Vanishing aesthetics: Mediality and literature after Merleau-Ponty, Virilio, and McLuhan (Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Paul Virilio, Marshall McLuhan)

The development of high technologies and media networks in the late Twentieth Century parallels the “de-aestheticization” of art objects. Walter Benjamin's influential argument for the “fading of aura” extends this critique to all objects, which are characterized by reproducibility and technical performance, rather than by the beautiful appearance and sense phenomena of traditional aesthetics. The technical object that results is one index of modernity: at stake in this end-state of aesthetic theory is a claim to read the immediacy of history. This dissertation adapts Hans Blumenberg's metaphorological approach to argue for a continuation of aesthetic theory in the re-evaluation of the technological object by theorists of mediation, focusing on the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the aesthetics of disappearance of Paul Virilio, and the media analyses of Marshall McLuhan. These theorists problematize the appearance and performance of the technological object to demonstrate its immateriality and mediality. Media theory re-establishes the aesthetics of the technological object, leading to a renewed historicism. Media aesthetics discover the staging of history in technology. The second focus of this dissertation is the role of language in media theory, and, in particular, the role of metaphor as the explanation of mediation. Each media theorist develops a concept of metaphor, best exemplified in literary texts. This dissertation reads fiction by Ballard, Gibson, and Pynchon, poetry by Olson and Pound, and concept art by Flynt and Smithson, to situate literature as necessary to the theorization and use of technological systems. Media theory preserves a concept of the literary as a heuristic maintaining the open-ness of technical systems. Finally, in contrast to the simply teleology of a supposed “death” of literature under technical conditions, this dissertation re-configures the history and lines of influence between media technologies and textual strategies, using examples such as the MIT Media Lab, nanotechnology, and high tech accidents, to argue for complex theoretical borrowings and institutional exchanges.