On Splits, Big and Little: Towards an Intensive Model of Media and Mediation

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The impetus for this work - the creation of an affect-based intensive model of media and mediation - is good and necessary. The introduction of the article is logically sound and engaging. I have four main areas that the author should consider while revising this article: 

1) The most important area to consider is the role mediatization plays in this model. Given the Quanon example and the role "big tension" plays in it, I urge the author to consider how an intensive model of mediation is impacted by the overall mediatization of family and social life. Due to our current technological trends, it seems short-sighted to theorize mediation without considering how it is impacted by our larger context of expanding mediatization.

2) One of the rationales for this model is finding a different way to conceptualize mediation that does not lead to "dualistic, essentializing theories and unresolvable normative debated about the consequences of media". I support this and agree with your assessment of the "mediation as extension" model. However, by creating a "mediation as intensive" model, you are reinscribing a binary, dualistic way of thinking about the process of mediation. So, mediation is not extensive, it's intensive; it's not disconnecting, it's splitting; it's not connecting, it's folding. These models and their articulation are too interconnected because they are defined/described in direct relation to each other rather than completely different theories. In this way, Grusin is instructive. His use of "generation and modulation" to describe the way mediation engages affect is distinct from a "media as extension" model and also suggests a more nuanced application of affective theory. 

3) While you mention that feminist scholars have "greatly advanced" affective theory, you only cite one of them - Lauren Berlant. Overall, your discussion of affective theory is very limited and because of this, some of your examples in the intensive section are not as strong as they could be. For instance, rather than discussing minerals when addressing sensitivity and pressure, I urge you to look into affective theory around touch, haptics, and film in the works of Laura Marks. Marks would allow you to discuss "the fold" which seems to get overlooked in your theory since there is such a strong focus on "the split".  This section of the article could use significant revision. Rather than beginning this section with a rearticulation of Merleau-Ponty, dive right into affective theory (sensation, mood, the senses, feeling, emotion) to flesh out your use of the word intensive (i.e. intensity) regarding the process of mediation. 

4) Finally, at some point, it will be important for you to offer some type of definition of mediation as understood from your intensive model. I've read the paper 3 times and I'm still unclear how your intensive model is best articulated. Part of this stems from my issue with both McLuhan and Merleau-Ponty being used in such a narrow way. McLuhan's theory of extension was based on his belief that new technologies create new environments. In other words, the new environment created is the message, not the technology itself. So, while the technology (device/platform/etc.) could be an extension, mediation is the environment created by this new assemblage. While I think you mean this, you don't say this and instead, you limit McLuhan to his slogans. Merleau-Ponty seems like an odd choice to put with the extension model partially because there are so many media scholars you could focus on instead and he doesn't help you expand on the extension model. For instance, one way you could consider expanding on this model would be to focus on how conceptualizing mediation as connection/disconnection assumes that the message is somehow translated through the process of mediation itself since the medium of the message is different than the body it originates from.        

Author Response

Please see attached

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

I very much enjoyed this paper and learned a lot from it. Your basic insight, that media at the same time connect and split, is in my view of huge significance for media and communication philosophy, and something I have myself worked out in quite a bit of detail with respect to communication. I also very much appreciate the combination of fundamental theorisation and empirical application. 

Your main point, that the splitting of media generates a redrawing of the affective map of human existence, allows you to carry out the more empirical parts of the study. I feel that the link between the fundamental notion of mediatisation and the importance of affect remains a bit vague. Maybe it is my misunderstanding. Perhaps you could look into this. You now seem to want to establish that link via phenomenology and a little bit via Spinoza. I wonder if there is a lingering substance metaphysics at work here. Phenomenology, despite its huge descriptive power, still operates within a subject-object framework it regards as basic. It is visible in some of the quotations from Merleau-Ponty that you use, for example the one that says my body is for me a site of possibility of world. Spinoza, in turn, has a very powerful notion of modes, but starts from a substance, needing nothing else but itself in order to exist. You have discovered that with communication and mediation a profound critique of the entire history of substantivist thinking becomes possible and necessary, yet you show how you remain tied to notions of substance at the same time. Here a philosopher like Whitehead clearly offers an alternative. And remember that Whitehead called his philosophy a "critique of pure feeling", parodying Kant. Perhaps the fundamental process ontology allows you to articulate the connection between mediation and affect. (I am thinking here, too, of McLuhan's only thinly veiled Thomism and the clear links between his notion of media and the substantial forms that were discussed at length in medieval metaphysics; with the words "substantial form" substantialist metaphysics tries to say "media").

You can think here also of language as a kind of proto-mediator that shows the same split, embodied in the cry of the baby for the absent mother (the first phone call). Lacan showed how the entry into language, into mediation, is the mechanism through which the child splits from the mother and comes to occupy the world of the "law", culture, "in the name of the father". The same split seems at work here. In all communication, there is both a sharing and a withholding at the same time and in the same respect. 

So I think the article will benefit from a clear, explanatory and explicit linking of mediation and affect. Without it, unsympathetic readers might perceive the references to media theory and to current media realities as a plethora of associations, a.k.a. a rant, and that is not what this article is doing.

I very much appreciated the autoethnographic twist at the end which shows how important this topic is and that, indeed, we are dealing often with a matter of the will more than the intellect when we deal with media ecologies. This article, if taken seriously, will hugely deepen people's understanding of media.

Author Response

Please see attached

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf