New Materialism as Media Theory: Medianatures and Dirty Matter

In the midst of theoretical debates and traditions concerning ‘‘materialism’’ (also new), ‘‘realism’’ (speculative) and ‘‘objects’’ (object-oriented philosophy), one of the most important things to realize is that a lot of the discourses stem from what could be called ‘‘mediatic’’ phenomena. This does not mean we need to reduce the richness of the theoretical approaches concerned*whether they come from directions of Deleuze, Whitehead, Spinoza, Latour, material feminisms, science studies or radical empiricsm*to ‘‘media’’ or ‘‘technology,’’ but such an emphasis is one way to entangle ontological debates concerning new materialism with historical media approaches. Such perspectives mixing philosophy with media theory offer an insight to why we are so interested in non-human bodies and objects, processes that escape direct and conscious human perception, intensity of matter of technological and biological kinds. In short, it goes something like this: New materialism is not only about intensities of bodies and their capacities such as voice or dance, of movement and relationality, of fleshyness, of ontological monism and alternative epistemologies of generative matter, and active meaningmaking of objects themselves non-reducible to signification. New materialism is already present in the way technical media transmits and processes ‘‘culture,’’ and