ABSTRACT
The foregoing preliminary considerations show what the following study intends to accomplish and what it intends to avoid:
The medium will not be theorized as a means or an instrument but rather as a middle and a mediator. In light of this mediating function, the ‘transmission perspective’ and the ‘postal principle’ will be explored by investigating whether ‘transmission’ is definable in a way that at the same time reveals how media affect and shape what they transmit. The original scope of medial effectiveness will also be reconstructed as a perceptual relation and a letting-appear (Erscheinenlassen), in which the communicative functions of media are rooted and on which they ultimately depend. A philosophical gesture will thus be adopted that is traditionally called a metaphysical perspective insofar as what media let appear can be traced back to something concealed behind it and thus invisible. This process effectively reverses the classical metaphysical gaze, as it involves the ‘hidden materiality’ of media.
What is to be avoided now appears as a negative image: no media a priori is to be established, and media are thus not to be located within the frame of ultimate justifications. Media are also not to be endowed with a quasi-demiurgical power, thus blazing a trail for a kind of ‘media generativism’ that at the same time also brings forth what media let appear.
