To locate media in the political sphere means to strip them of their merely playful, theoretical-discursive, and technical-aesthetic status and to carve out their serious core. This work undertakes a media-theoretical attempt—as it was last developed in my previous work (Media Pharmacology)—to shift ‘media’ from their ‘traditional-playful’ field to the field of political seriousness. Such a concept of media differs from the usual “media theories” of tradition, which try to justify media in their linguistic, written, aesthetic, technical, profit-rational, instrumental, hermeneutic, or mathematical-informatic models. It also does not investigate individual media, but rather points to their modern and archaic ‘total economy’ (oikonomia): the ‘archaic law of media economy’. That money and goods as media are states of capital has long been known; but that information, texts, techniques, images, sounds, forms of communication, practices, thinking, creativity, reflexivity, attention, exhibition, arousal, hypertextual structures, virtual spaces, epistemic logics, AI, operations, interconnections, transmissions, bodies, will, desires, networks or paranets are also—we learn this today in the integral pre-state capital and state legal means economy. In this respect, “capitalism” has always been more than just the social relationship between “capital” and “labour”; its impact goes much further and at the same time back to archaic stages, than for example the instrumental forms of rationality of “profit rationality”, “world market”, “instrumental reason” or “calculative thinking” still suggest. It rather means the entire work, thought, culture, desire, body, expression, and virtual life of the people it encompasses as action and being, appearance and essence, relation and substance, practice and ontology, immanence and transcendence. Therefore, we correct here the Hegelian formula of “Being—Nothing—Becoming” by the formula: ‘Becoming—Being—Be!’ The ‘appearing essence’ of the media expresses itself neither ‘positively dialectical’ (Hegel), nor ‘negatively dialectical’ (Adorno), but in the imperative ‘Be!’ One, which means the ‘archaic law of media economy’, which from the beginning determines, directs, regulates all media and dynamically drives them forward in their happening by command. Therefore, “capital” knows not only the utilitarian profit motive, but also anti-utilitarianism, the “emotional value” (M. Mauss), the perception, affect, desire, arousal, image, sound, AI, data and information value, in which today the whole of humanity (the carrier medium) is preserved in its pre-state-monarchical capital medium and state-polyarchic legal medium. A pre-state financial, informational, design, digital management and state legalization of the world as the two complementary, archaic media economies: the pseudo-theological economy of capital means and the neo-mythical-state economy of legal means. In this respect, “economy” and “politics” are also epiphenomena; they are themselves once again mediated through a history of media (including the medium ‘thinking’ and ‘body’) as organs of domination: the one, immanent-transcendent media economy. One that has today split in its totality (in the respective absolutization of the medial) into a liberal-democratic, illiberal-authoritarian, geopolitical-cultural or fundamental-Islamist media economy, to appear therein as an antagonistic-polemical enemy economy.

Introduction

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发表日期：

2025年

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Stavros Arabatzis

摘要

To locate media in the political sphere means to strip them of their merely playful, theoretical-discursive, and technical-aesthetic status and to carve out their serious core. This work undertakes a media-theoretical attempt—as it was last developed in my previous work (Media Pharmacology)—to shift ‘media’ from their ‘traditional-playful’ field to the field of political seriousness. Such a concept of media differs from the usual “media theories” of tradition, which try to justify media in their linguistic, written, aesthetic, technical, profit-rational, instrumental, hermeneutic, or mathematical-informatic models. It also does not investigate individual media, but rather points to their modern and archaic ‘total economy’ (oikonomia): the ‘archaic law of media economy’. That money and goods as media are states of capital has long been known; but that information, texts, techniques, images, sounds, forms of communication, practices, thinking, creativity, reflexivity, attention, exhibition, arousal, hypertextual structures, virtual spaces, epistemic logics, AI, operations, interconnections, transmissions, bodies, will, desires, networks or paranets are also—we learn this today in the integral pre-state capital and state legal means economy. In this respect, “capitalism” has always been more than just the social relationship between “capital” and “labour”; its impact goes much further and at the same time back to archaic stages, than for example the instrumental forms of rationality of “profit rationality”, “world market”, “instrumental reason” or “calculative thinking” still suggest. It rather means the entire work, thought, culture, desire, body, expression, and virtual life of the people it encompasses as action and being, appearance and essence, relation and substance, practice and ontology, immanence and transcendence. Therefore, we correct here the Hegelian formula of “Being—Nothing—Becoming” by the formula: ‘Becoming—Being—Be!’ The ‘appearing essence’ of the media expresses itself neither ‘positively dialectical’ (Hegel), nor ‘negatively dialectical’ (Adorno), but in the imperative ‘Be!’ One, which means the ‘archaic law of media economy’, which from the beginning determines, directs, regulates all media and dynamically drives them forward in their happening by command. Therefore, “capital” knows not only the utilitarian profit motive, but also anti-utilitarianism, the “emotional value” (M. Mauss), the perception, affect, desire, arousal, image, sound, AI, data and information value, in which today the whole of humanity (the carrier medium) is preserved in its pre-state-monarchical capital medium and state-polyarchic legal medium. A pre-state financial, informational, design, digital management and state legalization of the world as the two complementary, archaic media economies: the pseudo-theological economy of capital means and the neo-mythical-state economy of legal means. In this respect, “economy” and “politics” are also epiphenomena; they are themselves once again mediated through a history of media (including the medium ‘thinking’ and ‘body’) as organs of domination: the one, immanent-transcendent media economy. One that has today split in its totality (in the respective absolutization of the medial) into a liberal-democratic, illiberal-authoritarian, geopolitical-cultural or fundamental-Islamist media economy, to appear therein as an antagonistic-polemical enemy economy.