GLOSSARY OF KEY TERMS
Baudrillard pointed out that such practices can be used as an ‘inoculation’ against further radicalization.
LIBIDINAL The libido is a primary psychic force associated with sexuality. As a biological drive, it has to be directed in some way (and it is directed in different ways for the various stages of the psychosexual development of the subject). Libidinal objects are invested with heightened attention and interest (what Freud termed ‘cathexis’). Freud regarded all mental energy as libidinal at root, though his conception of libido reached far beyond limited sexual desire for another person. It was used in terms of ‘libidinal impulses’ or ‘libidinal gratification’, and introduced by Freud in his book Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905). As a quasi-physics of the body, libido theory remained contentious, but has been taken up and reworked in various ways by later theorists such as Lyotard and Deleuze.
LOGOCENTRISM The logos signified ‘the word’, or originary intelligence, by which the universe is structured. ‘Logocentrism’, as used by Derrida, is a continuing need for this originary truth and universal structure, with its appeal to a ‘transcendental signifier’ by nature unrepresentable (whether God, the Idea, the Self, Reason, etc). In this vertical universe, hierarchy is the norm, and all key terms are organized by this logic, with one privileged over the other (the immediacy, self-presence and transparency of speech, for example, over the distance, detachment and equivocation of writing). Derrida’s deconstruction reveals that logocentrism is metaphysics that conceals the way such oppositions are interdependent, and in a constant play of difference.
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MEDIATION The concept of mediation is an epistemological principle, arguably traceable to Kant on the categorical conditions of knowledge, that holds that there is no direct cognitive apprehension of the world: we ‘know’ or understand the world by using an apparatus of concepts or representations. Meaning is not simply ‘given’ but actively produced. Later philosophers in the phenomenological tradition tried to circumvent such ‘representationalism’ by emphasizing the ‘task-driven’, or engaged, nature of cognition, as it emerges from our intersubjective interaction with the world into which we are already thrown. ‘Mediation’ in communication, media or cultural studies emphasizes how all our understanding and communication is already embedded in semiotic and symbolic systems, cultural beliefs and hierarchies of values; and that all communication is channelled through organizational apparatuses.
MEDIUM Medium is often distinguished from material or matter. The artist’s materials (oil paint, canvas, brush) were not unique in themselves, only their use, according to the conventions of painting or sculpture as they were configured at a particular historical moment. The artist’s medium developed as a complex of evolving materials, technical practice and institutional protocol. The concept of a distinct or ‘specific’ medium has been attacked from a number of perspectives: as a legacy of academic practice, regulation and protocol; as the remnant of an outmoded aesthetic theory of artistic autonomy; and in light of the rise of new digital technologies ‘multimedia’ facilities for visual communication.