Media as Cultural Techniques: From Inscribed Surfaces to Digital Interfaces

There is a credo in traditional cultural media theory: media create what they transmit. Marshall McLuhan’s ‘the medium is the message’ (McLuhan 1964: 23–35, 63–67); Friedrich Kittler’s ‘only that which is switchable is at all’ [‘Nur was schaltbar ist, ist überhaupt’] (Kittler 1993:182); and Jacques Derrida’s ‘there is nothing outside of the text’ (Derrida 1988: 144) paved the way for an interpretation of media as more or less sovereign agents of social and cultural life. Media construct and constitute what they present. Although there is a wide range of differences in how media were equipped with autonomous power and as an instance of ultimate grounding, I would like to collect them under one label. The transformation of media to a quasi-autonomous agent will thus be referred to as ‘media fundamentalism’.