Action at a Distance

by John Durham Peters, Florian Sprenger, Christina Vagt

How are human actions shaped by the materiality of media? 

Contemporary media leads us more than ever to an ‘acting at a distance,’ an acting entangled with the materiality of communication and the mediality of transmission. This book explores this crucial phenomenon, thereby introducing urgent questions of human interaction, the binding and breaking of time and space, and the entanglement of the material and the immaterial. 

Three vivid inquiries deal with histories and theories of mediality and materiality: John Durham Peters looks at episodes of simultaneity and synchronization. Christina Vagt discusses the agency of computer models against the backdrop of aesthetic theories by Henri Bergson and Hans Blumenberg, and Florian Sprenger discusses early electrical transmissions through copper wire and the temporality of instantaneity. 

95 pages, Paperback

Published June 23, 2020

About the author

John Durham Peters is professor of English and film and media studies at Yale University. He is the author and editor of many books, including The Marvelous Clouds, Courting the Abyss, and Speaking into the Air, all published by the University of Chicago Press.

Reviews

[Darby · Rating 4 out of 5]

Packs quite a dense punch (at least for my English brain) in a short package. If you can follow the introduction's explanation of the physics of it all, the case studies are interesting and do a lot of work to explore the theoretical implications of their intervention(s). John Durham Peters' chapter is, I think, the most accessible piece of the bunch.