Spectral mediations: rhetoric, philosophy, and the thinking of originary technics

Rather than talk about what mediation is and what it does or does not entail, this dissertation is concerned with the strategies by which mediation has been theorized and what those strategies mean politically and philosophically. This dissertation takes for granted that experience, reality, thought, communication and whatever else have been mediated from the beginning, and argues that we must begin to interrogate how the different responses to this mediation have manifested, how mediation has historically rejected and denounced, as well as celebrated and glorified. And we must begin to think how these different theoretical strategies for dealing with mediation continue in the discussions of media today. Finally, and most importantly, we must begin to ask about the very serious costs of maintaining these different ways of thinking the technics of mediation, something this project attempts by looking at texts from Plato and Lacan, the writings of Derrida and Heidegger, as well as the fiction of Kipling and the virtual reality of The Matrix.