specific mediality at play in creating different world versions, his contemporary Herbert Marshall McLuhan focuses on the mediality of technology. McLuhan’s premise that technological media not only transform and evolve alongside society but transform man in the process as well, echoes a determinism that has influenced Media Studies for a long time. With the arrival of Michel Foucault’s dispositif and of actor-network theory, multifocal models of mediality came into play that allow us to understand media as intraconnected networks of distributed agency. FollowingBruno Latour’s philosophy of modes of existence, we propose to redefine mediality as a mode of existence for an age of intraconnectedness. Using this key concept of Karen Barad’s “agential” new materialism allows us to focus on the “materialdiscursive” dimension of mediality particularly pertinent to our case: we are making the intraconnectedness of political, commercial, and scientific actors in the development of brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) transparent by shedding light on their ethical and political dimensions in their current medical usage. The unavoidable conflicts within all modes of existence lead us to emphasize the concept of accountability of these actors as a necessary aspect for understanding mediality as a mode of existence.