Materialities of Communication

The essays in this volume refer to an epistemological borderline, a stage of transition in Western thought. Within the academe field of the humanities, this transition can be described as a movement away trom the identification of meaning (i.e., from “interpretation”) toward problems concerning the condinons and torms of meaning onsotunion Converging with a leitmotif in early deconstruction, with Foucauldian discourse analysts, and with certain tendencies in cultural studies, such invesugatons on the constitunon of meaning include—under the concept “materialities of communication” — any phenomena that contribute to the emergence of meaning without themselves belonging to this sphere: the human body and various media technologies, but also other situations and patterns of thinking that resist or obstruct meaning-construction. The thrust of this volume ts not a search for the reality of the maternal or the materiality of the real. Instead, the contributors investigate the underlying conditions and constraints of common cation, whose technological, material, procedural, and performative potentials have been all too easily swallowed up by long-dominant interpretational habits. Among the authors are some of the most thought-provoking European participants in the ongoing reorientation of the humanities—Jan Assman, Steven Bann, Wlad Godzich, Friedrich Kater, Niklas Luhmann, Jean-Frangois Lyotard, Francisco Varela, and Paul Zumthor.