Summary of Joseph Vogl: Becoming-Media: Galileo’s Telescope
Medium means the middle, mediation and mediator (627). It is an in-between place that questions the working of a thing or a project. The field of media studies is vast, and it’s very size limits the ability of study. Approaches range from scientific inquiry, to historical reviews, journalism, information, economics and technology. It is difficult to analyze because the subject isn’t a thing itself, but something that transmits things for consideration. “Media makes things readable audible, visible, perceptible, but in doing so they also have a tendency to erase themselves and their constitute sensory function, making themselves imperceptible and “anesthetic” (628).
Medium will be discussed relative to 1610 and Galileo’s initial account of the stars. The telescope is a new technology, and it changed the relationship between how we view the world. It differentiates between the eye, the gaze and the viewed objet. It is a new technology, but more importantly, it is a new medium. Galileo examined the telescope in detail before examining the stars. The telescoped is as natural as regular vision (629). The telescope as an instrument speaks to the functions of the eye - it gives new context to how people see by expanding Kepler’s theory that the eye is an optical device.
The telescope is self-referential (630). It means it locates the viewer as much as viewed subject. The notations of the object are not just of the object, but they are also the result of the observation itself. Lastly, the observer forms meaning relative to the specific point of view and act as self-reflection, and by extension, the viewer of a piece of art will form meaning from the artists choice of view/presentation.
The medium becomes invisible. There is the aesthetic, what we can see, and the anesthetic which is what we do not take notice of. The medium is the anesthetic. Galileo notes how the six stars of Orion’s Belt contains hundreds of starts through he telescope. The telescope reveals the invisible - those stars we cannot view with the naked eye. The telescope is fundamentally linked to extending our vision towards things not visible (632). It is the distinction between the visible and the invisible, and how they are different. It also reveals that sightings through the telescope are now all conditional. This is what we can see - so far. It is now implied that more of invisible resides behind the visible.
The telescope provides a new realm of knowledge shrouded with conditionality. This is what is known so far, but we now know there is more out there.
Vogel, Joseph. Becoming-Media: Galileo’s Telescope The Philosophy of Communication. Cambridge: MIT Press. 2012. Pp 627-634. Print.
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