Special Issue: Manifestos

What Is Media Theory? Media Theory

Vol. 1 | No. 1 | 01-11
© The Author(s) 2017
SIMON DAWES CC-BY-NC-ND
http://mediatheoryjournal.org/
Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines
(UVSQ), France

With the relative ease with which new journals can now be established, the launch of
a new journal of media theory obliges us all the more to justify the need for such an
endeavour (Cubitt, this issue), to argue that we do indeed need yet another journal
theorising media (Shome, this issue), and to convince at least some readers that the
journal deserves the name, Media Theory (Mitchell, this issue). For this launch issue of
the journal, editorial and advisory board members were invited to set out their own
views on the importance of (a new journal of) media theory. While the journal can
hardly satisfy the occasionally conflicting and contradictory wishes of everyone on
the boards, this special issue represents a pluralistic manifesto for the journal –
manifestos for various possibilities and directions for Media Theory.

Media, Theory and Media Theory

Media Theory is not, therefore, a journal that privileges any particular theoretical
approach, perspective or tradition to the study of media, but nor is it simply a matter
of disinterestedly presenting their diversity or that of the range of theoretical
concepts or tools proposed or applied in media research. Rather, in emphasising
‘media’, ‘theory’ and ‘media theory’, the journal aims to deprovincialise media theory by
bringing into dialogue and debate the diversity of ways in which media are theorised.
For despite the inherently interdisciplinary histories of the various disciplines in
which media is studied internationally, there remains a tendency to restrict one’s
reading to one’s own field or disciplinary, geographical or linguistic bubble, applying
and developing theories without sufficient knowledge of how those theories have
already been debated and developed elsewhere. And although media research has
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Vol. 1 | No. 1 | 2017 http://mediatheoryjournal.org/

been institutionalised in media, communication and information studies disciplines,

departments, research centres and journals around the world, much of the theoretical
media research continues to be done outside of those fields. In many of the most
well-established (and often commercially published) media journals, the theoretical
element of individual articles is often restricted to the opening literature review
section of peer-reviewed, empirical ‘research’ articles, while articles that are devoted
to theoretical engagement and close reading of theoretical texts are demoted to un-
peer-reviewed ‘commentary’ sections. Conversely, the more ‘theoretical’ media
journals (normally more recently established, online and open access) tend to focus
on particular schools or, if they are explicitly open-goaled and interdisciplinary, to
either privilege dialogue between particular approaches or disciplines, or to feature
multiple disciplinary approaches without much evidence of dialogue or
rapprochement between them. This journal aims to offer the best of both these types
of media journal, as well as those non-media-related journals that privilege theoretical
exploration and debate, with a particular focus on transcending theoretical,
disciplinary and geographical boundaries.

The aim is not to establish a particular theory of any particular media, or to present
the various theories of the various media; it is rather to theorise media by unravelling
and teasing apart, by undermining and critiquing, and by providing genealogical
accounts of alternative attempts at theorising media. To do so necessitates the
transcending and transgressing of disciplinary boundaries, and the bringing into
dialogue of diverse theoretical approaches. The journal will endeavour to encourage
the Marxists as well as the Foucauldians, the media historians as well as the media
archaeologists, those who follow in the footsteps of Williams as well as those who
stand on the shoulders of McLuhan, and those from within the British cultural and
media studies tradition as well as those within German cultural techniques and media
theory, to write as much for each other as for the already converted, resisting the
temptation to settle for the journal becoming an echo chamber for any one
approach. For Media Theory, to theorise is therefore to ‘make, adapt, stretch and
compact distinctions between terms that are generally familiar’ (Baehr, 2000: xix), to
‘dismantle’ traditions (Baehr, 2000: xlv), to ‘flush out assumptions’ (Kendall and
Wickham, 1999: 30), to reconstruct the genealogy of theorisations and to reveal the

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‘dissension of things’ (Foucault, 1977: 142); it is the “never-finished task and

vocation of undermining philosophy as such, of unravelling affirmative statements
and propositions of all kinds” (Jameson, 2009: 59). Unlike (media) philosophy,
(media) theory must always return to the stuff of media (Cubitt, this issue) and to its
own mediation (Mitchell, this issue). On one level, this means continually asking the
question, what is, or are, media? More than a particular technology or industry,
anything can become a medium – from sex to seismographs, from chlorophyll to
cash (Cubitt, this issue), from a grain of sand to the universe (Mitchell, this issue) –
but not everything is always-already a medium. Infinite, indefinite (Mitchell, this
issue) and ‘intrinsically plural as object’ (Cubitt, this issue), there is nevertheless
always something outside media – the unmediated, the immediate, the presentation as
opposed to the representation (Mitchell, this issue). One task is thus to perpetually
reconceptualise what concerns us as the shared object of our studies, refusing
consensus on what is to be included or excluded.

Thus far, the contributions to the journal have been from mostly – if, thankfully, not
yet dead – white men from the global north. If the journal is to be effective in its
pursuit of deprovincialising media theory, then more effort needs to be made to
include and engage with theories and theorists from normally neglected communities
and locations. The effort to deprovincialise media theory goes beyond inclusion of
and dialogue with multiple disciplines, locations, identities and perspectives,
however; it means decolonising and geopoliticising theory (Shome, this issue) and
generating a critique of media power.

Aware of its own mediation as an online and open access journal, Media Theory will
aim to be a journal that is both recognisably an academic journal, by paying heed to
scholarly conventions, as well as something new, by challenging those conventions
and what we have come to expect an academic journal to be. Adhering for the most
part to referencing conventions, the double-blind peer-review process, publishing
ethics, indexing and archiving, and publishing articles with a creative commons
licence that ensures the integrity and authorship of the article, we will nevertheless be
open to experiments in radical open access publishing, including the possibility of
open peer-review and remixing content.

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At the heart of the project behind this journal, therefore, is a focus on

deprovincialisation (media theory from the global south; queering media theory; etc.),
radicalising open access publishing (remixing; rethinking peer-review; theorising
‘openness’ and ‘access’), and problematising the concepts of ‘media’, ‘theory’ and
‘media theory’, as well as a conscious and consistent endeavour to bring into contact
and into dialogue diverse theoretical and methodological approaches, so as to
develop a transnational and transdisciplinary forum of debate on media theory and
academic publishing. Media Theory is thus both an academic journal on media theory,
and an opportunity to self-reflexively critique and debate what media theory and
academic journals are, have been and could possibly be.

Media, Metaphor and Representation

The first section opens with essays on media, metaphor and representation,
beginning with W.J.T. Mitchell’s metaphorical reflection on what we talk about when
we talk about media: ‘Counting Media: Some Rules of Thumb’. Distinguishing
between five overlapping and contradictory rules of media (the rules of none, one,
two, three and all), Mitchell insists on the need for media theory to engage with
media ‘on its own field’, to question its own antitheses and to be self-reflexive about
its own metalanguage. Setting out the three basic orders of media –
images/sounds/words – and mapping them onto other familiar triads from the
history of media theory, from icon/index/symbol to gramophone/film/typewriter,
he also reminds us that media is itself one part of a triad: that between sender and
receiver in the transmission/communication model. Ultimately, he argues, media can
be both everything and nothing, while everything and nothing are, in turn, always
potentially media. Beyond the unambitious and yet impossible task of simply
defining, listing and counting all these different potential types of media, or asking
when and how something becomes media, Mitchell argues that the task of media
theory is to provide an ‘account of such counting’; of the ways in which we have
theorised media, as much as a theory of media itself.

For Liam Cole Young, such attempts at triadic thinking highlight the importance of
imagination, conceptual modelling, speculative thinking and experimental writing to
media theory. In his article, ‘Imagination and Literary Media Theory’, Young laments
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the waning importance of literary studies (in favour of communication studies and
anthropology) to media theory, reminding us that imagination – as object as well as
method – has been an “engine” that has driven media theoretical debates over the
past sixty years or so. In emphasising the imaginative thinking, close reading and
experimentalism of the literary stream, Young shows how media theory has been
able to ground abstract ideas in material, discursive and technical contexts that have
otherwise been neglected by more historical or philosophical approaches. In light of
the contemporary complexities of everyday life and new forms of computation,
commerce and governance, he argues that a return to the literary roots of media
theory could help provide the new metaphors we need to understand the relation
between technological and social change.

For Scott McQuire, we must continue to question the general understanding of

‘media’, where ‘mediation’ is seen as the production of ‘signs’ related to or
representing something – such as voice, experience or event – that is somewhere
else. In ‘Media Theory 2017’, he looks back at Derrida’s theorising of ‘writing’ in Of
Grammatology to argue for the contemporary importance of theorising presence,
absence and temporality in media that have become digital, mobile and ubiquitous.
Despite numerous media studies attempts at theorising the secondariness,
supplementarity and representationality of media, McQuire argues that new terms
and concepts are needed if we are to understand the ways in which profound
changes in all that we have understood as media – “in terms of scale, integration with
everyday life, transformation of the archive, and the growing convergence of media
platforms with other domains such as transport, logistics, finance, health, and e-
commerce” – constitute a new register of experience that requires a radical
rethinking of assumed relations of presence and absence.

Locating Media, Theory and Society

Responding to transformations in, and the increasing imbrication of, media
technologies and society is often presented as the study of ‘media and society’, where
‘society’ could mean ‘anything else’, and where any theoretical engagement is with a
separate body of (non-media-centric) knowledge developed within other disciplines.
There has in recent years, however, been a debate on whether or not media theory

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should be privileging media-centric approaches instead. In considering the merits of

the two approaches in ‘The ‘Theory’ in Media Theory: The ‘Media-Centrism’
Debate’, Terry Flew situates them within wider and more historical debates about the
relation between materiality and discourse in the work of Hall, Laclau & Mouffe and
others, as well as in the debate between McLuhan and Williams on, respectively, the
media’s influence on society or the social shaping of media. Turning to the
mediasphere, medium theory, media ecologies, mediation and mediatization, Flew
argues that the journal should be open to consideration of those perspectives on the
media that come from within the study of media itself, and engage in more
speculative accounts of where our media technologies may be leading us socially,
culturally, politically and economically.

In retheorising ‘media’ and its boundaries, it becomes essential to reconsider the

boundaries of ‘media theory’ too, and, in ‘Configuring Media Theory’, Marc
Steinberg questions the provincialisation of media theory by asking ‘what counts as
(media) theory?’. If we are delimiting media theory to critical theory, then we ignore
those theorists, such as Alvin Toffler, that fall on the wrong side of the divide.
Likewise, we may also be delimiting which regions of the world produce theory. For
Steinberg, the need to locate media theory is a question of genre and industry, as well
as of geography, as different systems of print capitalism in other countries would
produce academic publications with different standards and forms, which would in
turn produce different kinds of theory. Considering the diversity of types, media and
milieux of theory conducted in Japan, by media figures, artists and entrepreneurs in
popular paperbacks, manga and weekly magazines for general and professional
readerships, as well as university lecturers writing in hardbacks produced for their
students and colleagues by commercial academic publishers or university presses, he
proposes that media theory is thus a ‘configuration’ more than a definable entity as
such; one that requires us to reflect upon the institutional and geographical
conditions of media theorisation.

In doing so, we can more ambitiously aim to geopoliticise and decolonise media
studies, producing new epistemological frames within which to study media. This is
what, in her article, ‘Going South and Engaging Non-Western Modernities’, Raka

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Shome argues the journal should be doing. Taking issue with the ‘comparing media
systems’ and ‘media/communication and development’ approaches, as well as the
more recent emphasis on ‘dewesternising media studies’, Shome argues that they
tend to position Southern media (studies) in opposition to those in an invisible
North/West. For Shome, therefore, theorising media – rethinking “what media
means, what it can mean, its histories, its scope of operations, and even the objects
that may count as media” – is a question of geopoliticising knowledge production
and non-Western mediated modernities on their own terms. Such a task also entails
rethinking what ‘theory’ might be in relation to media and media studies.

Machinic World
The urgent need to develop new theories and concepts to keep up with rapid
technological and social change has always been an important rationale for media
theory. Today, as abstract data is captured, stored and analysed by machine learning
systems in increasingly complex ways, new conceptual models for thinking about
machine learning and artificial intelligence are required if we are to understand and
critique what is happening beneath the surface of these new computational forms. In
his ‘Prolegomenon to a Media Theory of Machine Learning: Compute-Computing
and Compute-Computed’, David M. Berry attempts to do just this by drawing on
Spinoza’s distinction between Natura naturans (‘naturing Nature’) and Natura naturata
(‘natured Nature’) to think through the difference between constitutive and operative
types of machine learning. In suggesting these concepts, he draws out the
significance of recent developments in this complex technological field not just for
media theory and digital humanities, but for social theory and human attention too.

Despite acknowledging the significance of algorithms to our everyday lives, however,

most of us have no idea how they actually work, nor of the extent to which our
tastes and desires are shaped by machinic operations. While Berry interrogates the
medium specificity of algorithms and software to understand the former, Ned
Rossiter considers the algorithmic production of subjectivity and affect in order to
propose a response to the latter. In ‘Paranoia is Real: Algorithmic Governance and
the Shadow of Control’, Rossiter responds to recent debates on fake news and post-
truth politics to argue that meaning and truth are tied less to representation these

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days (if we accept that we have moved from a logocentric to a machinic world) than
to algorithmic calculations of anticipation and pre-emption. The task becomes,
therefore, one of developing techniques and tactics to assist our political and
subjective orientation in worlds of algorithmic governance and data economies.

But ‘What Are the Theoretical Lessons when Agnostic Hacker Politics Turn to the
Right?’, asks Johan Söderberg. How do we stop these new techniques and tactics
being hijacked by corporations or by the far right? Although originally allied with
left-liberal causes, for example, Internet subcultures and discussion forums provided
the breeding ground for the return to the mainstream of neo-fascists and white
supremacists under the self-proclaimed banner of alt-right politics. Fake news and
the alt-right may urgently demand new theoretical responses, but the they also pose
questions for the efficacy of previous theorisations of media, and for the future of
media theory itself.

Form and Matter

While some are convinced that theory has had its day and is no longer relevant,
particularly in a context of big data, algorithmic automation and the computational
turn, M. Beatrice Fazi makes the case, in her article, ‘The Ends of Media Theory’, for
the continued need for theoretical enquiry and speculative endeavour. Situating the
‘end of theory’ discourse in the historical context of long-standing critiques of
rationalism and logocentrism, and drawing on Jameson’s distinction between theory
and philosophy, as well as Horkheimer’s distinction between traditional and critical
theory, Fazi focuses on the importance of abstraction, conceptualisation and
problematisation to both (media) theory and (media) philosophy. Arguing that new
concepts are needed to perceive and think in a highly techno-mediated world, to
“think computation precisely as a problem; as a problem in need of relevant
concepts”, Fazi argues that media theory is only an abstraction in the Whiteheadian
sense that experience is always-already abstract, and that to abstract is not, therefore,
to move away from the real, but rather “to construct it in terms of its actuality”.

Attempts to grasp the character of “rapid and radical social change” and to construct
reality in terms of its actuality have led many media theorists to relish the dissolution
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of the opposition between form and matter. For John W.P. Phillips, however, there
remains a tension between those that privilege form and those that privilege matter,
putting a strain on the very idea of ontology itself. In ‘The End of Ontology and the
Future of Media Theory’, Phillips grapples with theoretical and philosophical
attempts to “think things”, to “think the media” in terms of the physical existence of
“the between”, and to think the way each media platform is “displaced by its own
mediatic disruption”.

Responding to this dissolution between form and matter, Mickey Vallee’s article,
‘Contiguity and Interval: Opening Media Theory’, turns our attention to the borders
of mediation. For Vallee, media are both here and there, and mediation, which both
connects and disconnects, is only possible in terms of its own ruptures and intervals.
Arguing that the contemporary boundaries of mediated environments are expanding
and collapsing in continuous variations, affecting the very definitions of ‘media’ we
have come to depend upon, he turns to topology as a creative way of exploring
media as open and fluid. Understood topologically, there is no division between the
contiguous and the interval, but rather these terms are nodes in a network of
continuous variation that underlies evolving definitions of media, bodies,
environment, time, place and space.

Turning to the simultaneity of processes of stratification and mediation in his article,

‘Media Theory: How Can We Live the Good Life in Strata?’, Rob Shields reminds us
that media not only transmit and store, classify and relate; they also isolate, juxtapose
and stratify. For Shields, media needs theory to understand the “layered, stratified
and mediated world of many (local and global) scales, contending histories and
futures that haunt our present as anxieties”. But the purpose of theory is not just to
help us understand or critique the contemporary condition; we need media theory, he
argues, if we are to learn how to live the good life in such mediated and stratified
times.

In the Spirit of the Manifesto

Although all the authors who submitted articles to this inaugural issue were asked to
provide manifestos on what they would want a journal on media theory to be and do,

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the following were written very much in the style or spirit of a manifesto. Taking the
early 20th Century Blast Manifesto of the British Vorticist movement as her starting
point, for example, Jane Birkin shows how the manifesto can be considered as a
material object that makes declarations in form as well as content. In her article,
‘Manifesto: Graphic, Sonic, Affective Object’, Birkin goes on to draw on a range of
concrete poetic and graphic modernist manifestos to highlight the performativity of
their ‘moving information’.

In his call for ‘Open Theory’, Sunil Manghani similarly draws upon a wide range of
examples, from the Communist Manifesto to Bono and 1984, to illustrate a wide range
of issues – from reading and writing, through production and reproduction, to the
relation between (online) journals and their ‘audiences’ – and to argue that media
“gets us faster to what we already know” and that theory “only applies each time it is
evoked”.

In Gary Hall’s ‘The Inhumanist Manifesto’, he adopts the manifesto mode of

political writing to consider the links between his research interests in
posthumanism, piracy, Marxism, open access and the commons, on the one hand,
and, on the other, the various publishing ventures with which he’s been involved.
Taken together, they demonstrate a manifesto by example, in which Hall presents his
own privileging of collaborative, non-competitive and not-for-profit work,
emphasises the performative generation of projects as hyper-political, media gifts –
providing space for “thinking about politics and the political beyond the ways in
which they have conventionally been conceived” – and argues ultimately for the
displacement of the humanist categories that underpin our ideas of academia,
publishing and critique.

In the penultimate article of the issue, ‘10 Propositions for Doing Media Theory
(Again)’, Christoph Raetzsch discusses the significance of the journal’s open access
format, its focus on theory, and its emphasis on the international and
transdisciplinary scope of media theory, which “delimits a space of inquiry where
positions can meet outside their own disciplinary [and geographical] contexts”.
Representing the rich (historical, geographical, disciplinary) legacies of media theory

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in the journal is important, he argues, to promote the kind of detached theoretical

perspective that is required to provide critical distance in the face of accelerated
technological change.

Finally, the issue ends with the first article to have been submitted to the journal: in
the author’s own words, an ‘unrefereeable rant’ on the kind of journal Media Theory
needs to try to be. In ‘What Is a Journal for?’, Sean Cubitt argues that to survive, a
journal needs, more than anything, a reason to exist. For him, this should be a
transdisciplinary project to actively refuse disciplinary closures, and to critically
interrogate the scope and limits of specialisms and disciplines, in contrast to those
who would defend them for their own sakes. Because specialisms are not intrinsically
valuable or collective enterprises, he insists, the journal’s transdisciplinary project
should be to collectively enable (not determine) media theory, and to foster dialogue
between specialist objects and schools of thought so as to “unleash the potential
each of them has locked up inside its disciplinary firewalls”.

We’ll try our best. In the meantime, we hope you enjoy the ‘Manifestos’ issue.

References
Baehr, P. (2003) ‘Editor’s Introduction’ in P Baehr (ed.) The Portable Hannah Arendt,
London: Penguin Books.
Foucault, M. (1977) ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, in DF Bouchard (ed) Language,
Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, Ithaca: Cornell University
Press.
Jameson, F. (2009) Valences of the Dialectic. London: Verso.
Kendall, G. and Wickham, G. (1999) Using Foucault’s Methods, London: SAGE.

Simon Dawes is the founding editor of Media Theory. He is Maître de conférences

(Lecturer) at Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines (UVSQ), France,
and the author of British Broadcasting and the Public-Private Dichotomy: Neoliberalism,
Citizenship and the Public Sphere (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Personal website:
https://smdawes.wordpress.com/

Email: [email protected]

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