The Modalities of Media: A Model for Understanding Intermedial Relations

Abstract

Scholars have been debating the interrelations of the arts for centuries. Now, in the age of electronic and digital media, the focus of the argumentation has somewhat shifted to the intermedial relations between various arts and media. One important move has been to acknowledge fully the materiality of the arts: like other media, they are dependent on mediating substances. For this reason, there is a point in not isolating the arts as something ethereal but rather in seeing them as aesthetically developed forms of media. Still, most of the issues discussed within the interart paradigm are also highly relevant to intermedial studies. One such classical locus of the interart debate concerns the relation between the arts of time (music, literature, film) and the arts of space (the visual arts). In the eighteenth century, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing argued famously in Laocoön that there are, or rather should be, clear differences between poetry and painting,¹ but for the moment there is a tendency rather to deconstruct the dissimilarities of various arts and media. W. J. T. Mitchell is perhaps the most influential contemporary critic of attempts to find clear boundaries between arts and media. Many important distinctions have thus been made, and then successfully erased; much taxonomy has been construed, and then torn down, and this process has led to many valuable insights — Is that not enough? What is the problem?