Materiality, Virtuality, and Temporality
Materiality, Virtuality, and Temporality
This chapter is about the relation between meaning, media, and materiality. It focuses on various kinds of durability that allow particular materials to last, and thereby preserve meaning, by leaving relatively enduring traces. And it focuses on various ways this durability is imagined and utilized in particular media, and in particular understandings of mediation. In offering such an archeology of media, its focus is on entropy as much as information. Such ideas are then used, in conjunction with the notions of secrets and singularities introduced in earlier chapters, to review, extend, and critique key understandings of the virtual: Deleuze, insofar as he is taken up by later media theorists; and Peirce, insofar as his theory of the meaningful is, by design, a theory of the virtual. It shows how we develop intuitions for the (otherwise secret) sense-making capabilities of highly complex systems.
Keywords: virtual, materiality, media, Gilles Deleuze, Charles Sanders Peirce, archeology, information
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