Mediology
Encyclopedia
Mediology broadly indicates a wide-ranging method for the analysis of cultural transmission in society and across societies, a method which challenges the conventional idea that 'technology is not culture'. The mediological method pays specific attention to the role of organisations and technical innovations, and the ways in which these can ensure the potency of cultural transmission - and thus the transformation of ideas into a civilisational worldview capable of sustained action.
The term was first coined and introduced in French as "médiologie" by the French intellectual Régis Debray
in the "Teachers, Writers, Celebrities" section of his book Le pouvoir intellectuel en France, (Editions Ramsay, 1979). The English form of the term became more widely known and respected in the English-speaking world with the publication of the key text on mediology in English, Debray's Transmitting Culture (University of Columbia Press, 2004). Mediology was taught for the first time in the Sorbonne (Paris) in 2007 :fr:Médiologie.
The practice of mediology is not a science, and thus is able to range across academic disciplines. The main areas involved are those of longitudinal history (the history of technologies, the history of the book, the histories and theories of aesthetics) and also research in communications and information theory.
Mediology is not a narrow specialist area of contemporary academic knowledge (as media sociology is), nor does it aspire to be a precise science of signs (as semiotics
does). It differs from the models put forwards by communication studies
, in that its focus is not isolated individuals and a fleeting few moments of communication. Instead mediologists study the cultural transmission of religions, ideologies, the arts and political ideas in society, and across societies, over a time period that is usually to be measured in months, decades or millennia. Debray argues that mediology... "would like to bring to light the function of medium
in all its forms, over a long time span - since the birth of writing. And without becoming obsessed by today's media" http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/1999/08/DEBRAY/12314
Mediology must thus closely examine the methods used for the memorising, transmission, and displacement of cultural knowledge in any milieu. But it must balance its understanding of these with an equally close study of our individual modes of belief, thoughts, and competing social organisations. Mediology must further understand that such transmission is not simply happening within a lofty linguistic or textual discourse, but that transmission takes an equally valid concrete form in which "material technologies and symbolic forms" http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/1999/08/DEBRAY/12314 combine to produce things such as rituals, architecture, flags, special sites, customs, typefaces and book bindings, smells and sounds, bodily gestures and postures, all of which have a potent anchoring role in cultural transmission among ordinary people.
Debray further points to the need to consider the role in transmission of all manner of non-media technical-cultural inventions, especially those of new forms of transportation. He gives the historical example of the bicycle
, which he suggests was historically associated with: the rise of a democratic rational individualism; a new role for women in advanced societies; and the new kinetic ideas expressed in early modernist art and cinema.
A mediologist might thus make an examination "within a system" (e.g. of systems of book production, of authors and publishers), or of "the interaction between systems" (e.g.: how painting and early photography influenced each other), or even of "the interactions across systems" (e.g.: the ways in which symbolic transmission of systematic knowledge is brought to intersect with the material history of actual transportation - such as desert trading routes and ancient religion, telegraph and railroad, the radio and airplanes, television and satellites, mobile phones and cars).
Debray is generally critical of some of the ideas of Marshall McLuhan
(whom he sees as being overly technologically determinist), and of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu
. He also tries to step beyond Antonio Gramsci
, in that he suggests that an ideology cannot be comprehended in ideological terms alone.
(Wide Angle magazine, Vol.18, No.1, January 1996), was a four-page book review of Debray's Vie et Mort de l'Image, in which she claimed to have discerned "traces of a strong, vulgar Marxist school of thought".
The second review, by Pramod Nayor of the University of Hyderabad (Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory, Vol.8, No.1, Winter 2006) was a review of the English translation of Transmitting Culture (2004). In concluding the review Nayor notes the similarities of some aspects and directions of mediology to Birmingham School cultural studies
ranging from "Raymond Williams
through Stuart Hall
". Nayor also notes that recent philosophers and historians of science - he cites Bruno Latour
, Eugene Thacker
and Dwight Atkinson - have also examined science in relation to "intersecting cultural, ethnic, economic and iconographic 'bases' of the transmission of culture"
An article by Steven Maris in Fibreculture No.12 http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue12/issue12_maras.html similarly suggests that Debray is too firmly embedded in "the French academic scene" and that thus "Debray's explicit engagement with other national scholarly traditions of media, communications and cultural studies in the works mentioned above is minimal". Maris also notes that mediology "predates much of the [current academic] interest in networked cultures and new media".
Physicists Alan Sokal
and Jean Bricmont
have criticized Debray's work for using Godel's theorem
as a metaphor without understanding its basic ideas, in their book Fashionable Nonsense
. Debray engaged in dialogue with Bricmont in a 2003 book titled "À l'ombre des lumières : Débat entre un philosophe et un scientifique", which so far has not been translated into English.
Despite such criticisms, the six-volume New Dictionary of the History of Ideas (2004) wrote of Debray that "His achievement is to have synthesized these earlier arguments into a practice with a powerful political project ahead of it." (Vol.4, page 1394).
The term was first coined and introduced in French as "médiologie" by the French intellectual Régis Debray
Régis Debray
Jules Régis Debray is a French intellectual, journalist, government official and professor. He is known for his theorization of mediology, a critical theory of the long-term transmission of cultural meaning in human society; and for having fought in 1967 with Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara in...
in the "Teachers, Writers, Celebrities" section of his book Le pouvoir intellectuel en France, (Editions Ramsay, 1979). The English form of the term became more widely known and respected in the English-speaking world with the publication of the key text on mediology in English, Debray's Transmitting Culture (University of Columbia Press, 2004). Mediology was taught for the first time in the Sorbonne (Paris) in 2007 :fr:Médiologie.
The practice of mediology is not a science, and thus is able to range across academic disciplines. The main areas involved are those of longitudinal history (the history of technologies, the history of the book, the histories and theories of aesthetics) and also research in communications and information theory.
Mediology is not a narrow specialist area of contemporary academic knowledge (as media sociology is), nor does it aspire to be a precise science of signs (as semiotics
Semiotics
Semiotics, also called semiotic studies or semiology, is the study of signs and sign processes , indication, designation, likeness, analogy, metaphor, symbolism, signification, and communication...
does). It differs from the models put forwards by communication studies
Communication studies
Communication Studies is an academic field that deals with processes of communication, commonly defined as the sharing of symbols over distances in space and time. Hence, communication studies encompasses a wide range of topics and contexts ranging from face-to-face conversation to speeches to mass...
, in that its focus is not isolated individuals and a fleeting few moments of communication. Instead mediologists study the cultural transmission of religions, ideologies, the arts and political ideas in society, and across societies, over a time period that is usually to be measured in months, decades or millennia. Debray argues that mediology... "would like to bring to light the function of medium
Media (communication)
In communications, media are the storage and transmission channels or tools used to store and deliver information or data...
in all its forms, over a long time span - since the birth of writing. And without becoming obsessed by today's media" http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/1999/08/DEBRAY/12314
Mediology must thus closely examine the methods used for the memorising, transmission, and displacement of cultural knowledge in any milieu. But it must balance its understanding of these with an equally close study of our individual modes of belief, thoughts, and competing social organisations. Mediology must further understand that such transmission is not simply happening within a lofty linguistic or textual discourse, but that transmission takes an equally valid concrete form in which "material technologies and symbolic forms" http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/1999/08/DEBRAY/12314 combine to produce things such as rituals, architecture, flags, special sites, customs, typefaces and book bindings, smells and sounds, bodily gestures and postures, all of which have a potent anchoring role in cultural transmission among ordinary people.
Debray further points to the need to consider the role in transmission of all manner of non-media technical-cultural inventions, especially those of new forms of transportation. He gives the historical example of the bicycle
Bicycle
A bicycle, also known as a bike, pushbike or cycle, is a human-powered, pedal-driven, single-track vehicle, having two wheels attached to a frame, one behind the other. A person who rides a bicycle is called a cyclist, or bicyclist....
, which he suggests was historically associated with: the rise of a democratic rational individualism; a new role for women in advanced societies; and the new kinetic ideas expressed in early modernist art and cinema.
A mediologist might thus make an examination "within a system" (e.g. of systems of book production, of authors and publishers), or of "the interaction between systems" (e.g.: how painting and early photography influenced each other), or even of "the interactions across systems" (e.g.: the ways in which symbolic transmission of systematic knowledge is brought to intersect with the material history of actual transportation - such as desert trading routes and ancient religion, telegraph and railroad, the radio and airplanes, television and satellites, mobile phones and cars).
Debray is generally critical of some of the ideas of Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
Herbert Marshall McLuhan, CC was a Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar—a professor of English literature, a literary critic, a rhetorician, and a communication theorist...
(whom he sees as being overly technologically determinist), and of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu
Pierre Bourdieu
Pierre Bourdieu was a French sociologist, anthropologist, and philosopher.Starting from the role of economic capital for social positioning, Bourdieu pioneered investigative frameworks and terminologies such as cultural, social, and symbolic capital, and the concepts of habitus, field or location,...
. He also tries to step beyond Antonio Gramsci
Antonio Gramsci
Antonio Gramsci was an Italian writer, politician, political philosopher, and linguist. He was a founding member and onetime leader of the Communist Party of Italy and was imprisoned by Benito Mussolini's Fascist regime...
, in that he suggests that an ideology cannot be comprehended in ideological terms alone.
Criticisms
Criticisms of mediology in English so far have been found in two short book reviews and one article. The first, by the screenwriter Yvette BíróYvette Biro
Yvette Biro Ph.D. - Essayist, Screen-writer, and Professor Emeritus at New York University Graduate Film School .Her early books on the aesthetics of film were first published in her native Hungary, which became handbooks for film-schools in the country. Meanwhile she worked on a dozen of...
(Wide Angle magazine, Vol.18, No.1, January 1996), was a four-page book review of Debray's Vie et Mort de l'Image, in which she claimed to have discerned "traces of a strong, vulgar Marxist school of thought".
The second review, by Pramod Nayor of the University of Hyderabad (Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory, Vol.8, No.1, Winter 2006) was a review of the English translation of Transmitting Culture (2004). In concluding the review Nayor notes the similarities of some aspects and directions of mediology to Birmingham School cultural studies
Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies
The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies was a research centre at the University of Birmingham, England. It was founded in 1964 by Richard Hoggart, its first director...
ranging from "Raymond Williams
Raymond Williams
Raymond Henry Williams was a Welsh academic, novelist and critic. He was an influential figure within the New Left and in wider culture. His writings on politics, culture, the mass media and literature are a significant contribution to the Marxist critique of culture and the arts...
through Stuart Hall
Stuart Hall
-People:*Stuart Hall , British radio and television presenter*Stuart Hall , British cultural theorist and first editor of the New Left Review...
". Nayor also notes that recent philosophers and historians of science - he cites Bruno Latour
Bruno Latour
Bruno Latour is a French sociologist of science and anthropologist and an influential theorist in the field of Science and Technology Studies...
, Eugene Thacker
Eugene Thacker
Eugene Thacker is an author and associate professor at The New School in New York. Thacker is known for his work in philosophy, media theory, and the study of genre horror and science fiction. In addition to his writing on science and technology, Thacker has written on the work of Georges Bataille,...
and Dwight Atkinson - have also examined science in relation to "intersecting cultural, ethnic, economic and iconographic 'bases' of the transmission of culture"
An article by Steven Maris in Fibreculture No.12 http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue12/issue12_maras.html similarly suggests that Debray is too firmly embedded in "the French academic scene" and that thus "Debray's explicit engagement with other national scholarly traditions of media, communications and cultural studies in the works mentioned above is minimal". Maris also notes that mediology "predates much of the [current academic] interest in networked cultures and new media".
Physicists Alan Sokal
Alan Sokal
Alan David Sokal is a professor of mathematics at University College London and professor of physics at New York University. He works in statistical mechanics and combinatorics. To the general public he is best known for his criticism of postmodernism, resulting in the Sokal affair in...
and Jean Bricmont
Jean Bricmont
Jean Bricmont is a Belgian theoretical physicist, philosopher of science and a professor at the Université catholique de Louvain. He works on renormalization group and nonlinear differential equations....
have criticized Debray's work for using Godel's theorem
Gödel's theorem
Gödel's theorem may refer to:*Gödel's incompleteness theorems*Gödel's completeness theorem*Gödel's speedup theorem...
as a metaphor without understanding its basic ideas, in their book Fashionable Nonsense
Fashionable Nonsense
Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science is a book by professors Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont...
. Debray engaged in dialogue with Bricmont in a 2003 book titled "À l'ombre des lumières : Débat entre un philosophe et un scientifique", which so far has not been translated into English.
Despite such criticisms, the six-volume New Dictionary of the History of Ideas (2004) wrote of Debray that "His achievement is to have synthesized these earlier arguments into a practice with a powerful political project ahead of it." (Vol.4, page 1394).
See also
- Communication studiesCommunication studiesCommunication Studies is an academic field that deals with processes of communication, commonly defined as the sharing of symbols over distances in space and time. Hence, communication studies encompasses a wide range of topics and contexts ranging from face-to-face conversation to speeches to mass...
- Walter BenjaminWalter BenjaminWalter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin was a German-Jewish intellectual, who functioned variously as a literary critic, philosopher, sociologist, translator, radio broadcaster and essayist...
- History of technologyHistory of technologyThe history of technology is the history of the invention of tools and techniques, and is similar in many ways to the history of humanity. Background knowledge has enabled people to create new things, and conversely, many scientific endeavors have become possible through technologies which assist...
- History of ideasHistory of ideasThe history of ideas is a field of research in history that deals with the expression, preservation, and change of human ideas over time. The history of ideas is a sister-discipline to, or a particular approach within, intellectual history...
- MemeMemeA meme is "an idea, behaviour or style that spreads from person to person within a culture."A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena...
s - MemeticsMemeticsMemetics is a theory of mental content based on an analogy with Darwinian evolution, originating from Richard Dawkins' 1976 book The Selfish Gene. It purports to be an approach to evolutionary models of cultural information transfer. A meme, analogous to a gene, is essentially a "unit of...
- Cultural behaviorCultural behaviorCultural behavior is behavior exhibited by humans that is extrasomatic or extragenetic, in other words, learned.-Learned Behavior:...
- Cultural selection theoryCultural selection theoryCultural selection theory is a scientific discipline that explores sociological and cultural evolution the same way that Darwinian selection theory is used to explain biological evolution....
- Cultural reproductionCultural reproductionCultural reproduction is the transmission of existing cultural values and norms from generation to generation. Cultural reproduction refers to the mechanisms by which continuity of cultural experience is sustained across time...
- Evolutionary epistemologyEvolutionary epistemologyEvolutionary epistemology refers to two distinct topics - on the one hand, the biological evolution of cognitive mechanisms in animals and humans, and on the other hand, a theory in that knowledge itself evolves by natural selection....
- Tipping point (sociology)
- Taste (sociology)Taste (sociology)Taste as an aesthetic, sociological, economic and anthropological concept refers to a cultural patterns of choice and preference. While taste is often understood as a biological concept, it can also be reasonably studied as a social or cultural phenomenon. Taste is about drawing distinctions...
- Diffusion of innovationsDiffusion of innovationsDiffusion of Innovations is a theory that seeks to explain how, why, and at what rate new ideas and technology spread through cultures. Everett Rogers, a professor of rural sociology, popularized the theory in his 1962 book Diffusion of Innovations...
External links
- The French revue of mediology MediuM (mostly in French, some English).
- "On Transmission: A Metamethodological Analysis (after Régis Debray)" by Steven Maras, University of Sydney. FibreCulture issue 12.
- A Wired magazine interview with Debray.
- Régis Debray'site : http://www.regisdebray.com/
- Louise Merzeau (french mediologist) : http://www.merzeau.net/
- François-Bernard Huyghe (french mediologist) : http://www.huyghe.fr
- Forum Mediologie (Germany) : http://www.mediologie.avinus.de/category/mediologie-als-methode/