Media Do Not Exist: Performativity and Mediating Conjunctures by Jean-Marc Larrue and Marcello Vitali-Rosati offers a radically new approach to the phenomenon of mediation, proposing a new understanding that challenges the very notion of medium. It begins with a historical overview of recent developments in Western thought on mediation, especially since the mid 80s and the emergence of the disciplines of media archaeology and intermediality. While these developments are inseparable from the advent of digital technology, they have a long history. The authors trace the roots of this thought back to the dawn of philosophy. Humans interact with their environment – which includes other humans – not through media, but rather through a series of continually evolving mediations, which Larrue and Vitali-Rosati call ‘mediating conjunctures’. This observation leads them to the paradoxical argument that ‘media do not exist’. Existing theories of mediation processes remain largely influenced by a traditional understanding of media as relatively stable entities. Media Do Not Exist demonstrates the limits of this conception. The dynamics relating to mediation are the product not of a single medium, but rather of a series of mediating conjunctures. They are created by ceaselessly shifting events and interactions, blending the human and the non-human, energy, and matter.
MULTIFILE
This paper analyses the performativity of the sociotechnical imaginaries that the online communities interested in blockchain applications (e.g., cryptocurrencies) construct through the memes they share, in the context of a crisis of truth and amid pervasive precarity. These memes adopt a subcultural language that is a mix of financial jargon and blockchain slang, neither building on the established codes of the regulated financial sector nor belonging fully to the colloquial nature of internet banter. Through them, the community collectively constructs ways to overcome the fundamental uncertainty that traverses all aspects of contemporary life – housing, precaritisation of labour, political ruptures, etc – by doubling down on them. Financial speculation is no longer reserved to those with disposable income but becomes a tactic for survival in a scene that actively destabilizes information for competitive market advantage. Through the use of repeated memetic subcultural phrases, blockchain memes blur the difference between fact and fiction in an effort to reconcile the extreme volatility of cryptocurrencies with the neoliberal conviction that the market is always right. As a result, no one is trustworthy, individualism takes on a new dimension, and what Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou calls a “speculative community” arises. Ultimately, this case study highlights how the iterative and distributed character of memes supercharges the normative character of performativity.
This paper contributes to the knowledge of the performativity of accounting by exploring the unexpected consequences of a management accounting and control system (MAC) as designed in a large public organization. In an organization in the Dutch sector of Nursing Homes, Homes for the Elderly and Homecare MAC turns from a system into an actor-network. Rather than being a stable answer machine in the context of decision making or a ready-made tool for performance management by which distant (top) managers and controllers aim to measure and manage performance from time-space distances, MAC is grounded in relations and performatively develops. As such, it becomes multiple. The study shows how the performativity of MAC goes beyond its functionality. Though originating from MAC’s functional design, MAC’s performativity is not simply about the degree to which it realizes the intentions of its designers, but is about its dynamic relational consequences. Controllers should mediate in the dynamics of MAC so that processes of learning are enhanced and the quality and efficiency of the care practices develop
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