The Dispositional Powers of Media and the Problem of Truth-Telling

• In Event: Truth and Force

Abstract

Traditional critical theories of media rely on two conceptual edifices: epistemically, all media are truth-obscuring influence machines of coercion; ontologically, all media are substances (in Aristotle's sense of ousia). In the rare cases that the disciplinary study of political theory concerns itself with media, then, it does so with these two conceptual prejudices in mind. In my paper I introduce an intermedial account of technical objects that eschews both these premises and concerns itself instead with the dispositional modes of power that media enact in everyday life. Such an account allows us to appreciate how the associated milieu of human and techne is a participatory relation that articulates actually-existing forms of solidarity and collective action in everyday life.

Author

• Davide Panagia, UCLA