Abstract:
J oseph Vogl recently argued that we should reject the idea that such a thing as a medium (in any predetermined sense) exists, arguing instead that media theory should look at the complex arrangements of heterogeneous elements that make up media events (those moments when things become media). 1 Ordinarily media ontology addresses what media ‘‘are,’’ but due to the fact that a medium could be anything ranging from the abstraction of a symbolic system, to the corporeality of the senses, to the concrete artifice of a technical device, any definition of an object is hopelessly reductive. A much better approach is indeed the one offered by Vogl, where media are understood in terms of their singularity and their emergence. This notion of ‘‘becoming-media’’ is sensitive to the heterogeneity and ambiguity that disables the more straightforward ontological question about what things qualify as media. It also incorporates many of those questions that tend towards analyses of processes, institutions, functions and effects. But for the purposes of this paper I would like to say that all these questions remain at the ontic level, and that the ontological interrogation of media requires something else.