Media Manifestos: On the Technological Transmission of Cultural Forms

This volume launches a new sub-discipline of the human science, "mediology". It includes: a new way in which to analyze and think about the media from the city state to the Internet; a debate on the transition, from quill to print, to video and the effects of these changes on society; and an examination of the work of Roland Barthes, Umberto Eco, C.S. Peirce and Marshall McLuhan. The book sums up over a decade of Regis Debray's research and writing on the evolution of systems of communication. Debray announces the battle-readiness of a new sub-discipline of les sciences humaines: "mediology". Scion of that semiology of the 1960s linked with the names of Roland Barthes and Umberto Eco - and trans-Atlantically affiliated to the semiotics of C.S. Peirce and the media analyses of Marshall McLuhan ("medium is message") - "mediology" is yet in (dialectical) revolt against its parent thought-system. Determined not to lapse back into the empiricism and psychologism with which semiology broke, mediology is just as resolved to dispel the illusion of the signifier, slough off the scholasticism of the code, and recover the world - in all its mediatized materiality. Steeped in the intellectual ethos of Althusser and Foucault, informed by the historical work of the Annales School, and yet plugged in today's audiovisual culture, this book turns a neologism ("mediology") into a tool-kit with which to re-think the whole business of mediation. Regis Debray is the author of "Teachers, Writers, Celebrities", "Critique of Political Reason" and "Charles de Gaulle: Futurist of the Nation".