W.J.T. Mitchell’s View Of Media From The Perspective Of Media Aesthetics

W.J.T.Mitchell is the representative scholar of visual culture studies in the 21 st century,and his famous "pictorial turn" has shifted the focus of contemporary cultural studies from language to the visual.Although he is best known for his work on iconography and visual culture,Mitchell is also considered a media scholar because his work involves a great deal of discussion of media.Rather than studying media in abstract generalizations,Mitchell turns to discussing specific media in concrete cases,reverting to a "dialogue" with media by constructing a transcendental model of "media aesthetics," and choosing what he sees as a more generative He chooses a more generative concept-"image"-to explore the medium and its relationship with literature and art and people.However,few scholars have paid attention to the importance of "media" in Mitchell’s image theory and the relevance of Mitchell’s view of media to the current phenomenon of new media literature and cross-media literary research.The formation of Mitchell’s view of media did not happen overnight,but even accompanied his entire academic career,and his broad vision of "image" research has led to the integration of media ideas into his theory.The influence of four thinkers in the history of media studies on the formation of Mitchell’s view of media is found in Mitchell’s inheritance and transcendence of his predecessors’ media theories,as Mitchell supplemented Mc Luhan’s concept of media as "sensory ratio" with the concept of "symbolic ratio",and Kittler’s concept of media as "sensory ratio".Mitchell complements Mc Luhan’s concept of the medium as a "sensory ratio" with the concept of the "symbolic ratio";Kittler provides a deep-rooted "trichotomy" for Mitchell’s media studies;Mitchell points out that Raymond Williams’ equation of the medium with "material social practices" should not be absolute;and Mitchell’s Mitchell’s "age of controlled reproduction" is a direct application of Benjamin’s "age of mechanical reproduction".In contrast to his previous media studies,Mitchell abandons the interpretation of media theory from the outside of the media,but chooses to rethink the relationship between media and people in actual cases,and attaches importance to the self-referential nature of media.Mitchell gradually realizes that the subject matter is in fact the relationship between different media,art forms,sensory modalities and symbolic codes,and he starts from the concept of "media aesthetics",defining "media" differently in different texts,revealing the transcendental nature of media.Mitchell’s concept of "media aesthetics",the different definitions of "media" in different texts,reveals the transcendental trinity of "image/music/text",and forms Mitchell’s own unique view of mixed media: focusing on the dialogue between media and image and people,and further analyzing the role of "stitching" in the media to seamlessly intertwine the sensory and symbolic ratios.From a practical analytical perspective,Mitchell’s work on the media From a practical analytical perspective,Mitchell proposes a "beyond comparison" approach to mixed media,insisting on the intuitive and substantive nature of the work,starting with the recognition of the hybrid relationship between different media/art,and choosing to criticize works of art in different media with a "beyond comparison" approach.He chooses to criticize works of art in different media with a "beyond comparison" approach,to "dialogue" with them,and to focus on the self-referential nature of different media/works of art themselves.Mitchell’s view of media can be applied to the more complex phenomenon of new media literature and art and to the study of new media literature and art criticism,from which we can see a vision of the future of digital images and biological images.Mitchell’s "beyond comparison" approach is applied to the field of modern new media,and in the process of analyzing specific cases of new media literature,we explore the implications of his views for contemporary cross-media studies and new media literature research.While the transcendental model behind the medium revealed by Mitchell is an understanding of the universality of art and media,the transcendental comparative approach focuses on the specificity of art and media.At the same time,this view of media also reveals the current dilemma of disciplinary research,which is moving from "interdisciplinary" to "non-disciplinary".