A mediologist might thus make an examination “within a system” (e.g. of systems of book production, of authors and publishers), or of “the interaction between systems” (e.g. how painting and early photography influenced each other), or even of “the interactions across systems” (e.g. the ways in which symbolic transmission of systematic knowledge is brought to intersect with the material history of actual transportation – such as desert trading routes and ancient religion, telegraph and railroad, the radio and airplanes, television and satellites, mobile phones and cars).
Debray is generally critical of some of the ideas of Marshall McLuhan (whom he sees as being overly technologically determinist), and of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. He also tries to step beyond Antonio Gramsci, in that he suggests that an ideology cannot be comprehended in ideological terms alone.
Criticisms
Criticisms of mediology in English so far have been found in two short book reviews and one article. The first, by the screenwriter Yvette Bíró (Wide Angle magazine, Vol.18, No.1, January 1996), was a four-page book review of Debray’s Vie et Mort de l’Image, in which she claimed to have discerned “traces of a strong, vulgar Marxist school of thought”.
The second review, by Pramod Nayor of the University of Hyderabad (Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory, Vol.8, No.1, Winter 2006) was a review of the English translation of Transmitting Culture (2004). In concluding the review Nayor notes the similarities of some aspects and directions of mediology to Birmingham School cultural studies ranging from “Raymond Williams through Stuart Hall”. Nayor also notes that recent philosophers and historians of science – he cites Bruno Latour, Eugene Thacker and Dwight Atkinson – have also examined science in relation to “intersecting cultural, ethnic, economic and iconographic ‘bases’ of the transmission of culture”
An article by Steven Maris in Fibreculture No.12 [1] similarly suggests that Debray is too firmly embedded in “the French academic scene” and that thus “Debray’s explicit engagement with other national scholarly traditions of media, communications and cultural studies in the works mentioned above is minimal”. Maris also notes that mediology “predates much of the [current academic] interest in networked cultures and new media”.
Physicists Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont have criticized Debray’s work for using Gödel’s theorem as a metaphor without understanding its basic ideas, in their book Fashionable Nonsense. Debray engaged in dialogue with Bricmont in a 2003 book titled “À l’ombre des lumières : Débat entre un philosophe et un scientifique”, which so far has not been translated into English.[3]
Despite such criticisms, the six-volume New Dictionary of the History of Ideas (2004) wrote of Debray that “His achievement is to have synthesized these earlier arguments into a practice with a powerful political project ahead of it.” (Vol.4, page 1394).