media blog

Many of my readers also read Levi at Larval Subjects anyway. But in case you missed it, I want to second his link to the orbis mediologicus blog.

And I agree with the following statement by Levi:

“While I have a great love for my brothers and sisters in literary theory, media studies has been a privileged site for object-oriented ontology, as they have perpetually had to theorize the mess of interactions between new technologies and signs, placing them all on equal footing. Like the critical animal theorists, the media studies crew created object-oriented ontology before object-oriented ontology existed, carefully tracing networks of objects ranging from signs, to images, to technologies and economics, being forced to forge new concepts as a result, and increasingly drifting away from anything like eliminative idealism by virtue of the demands of their object.”

“Eliminative idealism” is a great phrase. And I also happen to think that eliminative materialism is actually just eliminative idealism. There’s nothing realist about replacing manifest images with scientific or mathematical images. This sort of person really sees the world as made up of nothing but an army of images: some of them to be hallowed as truth (those that exist in nature), the others to be angrily debunked and pistol-whipped (those fabricated by the human mind). Since everything is just an image, philosophy turns into nothing but a set of criteria for differentiating between good and bad images. And that’s not realism.