Epistemologie der Medialität: Eine medienphilosophische Reflexion

The logic of media usage is determined by the self-blinding of the materiality of the medium in the act of its transmitting function. According to the traditional topos of the 'dying messenger', a messenger-oriented model of mediality is developed. Contrary to the appearance of the 'vanishing' medium, a critical media philosophy has to depict that and how media always shape and constitute what they represent. One phenomenon mostly being invisible in our normal use of texts and pictures is the medium of 'artificial flatness' within the framework of a 'cultural technique of flattening': scientific, technical and artistic creativity is inconceivable without two-dimensional inscriptions in the form of writings, graphs, diagrams and maps. But how can this imprinting power of inscribed and illustrated surfaces be grasped if at the same time the role of media is understood in terms of transmission, connection, intermediation? Our suggestion is to describe the shaping power of media by the concept of 'transfiguration': From a transfigurative perspective, the medium only reveals itself as a trace on its content. Traces are visible transformations in the mode of latency. To manifest this latency, to make the implicit explicit, is then a task of media philosophy. As examples of such a critical-epistemological reflection, the relationship between writing and language, as well as between map and territory, is discussed.