Mediation operates as a thirdness beyond body and image

Evidence

Selfies, as Kardashian makes them, are wholes unto themselves, deep gaze, lush corporeality without background, on-demand immediacy. Scapes as Burtynsky makes them are enormous and complex, but unwhole—magnitude deployed to decomplete, immensity that relativizes itself with the allusion to all that is unimaged and unimagined. Glimpsing the order of industry or energy or labor, making patterns perceptible, Burtynsky’s images activate the symbolic, the realm of the social and the systematic. They use the image not to mirror but to precipitate otherness, inviting us to traverse obscure zones and to construct for the good. Mediation depends upon this thirdness beyond body and the image, the medium of interaction without prescribed outcomes, relation without guarantees. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 332

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines mediation precisely as ‘thirdness beyond body and the image’ — the anti-collapse-of-mediation position the reader wants to defend.
• XREF: The ‘thirdness’ architecture echoes Peirce’s triadic sign (and arguably Žižek’s mediation), giving the reader a theoretical anchor for the chapter.