Intermedialities, Societies, and Power Histories

From their very beginnings intermedial phenomena and processes are closely connected with social power structures and various power plays. In our chapter we tackle a selection of paradigmatic intermedial power plays based on several historical cases, ranging from prehistorical caves, medieval mystery plays, tapestries, nodes of intermedial networks of colporteurs/pedlars in modern times, TV-news, internet platforms, to post-modern “documentaries.” The major challenge of our approach lies in the development of research axes and viable historical and stable categories for the re-construction of social functions and power plays of intermedial phenomena. We undertake a double or triple methodological effort: after a brief clarification of our concept, as well as of the notion of power and of levels of intermedial power plays, we propose seven heuristic research axes. The application of these historiological axes or perspectives implies movements of zooming in to specific cases and processes and zooming out to broader groups of intermedial phenomena and practices. While doing this, we will make use of various “tools” of media research, of social research and sociology of knowledge, of economies of attention, but, also of “sound archaeology,” semiology, and theories of memory. This procedure will finally lead us to an “in-between” research level, oscillating between theoretical reflections and historiological re-constructions, which is constituted by bottom up and top-down movements. The chapter ends with a preliminary conclusion of what intermedial power plays “(can) do to us” under specific sociohistorical and technological conditions. In this sense, our contribution is another test run for the breadth and applicability of a historiological approach of a network history of intermedial functions and power plays.