Intermediality, Semiotics, and Media Theory

The chapter explores two complementary perspectives: the lack of an explicit focus within semiotics on media technology and a converse lack of semiotic awareness in the classic media theory. The slow genesis of the medium concept clearly affected the formation of modern semiotics with Peirce and Saussure. It is shown that within this process, the technological aspect constituted the “place of strongest resistance” and to what extent the subsequent developments in semiotics have been marked by this initial condition. Technological media science, best represented by Kittler, is then shown to develop out of a blindness to the semiotic implications of its own premises. Even if it allows us to see how new ways of signification come to exist as a result of technical inventions, this insight is preconditioned by a gesture of erasure of semiotic difference. It appears truly ironic that Kittler’s writing is still so semiotically rich. In the field of intermediality, we can observe an initial reversal in weighing the importance of the cognitive vs the technical dimension of the medium. The consequence of this is that intermedial research has tended to lose sight of the internal logic of media evolution. What has not yet been resolved is how the technical condition should be conceptualized if it contributes to the “qualification” of the medium. It is argued that both semiotics and technics should be seen as converging on a common theoretical terrain, in a complicated, chiasmatic relationship. Technics and semiotics need to be studied together.