Media, materiality, and the human

You argued nearly twenty years ago, in your essay on the materiality of informatics, ¹ that theorists need to resist the “absorption of embodiment” into discourse, which you characterized as typical of Foucault’s analysis and other kinds of abstract studies of power. So the idea of thinking about the materiality of information is not a new question for you, but it was new to many of the presenters at the NC State symposium, “Materializing Communication and Rhetoric, Technologies, Infrastructures, and Flows.” The symposium brought together scholars from a range of perspectives in rhetoric, literature, media studies, communication, and cultural studies, to consider the materiality of communication and rhetoric. The symposium’s topic was taken up in a number of different ways. Some participants, such as Jeff Rice, Bill Balthrop, and Carole Blair, ² offered rhetorical analyses of physical spaces such as monuments or urban spaces. Others focused on infrastructures and interfaces, such as Lisa Parks’ analysis of the transition to digital broadcast television in the US and Adriana de Souza e Silva and Jordan Frith’s work on mobile interfaces. Others, such as Mark Hansen and Greg Wise, asked us to consider the materiality of physiological, affective, and cognitive processes such as sensation and attention. And still others such as John Durham Peters, Ron Greene, Jeremy Packer, and Kathleen Oswald offered more holistic, historical analyses that considered the complex articulations of technical media with discursive formations and social practices. So, there was a broad range of understandings of materiality. Could you comment on the different ways in which materiality is being conceptualized today and incorporated as a focus of contemporary theory?