The Politics of Intermediality
The Politics of Intermediality

Summary/Abstract: The whole discussion, whether historical or contemporary, on intermediality versus ‘pure media’ (a notion which seems to be implied by ‘intermediality’, otherwise one would not know between what entities the ‘inter’ takes place) is structurally – and not only in a historical-empirical sense – a political discussion. A prominent reference to this is to be found, for example, in the recent work of Rosalind Krauss. At the end of her small volume entitled A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition, she refers to the “international fashion of installation and intermedia work, in which art finds itself complicit with a globalization of the image in the service of capital,” a complicity at which Krauss levels sharp criticism. She denounces intermediality as capitulation to the capitalist spectacle (Debord). On the other end of the Spectrum, in the mid-1960s, Dick Higgins condemned the pure media as signs of capitalist division of labour and praises intermediality as the dawn of communist society. In the essay these two opposites are described in detail and thus a new field of research is outlined: the politics of intermediality.

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