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(2013) Bergson and the metaphysics of media, Dordrecht, Springer.

Metaphysical media

the discrete and the continuous in Deleuze and McLuhan

Stephen Crocker

pp. 17-44

On the surface, nothing could be further apart than the technological determinism of Marshall McLuhan and the "transcendental empiricism' of Gilles Deleuze. Nonetheless, Understanding Media and the Cinema books both look to the birth of motion pictures for insight into the nature of thinking itself. In the movies, McLuhan and Deleuze see a new image of thought that is no longer based on a Cartesian model of a machine linking discrete cells of activity, but on the active role of "resonant' or "irrational' intervals, in which the interstice or medium between events plays an active role in the creation of the sense that passes through it. For both, film's significance is not only aesthetic or technical, it is also metaphysical. Film is a break boundary, as McLuhan puts it, between discrete and continuous forms or organization that offers us some new kind of insight into the nature of relations and intervals.

Publication details

DOI: 10.1057/9781137324504_2

Full citation:

Crocker, S. (2013). Metaphysical media: the discrete and the continuous in Deleuze and McLuhan, in Bergson and the metaphysics of media, Dordrecht, Springer, pp. 17-44.

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