Seite - 22 - in Limina - Grazer theologische Perspektiven, Band 4:2

20 | www.limina-graz.eu Alessandro De Cesaris | The Taste of Truth In this way, a “mediology” of taste is the study of how that particular natu- ral medium – our sense of taste – is able to shape human experience in general, and therefore what aspects of our cultural and technological expe- rience are rooted in our sense of taste. 1.2 What is a “medium”? Based on this approach, another problem arises: what do we mean with the term “medium”, be it natural or artificial? In other words: what is media- tion? For the sake of the paper, I will offer a brief clarification of my use of this notion. As we have already seen, Debray’s understanding of mediation tends to identify it with transmission (cf. Debray 1991). While Debray’s contribu- tion is essential for many reasons – not last for his deep understanding of the significance of Christian culture in the history of media – I will not follow this identification. Other scholars have provided a very complex no- tion of “transmission” (cf. Krämer 2015), but I still think that the notion of mediation can be differentiated from the notion of transmission, as well as from two other notions: relation and transformation. By analysing the difference between the concept of mediation and these other concepts, I will be able to propose at least a “negative” definition of what I mean with this term. First of all, mediation is not a relation because relations1 are static, and me- diation is dynamic. In other terms, mediation is not a fact, but rather an act; it is not a property, but a function. Secondly, mediation is not a transmission because, while it can surely “al- ter” the content of its object in some way, transmission leaves the onto- logical status of the object unaltered. On the contrary, mediation is always a process that modifies the status of the object. I will attempt to clarify this position with an example: if I take a picture of a letter, and send it to a friend, the message of the letter is transmitted (it is a message before and after the transmission); however, the letter itself is mediated: its way of being is radically altered, since after the mediation process it exists in the form of an image. A consequence of this feature of mediation is that, differ- ently from transmission, it is asymmetrical and irreversible: I can send back a message, but I cannot “mediate back” an object. A dynamic, asymmetrical and heteronomous function 1 Of course, here I am using a very specific notion of relation. I mostly refer to Aristotle’s idea of relation (pros ti) as a category, namely as a property of beings (Cat. VII, 6a).