Materiality (Bill Brown)

different dimensions of materiality-- different meanings of "dematerialization"--- What sort of materialism would help us access the materialities of dematerializing media?

p59-60
(m)aterialism that displays the multiple orders of materiality— or the order of materialities— between a phenomenological account of the interface between user and technology, an archeological account of the physical infrastructure of the medium, and sociological account of the cultural and economic forces that continue to shape both the technology itself and out interactions with it.


different dematerialization hypothesis:
1)  medium prevents some more immediate access to "things themselves"
2) Marx   the particularities of any object or action disappear within the regime of value
3) Georg Simmel      money facilitates the preponderance of calculation
4) Allan Sekula  "The Traffic in photographs"
Just as money is the universal gauge of exchange value, uniting all the world('s) goods in a single system of translations, so photographs are imagined to reduce all sights to relations of formal equivalence.
Jonathan Crary     the new "autonomy and abstraction of vision"
                              the development of photography shapes "an entire territory on which signs and images, each effectively severed from a referent, circulate and proliferate."

5) New media studies
 *  indexical vs digital
*    dematerialization of the original medium itself    homogenized within the hegemony of the digital
      kittler "with numbers, everything goes"


The materiality of communication
Mark Hanse   "thus grants one version of the dematerialization hypothesis—the homogenizing, the dematerializing effects of digitization, a process that dislodges any image from its traditional spatial coordinates, a process that remains mere process until the "affective body" makes sense of the flow it has arrested and stabilized."


Attention to materiality within media studies shares the objectives of a "new materialism" that has distinguished itself from historical materialism, structuralism, and semiology by reengaging phenomenology, by focusing on material culture, and by drawing attention to a materiality of the signifier, now understood as the signifying effects of matter itself.