many thanks once again for your input.

I suspect that your being Canadian may have clouded your possible appreciation of McLuhan Anne; I’ll send you the paper when it’s done

I don’t know if you are already knew Matthew Fuller’s “Media Ecologies : Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture” (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/026206247X/103-7775828-5725443?v=glance&n=283155&n=507846&s=books&v=glance), but I think it might useful to you…:

“In Media Ecologies, Matthew Fuller asks what happens when media systems interact. Complex objects such as media systems –understood here as processes, or elements in a composition as much as “things” — have become informational as much as physical, but without losing any of their fundamental materiality. Fuller looks at this multiplicitous materiality — how it can be sensed, made use of, and how it makes other possibilities tangible. He investigates the ways the different qualities in media systems can be said to mix and interrelate, and, as he writes, “to produce patterns, dangers, and potentials.”

Fuller draws on texts by Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze as well as writings by Friedrich Nietzsche, Marshall McLuhan, Donna Haraway, Friedrich Kittler, and others, to define and extend the idea of “media ecology.” Arguing that the only way to find out about what happens when media systems interact is to carry out such interactions, Fuller traces a series of media ecologies — “taking every path in a labyrinth simultaneously,” as he describes one chapter. He looks at contemporary London-based pirate radio and its interweaving of high- and low-tech media systems; the “medial will to power” illustrated by “the camera that ate itself”; how, as seen in a range of compelling interpretations of new media works, the capacities and behaviors of media objects are affected when they are in “abnormal” relationships with other objects; and each step in a sequence of Web pages, Cctv — world wide watch, that encourages viewers to report crimes seen via webcams.

Contributing to debates around standardization, cultural evolution, cybernetic culture, and surveillance, and inventing a politically challenging aesthetic that links them, Media Ecologies, with its various narrative speeds, scales, frames of references, and voices, does not offer the academically traditional unifying framework; rather, Fuller says, it proposes to capture “an explosion of activity and ideas to which it hopes to add an echo.”

As for your paper, well you know I’m not big on McLuhan, and that I am big on Nietzsche, D&G and ANT, so you’ve got half of me wholeheartedly with the other half resisting. (A dangerous combination.) And if I understand correctly, you’re going to summon the body as technological medium?

I take Simondon’s “in-formation” or matter-taking-form as a critique of the kind of hylomorphism that permeates cybernetic and algorithmic models of media. So I think looking at technical-corporeal materialisations offers a fruitful point of departure, but I’m unclear what aspects of McLuhan and medium theory you plan to marshall [groan], and how they connect to Nietzsche.But I guess that’s the point of the paper, huh?

I guess I mean to say that I see strength in the desire to trouble the “undeclared preference for anthropocentric subjectivism” in media studies. I’m also quite interested in a “phenomenological encounter with the technological realm”. Does this maintain distinct regions? If so, to what effect?

Lingis argues that there are self-contained and mutually external levels which we sense and to which we must adapt, and Simondon focusses on the coming-together of different orders-of-being. If we tie all your regions together, is it in terms of radical contingency? How does this sense of time affect the body?

Anyway, I don’t know if this helps or hinders or even makes sense (I’m still on my first cup of coffee) but there you have it. Good luck with your paper – I’d love to read it when it’s done :-)