Mediation

From Metapedia

The most fundamental macro-question in communication, media theory, and cultural theory is the nature of mediation: we are always already in language, in symbolic systems, and we know our lived-in world by language, discourse, and signs, not by immediate access to "things in themselves" (Kant). To be always already in a world of symbolic mediations means that we're always in a world of socially constructed values, hierarchies, and ideologies. Much of contemporary media and communication theory assumes the primacy of mediation in any theoretical model: medium, milieu, structures/systems of mediation. Debray adds the dimension of cultural transmission over time (the diachronic, "through time" dimension) to simple mediation or communication (the synchronic or concurrent dimension) as a theoretical foundation for mediology. The "Prison House of Language" dilemma (Jameson): all forms of knowledge presuppose that we are always already in language, and we cannot step outside language and signs to comprehend an unmediated or non-representable world.

The irreducible structure of any sign system consists in the separation of the signifier and the signified, something present and something absent, something appearing as a trace or mark (signifier) and something deferred (signified content or meaning). Derrida's early model of differance" (differentiation in binary semantic structures and deferring/deferral of meaning in signifier/signified structure) has been influential.

An immediate/unmediated presence of meanings and things is unavailable to language users and thus to culture as a whole. Illusions of direct or immediate (unmediated) meanings/values/real things are behind ideologies, religions, systems of belief. Semiotics and post-Foucauldian discourse analysis does not deny the existence of real things or a world outside language and signs, nor of our need to describe a real world outside of language and mediation, but exposes our inability to give meaning to anything without the structuring preconditions of our systems of discourse and cultural sign systems.

• All communication entails, requires, presupposes mediation, not things as they are.
• Fours sense of "medium": media type, channel, mediation, environment.
• The content and form of media present a socially constructed system of meaning, not "reality" outside representation.
• "History is only accessible to us in narrative form." --Fredric Jameson
• "Film gives us not the world as it is but the world as we desire it to be." --Fritz Lang, Director, in Godard's Contempt