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One lingering, unresolved dimension of intermediality theory is the status of mediality itself. Typically, the concept of intermediality is offered as a challenge to the idea that media exist as “isolated monads” (Mueller 105); the task of the analyst then becomes that of thinking through the variety of relationships between them. The risk is that this conception of intermediality may work to hypostatize media as particular kinds of objects. In this hypostatization, work on intermediality has sometimes diverged in important ways from the ongoing development of ideas about mediality itself. Mediality is best seen, I would argue, not as a permanent and definitive property of objects or forms but as the occasional state of a wide variety of objects, including those not normally classed as “media.”
Friedrich Kittler’s deliberately simple typology of media functions provides one route into an expanded conceptualization of mediality. While the list of elements that constitute this typology varies slightly across his work, the key media functions he identifies are those of processing, transmission and storage (Griffin 711). The capacity of a given object (a cultural form or technology) to carry out one or more of these functions will define its mediality, as a state in and out of which such objects pass. The eyeglasses that “remember” the size of their owner’s head, as a result of use and subsequent alteration, are medial in their storage of that information (and as a result of the “inscription” by which head size is marked upon them). Likewise, the bagel, whose central hole remembers the original circulation of bagels when they were carried by vendors on poles, transmits that original function as one of the historical features stored and expressed in its present form. There is little point, however, in gathering up eyeglasses and bagels within an ever-expanding list of media. Mediality is better seen as a distributed and intermittent property, the occasional (but not definitive) state of an object depending on its particular use at a given time or the prism through which it is viewed.
In this sense, then, intermediality is less the variety of possible relationships between objects pre-identified as media than a property of those assemblages in which the functions of media are extended or transformed. In what follows, I...