Bergson and the Metaphysics of Media

Any message requires a medium, but because media can be speeded up and made more efficient, we also regard them as obstacles in the way of more effective communication. Media are both means and hinderance and this leads to a number of important and difficult problems that cross the borders of media theory and philosophy:

• Can media produce immediacy?
• What must mediation be if it doesn't go away?
• Why is there is always a middle?
• Can the means be considered independently of the content that passes through them?

This book follows the 'metaphysics of mediation' from the philosophy of Henri Bergson into a wide range of intellectual movements that he influenced, from radical forms of Catholicism and phenomenology to the media philosophies of Gilles Deleuze, Marshall McLuhan, Walter Benjamin and Michel Serres.

Stephen Crocker is Associate Professor of Sociology at Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada. He has published widely on the philosophy of time and the theory of media. His work has appeared in, among other places, Continental Philosophy Review, Deleuze Studies, Philosophy Today and numerous anthologies.

Introduction
Any Moment Whatever: Elaborating Bergson's Ideas
PART I: THE MEDIUM AS MEANS AND OBSTACLE
1. Metaphysical Media: The Discreet and the Continuous in Deleuze and McLuhan
2. One or Many Planes: The Evolution of Intervals in Painting and Film
3. Sounds Complicated: Audition and `Three Dimensional Thought'
4. Noise is the Presence of the Medium
PART II: KILLING TIME: SYNCHRONY AND DIACHRONY
5. Instrumental Reason and the War on Intervals
6. Distracted and Contemplative Time
7. Empty, Homogenous Time/Any Moment Whatever
PART III: MAN FALLS DOWN: UNANSWERABLE SITUATIONS
8. Compromise Formations: Bergson's Vitalism
9. Unanswerable Situations
10. Interrupted Gestures
Conclusion: On Failure and Wonder
Notes
References Cited