Of Tools and Angels

Abstract

RÉGIS DEBRAY'S mediological work has so far failed to stir much Anglo-American enthusiasm. This failure is all the more remarkable given mediology's contiguity to currently flourishing fields of interdisciplinary research, namely the emergent cultural histories of technology, the work on material culture, and the re-orientation of numerous texts in the humanities and social sciences around the function of the new media in the production and circulation of knowledge. While Debray is an extraordinarily prolific writer, only a handful of his monographs have been translated in English to date, while his collaborative work and the journal Les Cahiers de Médiologie, which he has edited since 1996, remain virtually unknown in the United Kingdom. This is regrettable as Debray's work is instructive for current Anglo-American cultural studies insofar as it affirms that we cannot afford to study the history of technology without also studying the history of affect and sociality. At the same time, it demonstrates the difficulty of rendering an analytics of technoculture compatible with an analytics of the social imaginary or, in his words, of crossing the 'story of our tools' with that of 'our hopes and dreams' (p. 47).Transmitting Culture forms part of Debray's mediological project, a project officially launched with Cours de médiologie générale in 1991 but arguably informing Debray's thinking since his 1979 Le Pouvoir intellectuel en France (published by New Left Books as Teachers, Writers, Celebrities in 1981). Rather than advancing new work, Transmitting Culture constitutes a further re-statement of principles, this time foregrounding the study of