Publications [#296010] of Mark B. Hansen

Articles in a Collection

1. Hansen, MBN, Media Theory, in Routledge Companion to Literature and Science, edited by Clarke, B; Rossini, M, vol. 23 (January, 2006), pp. 297-306, SAGE Publications [doi]
   (last updated on 2026/01/17)

   Abstract:
   Poised on the cusp between phenomenology and materiality, media institute a theoretical oscillation that promises to displace the empirical-transcendental divide that has structured western meditation on thinking, including the thinking of technics. Because media give the infrastructure conditioning thought without ceasing to be empirical (i.e. without functioning as a transcendental condition), they form the basis for a complex hermeneutics that cannot avoid the task of accounting for its unthematizable infrastructural condition. Tracing the oscillation constitutive of such a hermeneutics as it serves variously to constitute media theory in the work of critics from McLuhan to Kittler, from Leroi-Gourhan to Stiegler, my interrogation ultimately conceptualizes the medium as an environment for life:by giving concrete form to ‘epiphylogenesis’ (the exteriorization of human evolution), concrete media find their most ‘originary’ function not as artifacts but via their participation in human technogenesis (our co-evolution with technics). © 2006, SAGE Publications. All rights reserved.