Special Issue: Manifestos

The End of Ontology Media Theory

Vol. 1 | No. 1 | 122-136
© The Author(s) 2017
and the Future of CC-BY-NC-ND
http://mediatheoryjournal.org/
Media Theory
JOHN W. P. PHILLIPS
National University of Singapore

Without our even realizing it, a new kind of human being was born in the brief
period of time that separates us from the 1970s.
(Michel Serres, 2016: 7)

Heidegger’s lifelong dream to destroy the binary opposition between form and
matter may be easier to attain with the help of mathematics and computer
science.
(Friedrich Kittler, 2009: 29)

I The End of the World

With media theory at a moment of development that suggests possibly conflicting
directions, the arrival of an open access media theory journal can provide a
speculative forum for establishing ways by which the future of the media and of
media theory might be addressed. In what follows, I sketch two different kinds of
contemporary approach to the media that, while caught within a classical framework,
privileging either a formal or a material emphasis, nonetheless look forward to the
dissolution of the opposition between form and matter and to the establishment of
new categories derived from attempts to grasp the technical aetiology of the media’s
sensible surface.

“It is surely not difficult to see,” writes G. W. F. Hegel, in the wake of momentous
social revolution, “that our time is a time of birth and transition to a new period”
(Hegel, 1997: 20). This statement, from the ‘Preface’ to The Phenomenology of Spirit
(1807), announces a philosophical development that will famously struggle to keep
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pace with the movement of history in the apprehension of imminent change. But it
will do so in the confidence that the revolution in thought, the culmination of more
than 20 centuries of philosophical development, will be as momentous as that
manifested in the social history with which it forms its dialectic. One can assess
Hegel’s prefatory remarks alongside comparable statements made throughout the
modern age, each time addressing a sense of catastrophic and yet stimulating social
turbulence, and expressing the need to match the rate of change in an unnerving
dance with advancements in knowledge that at once reflect and contribute to the
changes with which they aspire to keep in step. Echoing Hegel, Terence Hawkes in
the ‘Editor’s Introduction’ to each volume of the New Accents series of edgy critical
theory text books (first published in 1982), writes: “It is easy to see that we are living
in a time of rapid and radical social change. It is much less easy to grasp the fact that
such change will inevitably affect the nature of those academic disciplines that both
reflect our society and help to shape it” (xii). The series comprises books intended to
introduce emerging intellectual ideas to a non-specialist readership (particularly
undergraduate students) and, although published under the rubric of literary theory,
it includes topics relating to innovations in areas of cultural studies and media theory:
Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy, Fiske and Hartley’s Reading Television, Dick
Hebdige’s Subculture: The Meaning of Style.

In 2017, some of these New Accents texts remain current and belong among key
references in media history and media archaeology. Coming shortly after Jean-
François Lyotard’s La condition postmoderne (1979) and Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacres et
Simulation (1981), the series marks a moment in the history of a field of knowledge, a
symptom of a kind of accidental tradition, which retrospectively might be collected
under the idea of a critical media theory. It becomes clearer that no attempt to grasp
the character of the “rapid and radical social change” (echoing Hegel’s “birth and
transition to a new period”) could begin without acknowledging the role of the
intricate and yet fundamental connectivity of the technical media in every aspect of
social life. Such a tradition would include the seminal texts of Walter Benjamin,
Georg Simmel, and Paul Virilio, as well as, more recognizably, those of Walter Ong,
Marshall McLuhan and Harold Innis. But more recently the eruption of attempts to,
in various ways, and on various platforms, engage media and advance media theory,
manifests what I perceive as a tension in the field that tends to show up as a contrast,

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within critical media theory generally, between: 1) a tendency to engage more

intimately with the physical technology of the media, on its own terms, to engage
with the seductive, concealed, other side of the visible surface or interface of the
technical media; and 2) turning aside from such seductions, various attempts to
comprehend (to grasp and in some way to contain) a developing media knowledge
within an albeit transformed theoretical framework with its roots in ancient ontology.
In both tendencies, the very idea of an ontology, a science of existing, even physical,
things, including variously numbers, hardware, electronic architecture, the material
logic of the media itself, comes under severe strain. It is therefore desirable to
identify the stakes of this tension.

In a brief late essay, ‘Towards an Ontology of Media’ (2009), Friedrich Kittler

addresses what he sees as the fatal error in classical ontology: the form/matter
dichotomy. And, following Heidegger, he looks forward to its eventual dissolution. If
we suppose that everything – statues as well as trees and people but also technical
objects – can be comprehended as a formal arrangement of some material, as actively
formed passive matter, we are constrained by a framework that must fail, if our aim is
to comprehend the being of the media generally. Kittler’s suggestion is that
contemporary mathematical science can come to the aid of such aims. Kittler’s
ontology seeks the “dark side” of the technical media rather than its “visible face,”
which means putting into question the still tenacious opposition between form and
matter (still alive in kinds of contemporary materialism and in words like
“information”) and in the end replacing it with a new trinity made up of the
categories of the technological hardware, “commands, addresses and data” (30). The
suggestion resonates a bit with the practice of an albeit diverse ‘digital humanities’,
concerned more with learning and exploiting the physics and technology of design as
it is with developing a social or philosophical critique of media. Kittler writes:

But if an ontology of media wishes to be informed by the technical state

of the art, it should know how to read blueprints, layouts, mainboard
designs, industrial roadmaps, and so on, in order to learn its very
categories from scratch, namely from the hardware of high tech (30).

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And so, in the dissolution of old ontologies, a new ontological dawn approaches. But
it does so, of course, while we are still in the dark. Kittler’s suggestion here provides
an opportunity to assess the stakes as well as the challenges of ongoing attempts in
the field to address the future in the intimacy of the technological details of the
physical media. 1 The physical facticity of the media in its esoteric complexity is thus
drawn into the range of the critical response. I will return to Kittler’s argument
shortly.

Attempts at a wider theoretical approach persist, but in forms that we tend to receive
as eccentric addresses, which come often late in a thinker’s career, represent a long
commitment to an intellectual field that they have informed, and offer innovative
frames of thinking on the contemporary situation. Some recent instances include
Jean Baudrillard’s final book, The Lucidity Pact or The Intelligence of Evil (2004), Peter
Sloterdijk’s epic You Must Change Your Life (2009), Michel Serres’s small but impactful
Thumbelina (2012), and Werner Herzog’s short film, Lo and Behold: Reveries Of The
Connected World (2016). 2 These authors have contributed a lifetime questioning the
media (often in the forms and formats of the media under question), yet their
overarching concerns remain philosophical and deal in sometimes bizarrely different
ways with the state we find ourselves in (Martin Heidegger’s use of the phrase,
Befindlichkeit, directs us to the most developed account of how one approaches a
condition in question 3). Sloterdijk, for instance, hardly mentions the media as such in
You Must Change Your Life, but his call for a “general immunology” implies that any
attempt to engage with the media must understand the history of the race as a history
of practices. And so, in the later stages of his book, it is precisely the media dominated
present that stands to be transformed. The key factor that unites these works, and
others that might be included among them, lies in their negotiating an environment
and condition of being that in their understanding has without precedent undergone
a kind of revolutionary change affecting fundamentally the connectivity of beings in
the world, and thus the ontology of the transformed world itself. Serres takes as his
premise the experience of a generation, who from the neo-nascent state inhabit a
world not so much mediated but rather saturated by media, and who thus inhabit the
mediasphere itself. Borrowing the language of the media, Serres writes of this new
generation, “they are formatted by the media…they are formatted by advertising”
(5). The language of formatting, alert to the heritage of cybernetics and algorithmic

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determination, nonetheless recalls more than a century of existential speculation,

which long before the now familiar language of computing proposed that subjects
are produced by choices made in whatever environment historically predominates.
The theme of choice, and of freedom of choice, has not prevailed in philosophy,
since the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre began to fade in the light of the cybernetic
upheavals of the decades following the Second World War. We exist in an ethical
universe that produces its subjects in increasingly uncertain contexts. Much of the
language of existentialism reclaims ancient arguments, like those of Aristotle, whose
ethics establishes a notion of character in the repeated habits of political subjects
who practice the craft of the self in their always contingent social, legal, and cultural
environments. Here already the theme of choice plays only a constrained role within
an ethics of habit and repetition (habituation, inhabiting languages, media) that will
eventually lead a subject to a condition from which, and only after which, such
ethical choices become possible. And now conditions that vastly exceed those
imaginable even for Sartre, let alone Aristotle, put the grounds of ethical choice into
an abyss.

It is not so much the case that the classical categories have failed in their task of
supporting the sense of a substantive world, as it is that a world whose existence had
indeed been supported by traditional categories has been replaced with an entirely
novel one and with entirely alien categories. This view represents a significant
difference from Kittler’s, who supposes that our inability to comprehend the media
ontologically lies in errors that date back to the classical era. Rather, and echoing
Hegel again, we are in a time of new birth and transition to a new period. Serres, with
his grandchildren as theoretical examples, writes:

Without us even realizing it, a new kind of human being was born in
the brief period of time that separates us from the 1970s.
He or she no longer has the same body or the same life expectancy.
They no longer communicate in the same way; they no longer perceive
the same world; they no longer live in the same nature or inhabit the
same space.

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Born via an epidural and programmed pregnancy, they no longer fear,

with all the palliatives, the same death.
No longer having the same head as their parents, he or she
comprehends differently (2016: 7).

Alongside the wearyingly common theme of the end of a world a new theme
emerges, that of the dawn of a new media era. Passages like this from Serres
represent a quite widely shared conception that is seldom stated quite so baldly.
Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi (again after a lifetime of media oriented philosophy) rivals
Serres in this. For example, And: Phenomenology of the End, demonstrates a similar
temporal separation (Bifo identifies 1977 as the chief cut-off point) and a
correspondingly post-apocalyptic formula in a notion of the “cyber sphere” that can
no longer be comprehended by its receivers:

Humans have already experienced the end of the world, or the end of a
world. A world ends when signs proceeding from the semiotic meta-
machine grow undecipherable for a cultural community that perceived
itself as a world.
A world is the projection of meaningful patterns on the surrounding
space of lived experience. It is the sharing of a common code whose key
lies in the forms of life of the community itself.
When flows of incomprehensible enunciations proceeding from the
meta-machine invade the space of symbolic exchange, a world collapses
because its inhabitants are unable to say anything effective about events
and things that surround them (2015: 331).

The “semiotic meta-machine” does not refer to the physics of contemporary

computer science, but to the effects of contemporary communications on the
symbolic environment. Bifo builds a lexicon from the terminology of Deleuze and
Guattari and others to address the situation as he finds it. The lexicon of culture,
community, semiosis has already lost its purchase on a world so changed that one
must speak again of the end of the world and the beginning of a new one. Any
attempt to build a media theory from such energetically diverse positions will benefit

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from attempting to negotiate the conflicting demands of a philosophical framework

and an adherence to the factuality of the media.

II Media Ontology
Perhaps the construction of a coherent theory of media does require a ground, a set
of principles on which the otherwise rapidly dispersed histories and protean forms of
“the media” could be theoretically anchored. Perhaps such a ground is necessary in
the aim of comprehending the media as a force among the social and political
relations with which and within which technical mediations form an inextricable
mesh. If so, then one would need to respond to a general sense that such a ground
does not yet exist. Attempts to develop a critique or critical theory of new media, and
of the Internet, necessarily stretch existing frameworks beyond their capacities. Such
a theory would in its emergence pose a challenge to existing grounds for theorizing
media.

Friedrich Kittler begins his enquiry into a possible “ontology of media” with a
challenge of this kind (Kittler, 2009: 23). The many existing “technological or
mathematical theories of communication media” suggest at first that this may be
more a problem for philosophy (by which Kittler means Western Ontology from
Aristotle to Heidegger or, in Heidegger’s own words, “European Metaphysics”),
except that it soon becomes clear that the technological theories also fall into the
errors typified by metaphysics: “McLuhan’s lecture on Aristotle’s ‘Metaphysics’ turns
their true meaning upside down” (25). McLuhan’s realization, that “philosophy
systematically excludes techne from its meditations,” fails therefore to observe that
metaphysical categories applicable to living and natural forms – like matter, form,
and entelechy – originally stem from “technical things” (25). The problem resides in
a distinction between matter and form that continues to hover like a shadow over all
our attempts to think things, to think especially the media, which in Aristotle’s
teaching do not have an ontological status. But McLuhan’s error, while historically
correct in the sense that the form/matter relation has systematically relegated
technical objects to a lesser status, also fails to notice that Aristotle’s philosophy,
once one strays from the Metaphysics, contains evidence of a concern with the media

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as physical and natural necessities: the air that conveys sound from voice to brain,
“between the thing and the eardrum as well as between the eardrum and the cochlea”
(25); the air between “thing and iris” and the water between “iris and retina” that
accounts for seeing in Aristotle’s description (25). Kittler thus identifies Aristotle as
the inventor of the term media: “he is the first to turn a common Greek preposition –
metaxú, between – into a philosophical noun or concept: tò metaxú, the medium” (26).
An ontology of the media, which currently suffers from an inability to “destroy the
binary opposition between matter and form” (29), might thus be developed based on
this recognition of the physical existence of the between, not a nothing or void but a
thing itself, and so a being. 4

In a further twist (Kittler observes that “the basic narrative remains unaffected by
this”), inevitable distortions disturb the story of the coinage: 1) Aristotle’s coinage in
fact belongs to Democritus (so to metaxú “is also that between the texts of
Democritus and Aristotle”); and 2) the translation of to metaxú by the Latin medium
“occurs first in Thomas Aquinas’ shaky command of Greek (“what he calls medium is
not identical with Aristotle’s ‘between’”). No doubt “the basic narrative remains
unaffected” but nevertheless another question emerges. Does the interval (between
languages, across historical distance, from one text to another) operate in a way that
is equivalent to how the air and water of Aristotle’s betweens operate? Can the
paraphrase of Democritus by Aristotle and the shaky translation of Aristotle by
Aquinas be considered to take effect across physical media? These instances do not
belong to the musical and vocal environment to which Aristotle’s account of the
physics of seeing and hearing refer, but instead describe situations governed by the
inherent possibility of a break from such present environments, a break which
extends the reach of the interval, the between, beyond finite calculability. Kittler’s
answer would be something like: yes, we account for the possibility of such an
interval, a transfer, a transport, or a translation, by reference to the physical medium
– especially in the case of the technical (as opposed to the “natural”) media – which
we regard as their precondition:

Even in Aristotle, the distinction between phone and graphe, voice and
writing, was drawn just once when he wrote that, while speech sounds
are signs of beings, written letters are only secondary signs of these

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sounds. Thus, metaphysics – as Derrida justly, albeit much too generally,

has remarked – always already forgets technical media, from writing itself
up to the written book, its own precondition (26).

In this apparent agreement with Derrida, and the almost simultaneous dismissal of
his “much too general” remarks on the philosophical forgetting of the technical
media, Kittler manages to make light of the powerful philosophical challenge that the
1967 texts, like Speech and Phenomena and Of Grammatology (which is where Derrida
picks up the same Aristotle reference), pose to anyone with a desire to construct a
coherent theory of media and communication. Kittler makes light of it, dismisses it,
neutralizes it, softens it with backhanded praise, but above all he seems to want to
deflect any suspicion we might have that the Derrida text is forcefully at odds with
him on this point. Metaphysics (or European Ontology), as is now well known,
represses, domesticates, or excludes the very condition on which its key values are
simultaneously built and yet threatened with ruin: the interval which breaks from all
present context thus enabling illimitable repetitions in unimagined future contexts. If
Derrida discovers this force animating Ontology in its generally contradictory attitude
towards writing (for example mixing hyperbolic praise with dismissive scorn) it does
not follow that Derrida’s understanding of writing (which he contrasts to “the
book”) is the same as Kittler’s.

Indeed, Kittler exhibits a considerably more variegated sense of the technical media
and yet brings a more deterministic attitude to how the physical properties of the
media serve as precondition for the content of a message, its ideas, its philosophy (to
the extent that, for instance, Friedrich Nietzsche’s aphoristic philosophy can be
traced to the emergence, and his use via secretarial help, of the typewriter 5). That’s
not to diminish the attention that Derrida consistently dedicates to questions of the
nature of a given kind of media archive: the disruption by writing of the way a book
captures sense in its organized formal closure; the experiment with this
disruptiveness in the formal adventures of texts like Glas, The Truth in Painting and The
Postcard; patient meditations on the transformation of the archive from say an
epistolary arrangement to an electronic one in, for instance, Archive Fever, On
Hospitality, and ‘Faith and Knowledge’, in which the electronic media perform an

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instrumental role; and throughout, the connections between drawing, writing, and
photography in so many texts. But in none of these cases can the mediational element,
that which grounds communication (for instance) on the between, be reduced to a
physical platform. To the contrary, the element that in all rigour one would have to
be able to isolate as mediational escapes ontology in every existing sense of that
category, from Aristotle to Heidegger, to the extent that the physical platform is
always that from which the interval – the between of the transport – must be able to
break, in a repetition that gives to all media their specific quality. This is no doubt
why Kittler dismisses the “remark” Derrida makes “much too generally,” about the
forgetting in writing of writing itself. There would be no instance of media
communication free from the property described by its general repeatability, and so
each platform – whether the typewriter, photography, broadcasting, email or the
internet – would be destined and displaced by its own form of mediatic disruption
and the inevitable distortions that infect it but that also serve as its condition of
possibility.

How, then, can this condition of possibility cohabit with something like the media
ontology that Kittler’s text looks towards? Kittler fixes on the idea (the “dream
of…solid state physicians”) of a future computer, “based on parallel and tiny
quantum states” (30). Can critical media theory proceed with an ontology that is
anchored in the hope of future scientific hardware? The inability to ground the media
ontologically corresponds to the media’s capacity, and the consistent performance of
this capacity, this ability, to escape ontological determination. Aristotle does not so
much exclude or forget the technical media in his metaphysics, as he turns a blind
eye to their corrosive force already in the domain, the physical here and now, which
he must nevertheless try to protect from them. The media are inherently destructive
of ontology, of physical continuity in space and time. In the 1960s, this theme in
various guises represents the unmistakable crumbling of ontology generally. It had
begun already in the aphorisms of Nietzsche, and in the essays on the media by
Walter Benjamin. Heidegger’s “fundamental ontology” remains functional at least in
name, for instance in philosophical essays by Slavov Žižek, Alain Badiou and others,
but if the strange domain of the between has had any purchase at all in the last sixty
years, then this has been at the cost of having to awaken from the dream of
ontological grounds, of the various ways of establishing or grounding things and

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relations, whether this dream takes on an empiricist character, builds itself into the
connective silicone structures of the contemporary hardware, or builds its substantial
reality in a more abstract domain. The media cannot be dissociated from abstraction
either. The inevitable and immediate disincarnation of the message, even as it is
inscribed or uttered (on a cave wall, on the page, in breath and voice, on screen, in
the von Neumann architecture), defines a precondition for arithmetic and grounds
logic on repeatable methodologies. The physics of water and air cannot, therefore,
serve as a model for the impalpable domain of mediation.

As Jean-François Lyotard had established by 1979 in La condition postmoderne (and in

this he was at once late to the game but also oddly prescient), such dreams are
formed of a doubled glance of false memories and anxious desires, never far from a
fear of social disintegration and “the paradisiac representation of a lost ‘organic’
society” (15). Instead, and with some room for speculation on a more fortunate
future, Lyotard identifies the field as one in which each of us is mediated. The between
is everywhere: “A self does not amount to much, but no self is an island; each exists
in a fabric of relations that is now more complex and mobile than ever before…one
is located at a post through which various messages pass” (15). Consequently, a great
difficulty in the development of a coherent and effective media theory, if one were
desirable, would lie in the sheer heterogeneity of the elements that it would need to
bring into its view. And so, universities and other institutes of knowledge that foster
the study of media do so through specialization, following a kind of historical rule of
default by which the sphere in question, the media in general, has manifestly
contributed to the tendency towards a division into specialisms in every domain. How
does one develop a theoretical knowledge of the media when the development of
media over an age a little less than 200 years old has itself largely influenced, if not
steered, the development of knowledge into sometimes powerfully specialized
particularities? Lyotard’s celebrated report on knowledge identifies some of what
marks these trends, in the critical problem of the legitimization of knowledge, trends
that have sought legitimation, variously, in narrative, pragmatic, systematic and
parological forms. Lyotard’s method, in a developed account of language games,
brings him to the conclusion that not only must we recognize that language games
are “heteromorphous,” but also that “any consensus on the rules defining a game

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and the ‘moves’ playable within it must be local, in other words, agreed on by its
present players and subject to eventual cancellation” (66). Increasing institutional
support for the self-legitimation of disciplines (largely through indicators of
excellence focused on the relevance of citation indexes) brings knowledge (still often
regarded under the postmodern rubric) without struggle into an economic sphere of
heteromorphous activities. Appeals to interdisciplinary research justifying an essential
heterogeneity in knowledge, either by extension to or contained within an ethical or
political discourse, do not advance beyond an in principle (yet often unintentionally)
anti-philosophical, anti-theoretical, standpoint, happily adrift among a disjunction of
activities, specialisms, and experiments in the field of media, which loosely holds
together studies of languages, theories, formats, cultures, networks, technologies,
societies, communities, and aesthetic discourses, and comprises an apparently
illimitable range of methods (empirical, historical, theoretical, mathematical,
ethnomethodological, experimental, and so on). Perhaps we at last need this final
renunciation of the classical theoretical impulse. Nevertheless, the stakes of the
problem seem great.

The old story that describes the crumbling of the old and the dawn of the new is
rejuvenated in the merging of techno-scientific and critical knowledge. But because
these trends are in each case implicitly or explicitly (intrinsically, essentially,
helplessly) antagonistic towards the other, an alternative, as yet indeterminate and
spectral, position begins to appear. It makes sense for media theory to come to grips
with this emergent position that would be neither ontological nor merely empirical.

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Notes

1 We can here only acknowledge, in lieu of a more extended analysis, furiously eclectic work, especially
in the last ten years, that in divergent but always critically provocative ways experiments with the
intricacies of such a challenge: e.g., Azuma Hiroki’s Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals; Jodi Dean’s Blog
Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive; Benjamin Bratton’s The Stack: on software and
Sovereignty; and Paul Preciado’s Testo Junkie.
2 Herzog in an interview during which he discusses his Lo and Behold, his short documentary on the

internet, says, “We have to be prudent when we look at social media … and of course they have
some extraordinary sides to it as well … but on average it only is a manifestation of stupidity and
banalities … it’s mostly banalities … which is okay because our lives are composed of a chain of
banalities” [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAkJjIMqBeo&t=81s]
3 “In der Befindlichkeit ist das Dasein immer schon vor es selbst gebracht, es hat sich immer schon gefunden, nicht als

wahrnehmendes Sich-vorfinden, sondern als gestimmtes Sichbefinden“ (Sein und Zeit: 135). “In Befindlichkeit,
Dasein is always brought before itself, and it has always already found itself, not in the sense of
perceptive self-finding, but in the sense of finding itself in its moodiness” (Being and Time: 174). In
the language of finding (Befindlichkeit, Sich-vorfinden, Sichbefinden) the concept of existence resonates with
the concept of mood or attunement (die Stimmung, das Gestimmtsein: attunement, mood), and this
distinguishes for all serious philosophical thought since Heidegger between a concept of self,
focused on perception, and an account of being-in-the-world, discovered existentially in Dasein’s
“moods” or “modes of attunement.”
4 See Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, Kittler and the Media. Cambridge: Polity, 2011.
5 In its early days, the word typewriter designated both the machine and person operating it. For the

reading of Nietzsche, see “The Mechanized Philosopher” (195-208).

John W P Phillips teaches at The National University of Singapore. He has

written about theatre, psychoanalysis, postmodernism, photography,
philosophy, new media, mathematics, music, military technology, literature,
education, cities, and art. He has recently completed a book on Jacques

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Vol. 1 | No. 1 | 2017 http://mediatheoryjournal.org/

Derrida, Jacques Derrida’s Formal Adventure and the Signature of Philosophy, and is
currently completing a book on Philosophy and the Dawn, which follows the
vicissitudes of the rising sun from Hegel, through Kierkegaard and Nietzsche,
to Heidegger, Derrida, Deleuze, Irigaray, and beyond.

Email: [email protected]

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