Foucault and Heidegger on mediation and subjectivity

If we take as a central maxim of media-ecological thought the proposition – central to the work of Marshall McLuhan – that our technological prostheses comprise spaces that we come to inhabit, then we can indeed call Michel Foucault a media-ecological thinker. In the following, we will undertake a brief exploration of the sense in which Foucault’s work explicates this fundamental media-ecological proposition, by way of some necessary clarifications regarding its provenance and milieu. This will not only provide us with a way of reading Foucault that highlights an important thread of continuity intrinsic to his corpus, but will also allow us to begin weaving this thread into the broad tapestry of twentieth century thinking on the formative properties of technics and media; a site where extraordinarily rich patterns have begun to emerge. If we can only begin to sketch out this way of reading Foucault, it is because of the caution that is required in dealing with his work, which represents a high point of twentieth century scholarship, deserving of a careful and sustained attention, for which I can only hope, within the constraints of this short article, to provide some small encouragement.