Communication Matters: Materialist Approaches to Media

Communication has often been understood as a realm of immaterial, insubstantial phenomena-images, messages, thoughts, languages, cultures, and ideologies-mediating our embodied experience of the concrete world. Communication Matters challenges this view, assembling leading scholars in the fields of Communication, Rhetoric, and English to focus on the materiality of communication. Building on the work of materialist theorists such as Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Friedrich Kittler, and Henri Lefebvre, the essays collected here examine the materiality of discourse itself and the constitutive force of communication in the production of the real.