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our understanding of the way in which the concept of mediation as a
process seems to come in and out of philosophical and social theory without
establishing until very late a special relation to the field of communication.36
The philological evidence suggests that concern with communication contin-
ues to be expressed, often still metaphorically, by use of the term medium.
On the other hand, the concept of mediation as it appears in Hegel and is
taken up in the tradition of Marxist and sociological theory posits this
concept in connection with more universal contexts than those of com-
munication. For Hegel, mediation concerns nothing less than the question
of being; for Marx, the question of labor (the mediation of mankind and
nature). The communicative relation seems to lie below the radar of think-
ing about mediation until later. As we shall see, the extrapolation of a
process of mediation from the fact of a particular communicative medium
(speech, writing, print) depended not on the incorporation of the concept
of medium into a more general conceptual framework but the reverse, a
reduction of the social totality to communication as its representative in-
stance.
A version of that reduction characterizes the work of Charles Sanders
Peirce, who elaborates the first full-scale theory of a specifically semiotic
mediation. Peirce s typology of signs is notoriously complex, but I will
emphasize only one small feature of that typology, setting out from a stan-
dard definition of the sign in Peirce: A sign, or representamen, is some-
thing which stands to somebody for something in some respect or
capacity. It addresses somebody, that is, creates in the mind of that person
an equivalent sign, or perhaps a more developed sign. That sign which it
creates I call the interpretant of the first sign. The sign stands for some-
thing, its object. It stands for that object, not in all respects, but in reference
to a sort of idea. 37 What Peirce calls the interpretant is actually another
sign (not a signified), the function of which is to interpret the first sign; the
interpretant then becomes a representamen for another interpretant. Um-
36. A significant exception is Friedrich Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics and Criticism, trans.
and ed. Andrew Bowie (Cambridge, 1998), p. 7, in which he defines speech as the mediation
[Vermittlung] of the communal nature of thought, and also mediation of thought for the
individual. Schleiermacher consistently sets hermeneutics in the larger context of
communication, but does not pursue further elaboration of the mediation concept. For a later
moment in this hermeneutic tradition, see Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel
Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, 2d ed. (London, 1989), pp. 383 405.
37. Charles Sanders Peirce, Elements of Logic, in Collected Papers, ed. Charles Hartshorne
and Paul Weiss, 8 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1960 66), 2:135.
Critical Inquiry / Winter 2010 345
berto Eco observes in his discussion of Peirce that this formulation inau-
gurates an endless series or unlimited semiosis. 38 The infinite replication
of the sign permits the model to incorporate virtually all other discourses
of knowledge by way of translation into semiotic terms: All this universe
is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs. 39 Peirce s
ambitious claim for a concept with formerly so narrow a role to play in
philosophical reflection interrupts the conversation in philosophy by vio-
lently displacing traditional philosophical questions into the domain of
the semiotic (a displacement that is without precursor but is perhaps par-
alleled in the work of Gottlob Frege). Peirce s implicit reduction of philo-
sophical system or notions of totality the world or human society to
the instance of symbolic exchange is a strategic gambit of considerable
symptomatic importance and quite outweighs the actual influence of
Peirce in the twentieth century.40 The desire to generalize social theory
from the instance of communication, language, or writing is recurrently a
feature of twentieth-century thought, propelling the development of
structuralism (Jakobson, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and others), poststructur-
alism (Derrida), systems theory (Gregory Bateson, Niklas Luhmann, and
Jürgen Habermas), communication studies (Harold Innis, Marshall
McLuhan, Walter Ong), and information theory (Norbert Weiner, Diet-
mar Wolfram, and others).
The use of the term representamen for the manifestation of the sign
confirms that Peirce is thinking of the sign primarily as a certain kind of
representation. But it is not sufficient merely to say that an object is rep-
resented by the representamen. Peirce speaks of the object in two senses. In
a formulation that sounds reminiscent of Locke, he posits first an imme-
diate object as what is given in the sign, in much the same way that ideas are
immediately present to the mind in Locke s system. In the second place,
however, when he speaks of the object as a thing in the world, he describes
it as mediate (we would say mediated).41 To say that representation is a
means by which objects in the world are mediated indicates that the con-
38. Eco, A Theory of Semiotics, p. 68.
39. Peirce, Pragmatism and Pragmaticism, in Collected Papers, 5:302.
40. For a discussion of Peirce s theory in its more global implications, see Richard J.
Parmentier, Signs Place in Medias Res: Peirce s Concept of Semiotic Mediation, in Semiotic
Mediation: Sociocultural and Psychological Perspectives, ed. Elizabeth Mertz and Parmentier
(Orlando, Fla., 1985), pp. 23 48. Parmentier notes that Peirce was relatively uninterested in the
physical medium of communication, a point of significant difference with most twentieth-
century communications theory; see ibid., p. 33.
41. See Peirce, letter to Victoria Lady Welby, 23 Dec. 1908, Semiotic and Significs: The
Correspondence between Charles S. Peirce and Victoria Lady Welby, ed. C. S. Hardwick and James
Cook (Bloomington, Ind., 1977), p. 73.
346 John Guillory / Genesis of the Media Concept
cept of representation is inadequate in itself to describe the effect of its own
operation. When Peirce brings the process of semiotic mediation forward
in his work, he complicates the concept of representation, including his
own use of it. The emergence of this complication has the potential to
deflect philosophical reflection on works of art from its immemorial fixa-
tion on representation or mimesis, an orientation shared with the theory
of signification.
If it has always seemed intuitively correct to say that the sign represents
thought, the sense in which a work such as the Iliad analogously represents
heroic action discovers the inadequacy of that notion from a Peircean
perspective. Mediation points to a hidden complexity of the representa-
tional process, which often goes quite beyond the announced object of [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
