Mediology

Definition

Mediology is a term coined by Régis Debray to denote the study of how abstract ideas lead to concrete practices, laws, and customs.

Debray fought alongside Ernesto "Che" Guevara in the late 1960s and was sentenced to 30 years in prison by a Bolivian war tribunal, but was released after three years and returned to France to found the discipline of mediology.

In his words, mediology studies the black-box problem. If the input is sounds, words, letters, even photons, and the output is legislation, institutions, police forces, and so on, then inside the black box must be what he calls the act of transmission, the whole set of technologies.

In this sense, mediology studies the history of ideas with a focus on what mediating technologies allowed those ideas to become the cultural institutions we see today. Marx's original ideas required the printing press, a networked international intellectual elite, and living intermediaries such as Lenin and Mao to become the Communism we know today.

Debray tends to downplay the role of technological determinism by looking for cultural factors that influenced the creation of the specific technology. To explain this he uses the example of the modern mechanical clock. We could look at the effects of the invention of the clock and talk about how it influenced history, yet the clock was invented because monks needed a way to keep accurate time measurement to implement their strict theological code. Thus in this case it was an abstract theological need that manifested in a technology that then spread across Europe to have profound changes on how everyone organized their life, making the notion of strong technological determinism a bit more complicated.

Mediology is a natural complement to the project of cyborg anthropology, although there are differences worth noting. Cyborg anthropology is more concerned with how information technologies have affected our notions of what it means to be human, while mediology tends to examine how ideas work with and through technologies to create persuasive cultural institutions.

Transmission

Debray separates communication from transmission, and the distinction carries the whole discipline. Communication moves a message through space, between people who are alive at the same time. Transmission moves a message through time, between generations, and requires institutions, bodies, training, and material carriers to survive the journey.

Media studies attends mostly to the first. Mediology takes the second as its subject, which is why churches, schools, and archives matter to it as much as printing presses do.

Mediaspheres

Debray divides history into periods named for the dominant medium. A mediasphere is a dynamic system of complex ecosystems reorganised by and around a single dominant medium, generally the most recent. The material and cultural vectors of transmission form this system together, and it reshapes its surroundings as its surroundings reshape it.

There are three.

Logosphere. The period following the invention of writing in the axial age, still dominated by oral culture. The written word is central, but its teachings are diffused mainly by speech and images. In Greece the logosphere makes possible the transition from mythos to logos. Debray associates it with kingdom and faith.

Graphosphere. Begins with the printing press in the fifteenth century, which does not abolish the logosphere so much as absorb it. The age of print, political ideologies, nations, and laws.

Videosphere. The audiovisual present.

He applies the same scheme to how people have looked at images: travelling through images to God in the age of idols, contemplating beyond images in the age of art, and now controlling images for their own sake.

Method

Transmission technologies are not only media. Debray insists on including other technical and cultural inventions, particularly new forms of transport. His example is the bicycle, which he associates with the rise of democratic rational individualism, a new role for women in advanced societies, and the kinetic ideas appearing in early modernist art and cinema.

A mediologist can work at three scales: within a system, such as book production and the relations between authors and publishers; between systems, such as how painting and early photography influenced each other; or across systems entirely.

Position against determinism

Debray is explicit about this. He holds that futurologists such as Alvin Toffler overemphasise the thread of technological determinism in history and then project it forward, and that the technologies of transmission, writing systems, printing presses, and computers, do not necessarily drive change in a predictably specific direction.

This is what separates him from McLuhan, whose framework he otherwise draws on. See Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.

Lineage

Mediology descends from the semiology of the 1960s associated with Roland Barthes and Umberto Eco, and is affiliated across the Atlantic with Peirce's semiotics and McLuhan's media analysis, while standing in deliberate revolt against its parent system.

It also draws on Althusser and Foucault, on André Leroi-Gourhan's anthropology of technique, on Michel Serres and Bruno Latour, and on the material histories of the Annales school. The technologies it tracks run from stylus and clay to quill and parchment to press and paper to mouse and screen.

Debray names poets and fine artists as the real forerunners of mediology, citing Mallarmé, Valéry, and Hugo alongside Taine, de Certeau, Derrida, and Dagognet.

Reception

Mediology is not widely discussed in either francophone or Anglo-Saxon circles and remains fairly unknown and little taught. Debray himself presented Introduction à la médiologie (2000) as a manual for a discipline that is not one.

Key texts

• Debray, Régis. Cours de médiologie générale. Gallimard, 1991.
• Debray, Régis. Vie et mort de l'image: une histoire du regard en Occident. Gallimard, 1992.
• Debray, Régis. Media Manifestos: On the Technological Transmission of Cultural Forms. Verso, 1996.
• Debray, Régis. Transmitting Culture. Columbia University Press, 2000.
• Debray, Régis. Introduction à la médiologie. PUF, 2000.
• Les Cahiers de médiologie, 1996 to 2004, and its successor journal Médium.

Related Reading

• Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
• The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media
• Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory
• We Have Never Been Modern
• The Language of New Media
• Society of the Spectacle
• Simulacra and Simulation
• The System of Objects
• Paul Otlet
• Prosthetic culture
• Collaborative Reality
• The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century
• The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918
• Myth of the Machine : Technics and Human Development
• What Technology Wants
• They Became What They Beheld
• Time and Bits: Managing Digital Continuity by Margaret MacLean