Page - 21 - in Limina - Grazer theologische Perspektiven, Volume 4:2

19 | www.limina-graz.eu Alessandro De Cesaris | The Taste of Truth 1.1 Methodological prolegomena: why a “mediology” of taste? Before starting my analysis, I would like to offer a brief sketch of what I mean with the term “mediology”. This word has been used by French in- tellectual Régis Debray (1991) in order to designate a “new” discipline, namely the study of the «means of symbolic transmission and circulation» (Debray 1991, 15). In this article, however, I will use the term “mediology” to indicate the study of media in its general sense. The domain of mediol- ogy, in this sense, is still quite fragmented and lacks methodological uni- ty: we speak of media theory, media studies, Medienwissenschaften, media philosophy; at the same time, the study of media is often covered by other disciplines such as semiotics, ICT studies, science and technology studies, philosophy, anthropology (cf. Weber 2003). Different names often corre- spond to very different approaches, along with different notions of what a “medium” is. For the sake of this article, I will start from Marshall McLuhan’s intuition that (technological) media are extensions of our own body, and specifi- cally of our sense organs (cf. McLuhan 1994, 45). According to this view, all forms of technologies are artificial extensions of those natural media that are our senses. In this formulation, the word “extension” must be under- stood in two different ways: first of all, it is a literal extension. McLuhan means no metaphor, since he explicitly refers to the physical extension and implementation of our material bodies. In a second sense, however, artificial mediation does “extend” our senses in a different, non-physical way: it extends the influence of sense organs to other domains of aware- ness. In other words, artificial media have a “metaphorical” function: they do not simply extend our perception in space, but they translate the role of perception to other modalities of expression and data elaboration (the so- called superior faculties, imagination and rational thought). In this case, the use of the term “metaphor” does not simply refer to the – horizontal – skill of «understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in term of one other» (Lakoff/Johnson 1980, 5). At the core of McLuhan’s me- dia theory lies a much more radical hypothesis: all levels of human aware- ness and expression, even rationality and abstract thought, are rooted in our sensuous experience through the mediation of artificial media. All levels of human awareness and expression are rooted in our sensuous experience through the mediation of artificial media.