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Genesis of the Media Concept John Guillory The medium through which works of art continue to inuence later ages is always different from the one in which they affect their own age. —WALTER BENJAMIN 1 1. Mimesis and Medium The word media hints at a rich philological history extending back to the Latin medius , best exemplied in the familiar narrative topos of clas- sical epic: in medias res. Yet the path by which this ancient word for “mid- dl e” ca me to serve as th e co ll ecti ve no un fo r our mo st adva nc ed communication technologies is difcult to trace. The philological record informs us that the substantive noun medium was rarely connected with matt ers of communication before the later nineteenth cent ur y. The explo- sive currency of this word in the communicative environment of moder- ni ty has relega te d th e genesis of the medi a concept to a pu zz ling obscurity. Th is essay is an at te mp t to gi ve an account of this genesis wi th in th e long er history of reection on communication. Itisno t my pu rpose, then, to enter into current de ba tes in me dia theo ry  but to descri be the philosophical precondi tions of medi a di sc ourse. I ar gue that the concept of a mediumofcommunicat ion wa s absent but wanted for the several centuries prior to its appearance, a lacuna in the philosophical tradition that exerted a distinctive pressure, as if from the future, on early efforts to theorize communication. These early efforts necessarily built on the discourse of the arts, a concept that included not only “ne” arts such as poetry and music but also the ancient arts of rhetoric, logic, and dialec- tic. The emergence of the media concept in the later nineteenth century was a response to the proliferation of new technical media—such as the telegraph and phonograph—that could not be assimilated to the older system of the arts. While I am only indirectly concerned in this essay with the history of technical media as such, I set out from the observation that the development of new technical media perplexed thereafter the relation I thank Clifford Siskin and William Warner for the occasion to produce an earlier version of the argument in connection with the conference “Mediating Enlightenment.” Several colleagues offered detailed comments on earlier drafts of this paper, for which I am very grateful: Lisa Gitelman, Maureen McLane, Scott Newstok, and Mary Poovey. 1. Walter Benjamin, “The Medium through Wh ich Works of Art Continue t o Inuence Later Ages,” trans. Rodney Livingstone, Selected Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott et al., ed. Marcus Bullock et al., 4 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 2002), 1:235. Critical Inquiry 36 (Winter 2010) © 2010 by The University of Chicago. 00093-1896/10/3602-0004$10.00. All rights reserved.

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