The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a philosophy of elemental media

In The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media, John D. Peters embarks on an exploration of the natural world to argue for a broad definition of media that includes natural environments. Peters asserts that meaning is inherent to nature, it can be found in the sea and in the sky, in all the environments that mediate our experience of the world. In that sense, the author advances the idea that media studies should take these environments—which he calls “elemental media”—seriously as objects and places that are full of meaning but so far neglected, for example, the clouds (“clouds are full of meaning—ask any famer, pilot, or sailor,” p. 255). Digital media, Peters explains, resemble old forms of communication and activate a natural conception of media. As such, natural environments lie at the heart of our interactions with the world, and are infrastructures that permit our existence as well as technological development. For this definition, Peters goes back to Aristotle, who discussed mediation in terms of “milieu” or habitat, thus as environment (p. 46). As any infrastructure, however, elemental media are prone to fall into invisibility (Star and Ruhdeler, 1996), thus the author emphasizes the importance to move away from the taken-for-grantedness that characterizes our relationship to nature. Peters builds on Friedrich Kittler's conception of a postdisciplinary theory of media to propose one that encompasses not only the humanities and social sciences, but also natural sciences (Kittler, 1999). While the author sees in materialism a counterbalance to the “digital hype” (p. 12), he moves beyond it to consider what is immaterial and symbolic, what defies materialization and thus is impossible to capture: time, fire, and clouds.