Introduction

Christer Johansson and Sonya Petersson

In the present volume, intermediality is inclusively defined as

relations between media conventionally perceived as different. It
covers themes such as relations between old and new media, inter-
medial concepts such as remediation and illustration, and explo-
rations of mixed-media objects as well as of objects in intermedial
networks.1 These and other intermedial issues are elaborated in
this volume’s fourteen individual chapters that bring together a
number of highly diverse cases, ranging from present-day instal-
lation art, to twentieth-century geography books, to renaissance
sculpture, and to public architecture of the 1970s.2 This inclu-
sive understanding of intermediality makes it possible for each
individual study to narrow it down and specify it according to
particular demands, methods, and research questions. Instead of
stipulating a fixed definition, our shared concern is precisely to

1
Cf. Irina O. Rajewsky’s characterization of intermediality in the broad
sense as “a generic term for all those phenomena that (as indicated by the
prefix inter) in some way take place between media.” Irina O. Rajewsky,
“Intermediality, Intertextuality, and Remediation,” Intermediality: History
and Theory of the Arts, Literature and Technologies, no. 6 (2005): 46,
43–64. Italics in the original. See also note 37 below for a reference
to Rajewsky’s discussion about the assumption of conventional media
differences included in the concept of intermediality.
2
The authors are with few exceptions affiliated with the cross-disciplinary
Department of Culture and Aesthetics at Stockholm University, where
“Mediality” is established as a profiled research area.

How to cite this book chapter:

Johansson, Christer, and Sonya Petersson. “Introduction.” In The Power of
the In-Between: Intermediality as a Tool for Aesthetic Analysis and Critical
Reflection, edited by Sonya Petersson, Christer Johansson, Magdalena Holdar,
and Sara Callahan, 1–21. Stockholm: Stockholm University Press, 2018. DOI:
https://doi.org/10.16993/baq.a. License: CC-BY.
2 The Power of the In-Between

explore the concept of intermediality. The key is to combine it

with other perspectives, to provide it with particular methods and
materials, and to make it the object of both aesthetic and me-
dia-historical approaches. While we take “aesthetic” to include
issues of formal analysis, the arts, and experience, “media-historical”
designates the specificity of media practice in time, space, and
particular environments. Our aim to integrate these two lines
of inquiry is intended to overcome what we understand as an
­unhappy divide between, on the one hand, the intermedial ­subfields
of semiotically and formalistically oriented studies and, on the
other, media-historical ones.3 Consequently, “intermediality” in this
volume is not only a concept employed to cover an inclusive range of
cultural objects, cultural contexts, and methodological approaches,
but is also modelled out by the particular cases it is brought to
bear on.
The following introduction has a three-part structure. First,
in the most general section, we discuss intermediality as a field
of ­research in a broad and cross-disciplinary sense. Then, in
the ­second section, the perspective is centered upon the present
­volume and its overarching objectives. The third and last section
is the most specific and introduces the volume’s outline and
individual chapters.

3
In this ambition, we complement a range of available edited volumes
on intermediality, as, e.g.: Changing Borders: Contemporary Positions
in Intermediality, eds. Jens Arvidson, Mikael Askander, Jørgen Bruhn,
and Heidrun Führer (Lund: Intermedia Studies Press, 2007); Framing
Borders in Literature and Other Media, eds. Werner Wolf and Walter
Bernhart (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006); Intermedial Arts: Disrupting,
Remembering and Transforming Media, eds. Leena Eilittä, Liliane
Louvel, and Sabine Kim (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars
Publishing, 2012); Intermedialitet: Ord, bild och ton i samspel, ed. Hans
Lund (Lund: Studentlitteratur, 2002); Media Borders, Multimodality and
Intermediality, ed. Lars Elleström (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
2010); Intermedialities: Philosophy, Arts, Politics, eds. Henk Oosterling
and Ewa Plonowska Ziarek (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2011); Media
Inter Media: Essays in Honor of Claus Clüver, eds. Claus Clüver and
Stephanie A. Glaser (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009).
 Introduction 3

Intermediality as a Field of Research:

Traditions, Rationales, and Subdivisions
The term “intermediality” may variously designate 1) certain cul-
tural phenomena involving the interrelations between two or more
media; 2) a cross-disciplinary subfield usually termed intermedi-
ality studies, starting to evolve during the 1990s; and 3) a larger
field of research, including not only subfields like intermediality
studies, but also allied fields like media theory and media history.
Our presentation of the field of intermediality is informed by the
third, inclusive, sense of the term.
Starting with intermediality studies in the narrower sense, as
we know it today, it is often demonstrating its dependence on
three interrelated research traditions: intertextuality, semiotics,
and interart studies.4 Its reliance on the first two, intertextuality
and semiotics, is, for instance, clearly manifested in Werner Wolf’s
well-known model of intermedial relations, where intertextual-
ity and intermediality are conceived of as two analogous phe-
nomena of semiotic referentiality, or “intersemiotic relations.”5
For Wolf, intertextuality is the “mono-medial” variant of these

4
This account of traditions is fairly presentist. Of course, it could be added
that discussions on and investigations of media and relations between me-
dia are as old as Western thought. The examples that immediately come
to mind are Horace’s for centuries rehearsed phrase from Ars Poetica,
“ut pictura poesis” (“as is painting so is poetry”) and Lessing’s Laocoön,
still often acknowledged as an important instance of media studies avant
la lettre. Both texts are available in early translations: Quintus Horatius
Flaccus, Q. Horatius Flaccus: His Art of Poetry, trans. Ben Jonson
(London: 1640 [c. 19 BC]); Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laokoön: An
Essay upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry, trans. Ellen Frothingham
(Boston: 1887 [1766]). For a discussion on the concept of medium in
early modern and modern philosophy, see John Guillory, “Genesis of the
Media Concept,” Critical Inquiry 36, no. 2 (Winter 2010): 321–362.
5
Werner Wolf, The Musicalization of Fiction: A Study in the Theory and
History of Intermediality (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999), 46, 35–50. For
a historiographic overview and a critical discussion of the concept of
intertextuality, see Mary Orr, Intertextuality: Debates and Contexts
(Cambridge: Polity, 2003). For an introduction to semiotics, see Daniel
Chandler, Semiotics: The Basics (London: Routledge, 2002).
4 The Power of the In-Between

co-working and meaning-producing relations, while intermedial-

ity is the “cross-medial” one.6 The third tradition, interart studies,
has been especially significant in the disciplines of comparative
literature and art history, and may broadly be characterized by its
comparative approach—not to media—but to the arts. The com-
parative approach proceeds from investigating how separate art
forms differ from or resemble each other,7 often under the guid-
ance of concepts such as ekphrasis (“the verbal representation of
visual representation,” e.g., poems about paintings), so-called ar-
tistic Doppelbegabungen (artists expressing themselves in more
than one art form), or adaptation (a transfer of qualities from
novel to film, from music to poetry, etc.).8 A typical product of
the interart tradition is the edited volume Interart Poetics: Essays
on the Interrelations of the Arts and Media (1997).9 Besides its
typicality, the book should also be noted as an example of the
differences between interart and intermediality studies and the
emergence of the latter. The chapter written by Jürgen E. Müller,
“Intermediality: A Plea and Some Theses for a New Approach in
Media Studies,” already in its title launches intermediality as a
“new approach” and further describes it as a challenge to “spe-
cialized disciplines for different arts/media.”10 Intermediality is

6
Wolf, Musicalization of Fiction, 46.
7
For a critical evaluation of the comparative tradition, see W. J. T.
Mitchell’s chapter “Beyond Comparison: Picture, Text, and Method,” in
Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1994), 83–107.
8
The definition of ekphrasis is taken from Mitchell, Picture Theory, 152.
For studies on ekphrasis and adaptation, both in line with the interart
tradition and deviating from it, see Pictures into Words: Theoretical and
Descriptive Approaches to Ekphrasis, eds. Valerie Robillard and Els
Jongeneel (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1998); Stephen Cheeke,
Writing for Art: The Aesthetics of Ekphrasis (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2008); Adaptation Studies: New Challenges, New
Directions, eds. Jørgen Bruhn, Anne Gjelsvik, and Eirik Frisvold Hanssen
(London: Bloomsbury Academy, 2013).
9
Interart Poetics: Essays on the Interrelations of the Arts and Media,
eds. Ulla-Britta Lagerroth, Hans Lund, and Erik Hedling (Amsterdam:
Rodopi, 1997).
10
Jürgen E. Müller, “Intermediality: A Plea and Some Theses for a
New Approach in Media Studies,” in Interart Poetics: Essays on the
Interrelations of the Arts and Media, eds. Ulla-Britta Lagerroth, Hans
 Introduction 5

thus presented as the successor of interart studies, which replaces

the comparative tradition with a more wide-ranging crossing of
borders between media and disciplines. Instead of making the
canonized art forms the center of attention, the rationale for in-
termediality studies is to foreground the more inclusive concept
of medium, embracing not only the arts but also medial multimo-
dality, different forms of popular culture, and new digital media.
The traditions of intertextuality, semiotics, and interart studies
are especially interwoven in the intermedial subfield oriented to-
ward formal analysis mentioned above.11 Again, Wolf’s model of
intermediality is one of the prime examples, since it is concerned
with schematizing media interrelations in typologies based on for-
mal qualities, such as “intracompositional” as opposed to “ex-
tracompositional,” “overt/direct” as opposed to “covert/indirect,”
and in modes of “showing” as opposed to “telling.”12 Similarly,
Irina O. Rajewsky’s distinctions between “medial transpositions”
(“transformation” in Wolf’s terminology, or the production of one
media object out of qualities of another, “first,” medium), “medial
combinations” (two distinct media present in one object in their
own materiality), and “intermedial references” (references to an
absent medium by way of the first medium’s own media specific
means), are structured by formal qualities of absent or present
media objects.13
A rationale for studying intermedial relations that is not so
much based on formal typologies but more pointing to the role
and function of sensory, perceptual, and interpretative interaction

Lund, and Erik Hedling (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997), 295 (quote),

295–304.
11
Cf. Jørgen Bruhn’s discussion of the “‘formalistic’ line of intermedi-
ality studies.” Jørgen Bruhn, “Heteromediality,” in Media Borders,
Multimodality and Intermediality, ed. Lars Elleström (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 231, 225–236.
12
Wolf, Musicalization of Fiction, 37–46; for “intracompositional” and
“extracompositional” cf. Werner Wolf, ed., “Metareference across Media:
The Concept, its Transmedial Potentials and Problems, Main Forms and
Functions,” in Metareference across Media: Theory and Case Studies
(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009), 19–20, 1–85.
13
Rajewsky, “Intermediality, Intertextuality, and Remediation,” 51–53. See
also Irina O. Rajewsky, Intermedialität (Tübingen: Francke, 2002). Cf.
Wolf, Musicalization of Fiction, 42.
6 The Power of the In-Between

with media is developed by W. J. T. Mitchell and Lars Elleström

and may be called the multimodal conception of mediality. This
concept recognizes media as operative by what Mitchell calls
“sensory, perceptual and semiotic elements” and what Elleström
terms “modalities.” Mitchell’s argument, in the article “There Are
No Visual Media” (first published in 2005), is basically that a
medium and its mediation always entail some mixture of the
sensory, perceptual, and semiotic elements. 14 All media are
­necessarily approached by the senses (sight, hearing, touch, etc.)
and prompted by “semiotic operators,” such as the Peircean triad
of iconic, indexical, and symbolic signs.15 Mitchell’s point is there-
fore that all media are “mixed media,” but all media are emphat-
ically not “mixed in the same way.”16 The latter, and sometimes
forgotten, part of Mitchell’s famous phrasing is perhaps the most
important, since it entails a more qualified concept of medium
specificity than is warranted by the traditional mono-modal per-
spective. For Mitchell, the acknowledgement of the mixedness of
all media makes it urgent to describe and analyze individual ob-
jects by their various specific media elements or making a “more
precise differentiation of mixtures.”17 Elleström’s multimodal con-
cept follows the logic of Mitchell’s: four “modalities” are under-
stood as present in all media, but in different ways, to different
degrees, and in different combinations. Elleström distinguishes
between “the material modality,” “the sensorial modality,” “the
spatiotemporal modality,” and the “semiotic modality.”18 The

14
Mitchell’s article “There Are No Visual Media,” Journal of Visual Culture
4 (2005): 257–266, has later been reprinted with minor amendments in
W. J. T. Mitchell, “There Are No Visual Media,” in MediaArtHistories,
ed. Oliver Grau (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 395–406 and in W. J. T.
Mitchell, Image Science: Iconology, Visual Culture, and Media Aesthetics
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 129 (quote), 125–135.
15
Mitchell, Image Science, 130. In Peirce’s semiotics, symbolic signs work
by convention, iconic by resemblance, and indexical by cause and effect
or existential relations. Cf. Charles S. Peirce, “Logics as Semiotic: The
Theory of Signs,” in Semiotics: An Introductory Anthology, ed. Robert E.
Innis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 1–23.
16
Mitchell, Image Science, 129.
17
Mitchell, Image Science, 129.
18
Lars Elleström, ed., “The Modalities of Media: A Model for
Understanding Intermedial Relations,” in Media Borders, Multimodality
 Introduction 7

l­atter coincides with Mitchell’s semiotic element in its reliance on

Peirce’s sign functions. The sensorial modality regards the physi-
cal and mental acts of perceiving the medial interface, the mate-
rial modality includes the “latent corporeality of the medium,”
whereas the spatiotemporal modality covers “the structuring of
the sensorial perception of sense-data of the material interface
into experiences and conceptions of space and time.”19 In other
words, Elleström’s modalities, just like Mitchell’s elements, enable
media to function as media; that is, to mediate and signify. The
material interfaces condition sensory inputs, which give rise to
perceptions that are structured in space and time and understood
as signifying.20 It should also be stressed that the multimodal con-
cept of medium designates intermedial relations as present from
the start: media objects, from television shows to epic poems, are
media specific only by virtue of their perceived mixtures.
The field of intermediality thus offers a range of terms and ap-
proaches designed to describe and analyze media and media in-
terrelations. Nevertheless, there is one fundamental question that
needs to be answered by anyone taking an interest in using the
tools on offer: Why should they be used in the first place? Are
formal, synchronic investigations of medial modes and interme-
dial relations in artworks and other kinds of artefacts motivation
enough, or are the intermedial categories and concepts just tools
to be used in studies with additional and greater ambitions? No
doubt the formalistic answer to these questions will differ from an
answer with media-historical, diachronic, points of departure—a
subdivision of the intermedial field that will be more directly ad-
dressed in the next section. Here, it should only be noted, firstly,
that media history and what is commonly called media theory
rarely approach relations between media as ends in themselves,
but rather as means to explore larger questions of, for instance,
media’s role in maintaining or subverting social and cultural
power, performing cultural agency, or taking part in the formation
of epistemological ruptures and traditions.

and Intermediality (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillian, 2010), 17–24,

11–48.
19
Elleström, “Modalities of Media,” 17 (first quote), 18 (second quote).
20
Elleström, “Modalities of Media,” 17–24.
8 The Power of the In-Between

Secondly, we insist on including media history and theory in in-

termediality as an area of research, since these fields’ exploration
of media history cannot but take relations between media into
consideration.21 Such relations are, for example, those between
oral and written media on the one hand, and between old and new
media on the other. The relationship between oral and written me-
dia have been frequently discussed in the context of diachronic
relations, media revolutions, and historical junctures and net-
works by the pioneering media theorists Eric A. Havelock, Walter
Ong, and Marshall McLuhan (as well as by later exponents of the
field, such as Friedrich Kittler and Jan Assmann).22 The relation-
ship between old and new media have both been understood as a
question of what Lisa Gitelman calls media-historical specificity
(see more in the next section),23 and closely associated with Jay

21
This is also the case with the field of media archaeology (not to be con-
fused with media history in the sense of, e.g., Lisa Gitelman). In his ac-
count of the rationales and interests of the media-archaeological proj-
ect, Jussi Parikka singles out “intermediality” as one of its issues. Jussi
Parikka, What is Media Archaeology? (Cambridge: Polity, 2012), 10, 19,
25–27, 34, 37, 38, 154.
22
Eric Alfred Havelock, The Muse Learns to Write: Reflections on Orality
and Literacy from Antiquity to the Present (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1986); Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of
the Word (London: Methuen, 1982); Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg
Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (London: Routledge and
K. Paul, 1962); Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999); Jan Assmann, Cultural Memory
and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination,
1st English ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
23
Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of
Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), 1–22. For further discussions
of media-historical approaches to old and new media see Lisa Gitelman
and Geoffrey B. Pingree, eds., “Introduction: What’s New About New
Media?,” in New Media, 1740–1915 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), xi–
xxii; David Thornburn and Henry Jenkins, eds., “Introduction: Toward
an Aesthetics of Transition,” in Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics
of Transition (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), 1–16. The historical per-
spective on new media in these volumes is opposed to the view that new
media are confined to present digital media and that its distinguishing
factor is its unprecedented possibilities of embodiment, as in Mark B. N.
Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004),
21–46.
 Introduction 9

David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s concept of “remediation.”24

The l­atter designates a kind of intermedial relationship in which
both old and new media, by way of processes of medial refash-
ioning, are involved in “competition or rivalry,” and struggling for
cultural status, either through “immediacy” (concealing media) or
through “hypermediacy” (foregrounding media).25 Investigating
digital media, Bolter and Grusin argue that “all current media
function as remediators,” and thus pay homage to as well as rival
earlier media through the particular ways in which they refash-
ion them.26 The same is however true of old media: “remediation
operates in both directions: users of older media such as film and
television can seek to appropriate and refashion digital graphics,
just as digital graphics artists can refashion film and television.”27
Bolter and Grusin maintain remediation to be a “defining charac-
teristic” of the new digital media and, at the same time, a funda-
mental characteristic of all medial practices.28
The previous attention to relations between doublets such as
orality and literacy, and old and new media, motivates the method
of triangulation introduced by Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen
in a recent textbook in media studies.29 At its most general level,
the method is designed to sidestep the binarism exposed above
and, more particularly, explore the way media do more than just
passively participate in culture—that is, have actual agency in in-
terconnecting the specific cultural and historical domains of aes-
thetics, society, and technology. The question “[h]ow are media
distributed across the nexus of technology, aesthetics, and society,
and can they serve as points of convergence that facilitate com-
munication among these domains?” deliberately seeks to bridge

24
Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New
Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999). The concept is defined on p. 45.
25
Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, 45, cf. 5. “Immediacy” and “hypermedi-
acy” are explained on pp. 11–12, 21–44, 54–55, 70–71.
26
Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, 55, cf. 14–15.
27
Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, 48.
28
Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, 45, 65.
29
W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen, eds., “Introduction,” in Critical
Terms for Media Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010),
vi–xxii.
10 The Power of the In-Between

conventionally un-bridged areas.30 Mitchell and Hansen make the

concept of media their rationale for bridging and interconnect-
ing, by recognizing it as that which “mediates” between binaries
and also, relying on McLuhan, as that which impacts experience
through its content as well as through its formal and technolog-
ical qualities. Ultimately, media are envisioned as opening “onto
the notion of a form of life, of a general environment for living—
for thinking, perceiving, sensing, feeling.”31 Mitchell and Hansen’s
reconceptualization of media as an environment for living is not
only based on the obvious fact that media are “everywhere,” from
human bodies to newspapers, but also on the way it both condi-
tions and makes experiencing and understanding possible.32
So far, we have presented intermediality as a much wider field
than intermediality studies in the narrower sense. The gained in-
sight, which informs our objectives below, is the benefit of moving
between subfields rather than fixing our position in one of them.

Exploring Intermediality as a Tool for Aesthetic Analysis

and Critical Reflection
The function of intermediality in this volume can be described
as a “travelling concept.”33 First, it travels between different dis-
ciplines. It is employed in studies emanating from art history,
comparative literature, theatre studies, musicology, and history of
ideas. But more to the point of our aim to explore it and fuse it
with other perspectives, the concept of intermediality travels from

30
Mitchell and Hansen, “Introduction,” viii.
31
Mitchell and Hansen, “Introduction,” xii.
32
Mitchell and Hansen, “Introduction,” x–xiv. Closely connected to Mitchell
and Hansen’s widened concept of medium is John Durham Peter’s
conceptualization of media as environments or ecosystems: “Once
­communication is understood not only as sending messages—certainly an
essential function—but also as providing conditions for existence, media
cease to be only studios and stations, messages and channels, and become
infrastructures and forms of life.” John Durham Peters, The Marvelous
Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2015), 14.
33
“Travelling concept” as defined in Mieke Bal, Travelling Concepts in the
Humanities: A Rough Guide (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002),
22–55.
 Introduction 11

Jørgen Bruhn and Henriette Thune’s combination of it with the

Bakthinian aesthetic object, to Peter Gillgren’s connection of it to
Kristeva’s intertextuality, and to Elina Druker’s insertion of it in a
Baudrillarian socio-ideological economy of signs. Throughout the
volume, intermediality is both the concept that informs the studies
and a concept modelled out in encounters with their particular
materials, methods, and research questions.
However inclusive, in all cases intermediality concerns something
that takes place in between media.34 One first sense of the in-­
between is that it is productive. For instance, in Bruhn and Thune’s
study of Sophie Calle’s exhibition Rachel, Monique, the authors
demonstrate how the space in between the media objects juxtaposed
in the exhibition gives rise to “formal content,” or themes that not
only correspond to more explicit themes in the exhibition, but also
add values like multiplicity and irony to the latter.
Anything that is in-between is also about the crossing of
borders. As noted above, intermediality has, from its launch in
the 1990s, been promoted as a field of research that transgresses
borders between disciplines as well as between the specific me-
dia conventionally studied within them.35 If keeping with the
conventional view that disciplines are fairly separated and that
their objects are fairly media specific, one could say that this vol-
ume testifies to the often-recognized promise of exchange over
disciplinary borders. It includes, for example, literary scholars
working with an art exhibition, art historians working with text
and film, a musicologist studying film, and a historian of ideas
studying images. But one could also leave the conventional view
and, to paraphrase Mitchell, say that the disciplines are just like
media in being mixed from the outset. Take art history and one of
its traditional objects, painting, as an example: Has not painting

34
Cf. the discussion of “in-between” in relation to the etymology and his-
toriography of the term in Stephanie A. Glaser, “Dynamics of Intermedial
Inquiry,” in Media Inter Media: Essays in Honor of Claus Clüver, eds.
Claus Clüver and Stephanie A. Glaser (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009),
12–15.
35
The latter is a pattern of association that permeates Werner Wolf’s dis-
cussion about “metareferentiality” as a transdisciplinary and transmedial
category in Wolf, “Metareference across Media,” 1–85.
12 The Power of the In-Between

“always” been the object of art historical/academic interpretation

in words, disseminated in the medium of writing and in the pack-
age of books? Has not painting, by the practices in and of art his-
tory, been reproduced in slides and photographs, not to mention
by digital interface?36 This is not an argument that in any way
denies the infrastructural compartmentalization of the academy,
but points to the already mixed character of both the disciplines
and their assumed media objects. The very difference between
the traditional, comparative approach to intermedial phenom-
ena and the mixed-media approach is that the latter conceives
of the object—a sculpture or a painting just as well as a comic
strip or a film—as always a product of more than one medium.
Accordingly, that which takes place in between media may also
take place within one object, as distinct from between two sep-
arate objects, taken to represent specific media. But importantly,
in each case there must still be, as Irina O. Rajewsky writes, an
“assumption of tangible borders between individual media, of
media specificities and differences.”37 In short, the concept of in-
termediality—relations between media conventionally perceived
as different—demands that media borders and differences are pre-
supposed from the start. Otherwise there would be no borders to
transgress, destabilize, and challenge.
The idea of the in-between as a transgression of borders is not
restricted to the borders between disciplines or between media.
As will be demonstrated in detail in the chapters that follow, it
may, by analogy, be transferred to various other conventionally
separated categories. For instance, Anna Dahlgren takes Walter
Benjamin’s classic argument further and highlights the transgres-
sion between the original work of art and its reproduction,38 Peter

36
For disciplinary/institutional practices, “protocols,” structuring media
use, cf. Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New, 7–8.
37
Irina O. Rajewsky, “Border Talks: The Problematic Status of Media
Borders in the Current Debate about Intermediality,” in Media Borders,
Multimodality and Intermediality, ed. Lars Elleström (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 52 (quote), 61, 63, 51–68.
38
The new translation of Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age
of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version” is available in
The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and
Other Writings on Media, eds. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and
 Introduction 13

Gillgren makes a point of transgressing the border between past

and present by analyzing the themes of night and sleep as “migrat-
ing” between renaissance sculpture and present-day photography,
while Daria and Kim Skjoldager-Nielsen’s argument about media
embodiment transgresses the border between object and subject.
These are indeed examples of the power of the in-between.
Our attempt to integrate aesthetic and media-historical ap-
proaches to intermediality is, as noted, an attempt to integrate
formal and historical lines of analysis. Needless to say, the benefit
of Wolf’s and Rajewsky’s typologies of intermediality is a fine-
tuned terminology that specifies the complexities of formal rela-
tions. Nonetheless, it should be stressed that neither Wolf’s nor
Rajewsky’s elaboration of distinctions need to be media-histor-
ically framed or demonstrated as culturally, socially, politically,
epistemologically, or institutionally embedded in the particu-
larity of time and space. The latter approach is precisely what
Lisa Gitelman argues for when she succinctly writes that “spec-
ificity is key.”39 Rather than essentializing media as, well, “me-
dia,” Gitelman calls for the specificity of media in history. To take
another example from the present volume, this corresponds to
the difference between what would, in Sara Callahan’s study, be
digital photography in general as opposed to the specificity of
the present-day artistic genre of digital photography, discursively
established as a new medium against the preceding medium of
analogue photography. Our conviction is that the call for his-
torical specificity does not rule out, but may very-well include
attention to formal qualities. Likewise, formal considerations of
media interrelations may very-well be simultaneously treated as
issues of social, cultural, and political use and abuse in p
­ articular
media environments. Throughout this book, our integrative
perspective also takes different forms. One example is Johanna
Ethnersson Pontara’s close analysis of the “formal imitation” of
opera in Ingmar Bergman’s film The Hour of the Wolf. The author
pays considerable attention to how media combination and inter-
medial references interact with the modalities of sound, image,

Thomas Y. Levin, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Rodney Livingstone, Howard

Eiland, and Others (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), 19–55.
39
Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New, 7.
14 The Power of the In-Between

and speech. The formal analysis is, however, intersected by con-

siderations of the film’s narrative (which is another perspective
combined with intermediality) and its early reception (which is a
historical issue). Another example is Magdalena Holdar’s study,
in which the argument is built around the performative character
of Yoko Ono’s work Space Transformer. In Holdar’s case, inter-
mediality takes on exactly the historical role Lisa Gitelman and
Geoffrey B. Pingree has described as an “agent […] of cultural
definition and cultural change.”40 For Holdar, the historical artic-
ulation of a theory of intermediality (by Dick Higgins) and the ar-
tistic and political intermedial practices of the Fluxus movement
are cultural-historical factors that contributed to make the radical
agenda of Ono’s work possible.
The last aspect to highlight here is the critical potential of me-
dia history, a recurring theme in Mitchell’s writings. In discussing
text and image relations in film, Mitchell presents them as “a site
of conflict, a nexus where political, institutional, and social an-
tagonisms play themselves out in the materiality of representa-
tion.”41 Put differently, any mix of media and modalities matter,
as vehicles for, or signs of, corresponding social, ideological and
discursive borders, convergences, and power relations.42 These
are critical considerations of media and of qualities in media
that are historical through and through: As when, for example,
Elina Druker examines how a network of references between the
inter-war era’s avant-garde film, music, window display, artistic
styles, and branded advertising furthered a market-driven media
aesthetics in the service of the ideology of the “welfare state.”

Artefacts, Networks, and Concepts

The present volume is divided into three parts, under the headings
“Artefacts,” “Networks,” and “Concepts.” These headings are in-
tended to describe how intermedial considerations enter and are

40
Gitelman and Pingree, “Introduction: What’s New About New Media?,”
xvi.
41
Mitchell, Picture Theory, 91.
42
Cf. Mitchell, Image Science, 167–179.
 Introduction 15

put to work in the different contributions. In characterizing the

authors’ use of intermediality, they both target the objects studied
and the way the objects are approached. It goes almost without
saying that all studies include medial artefacts, concepts, and net-
works, even if not to the same extent. Nonetheless, the criterion
for inclusion is in all cases qualitative. The studies are included
under the heading that best corresponds to their approach and
line of argument, rather than to any quantitative amount of arte-
facts, networks, and concepts.
The first part, “Artefacts,” includes six studies that all focus
on a particular object or exhibition. This is the case in Johanna
Ethersson Pontara’s analysis of Bergman’s film The Hour of the
Wolf, Peter Gillgren’s analysis of Michelangelo’s sculpture Night,
Magdalena Holdar’s analysis of Yoko Ono’s instruction art-
work Space Transformer, and Rikard Hoogland’s analysis of a
photomontage of a Swedish late nineteenth-century theatre per-
formance. In these studies, the intermediality of one particular
object is targeted and determines other considerations. In Bruhn
and Thune’s and Daria and Kim Skjoldager-Nielsen’s contribu-
tions, dealing with Sophie Calle’s exhibition Rachel, Monique and
the theatre group Hotel Pro Forma’s exhibition Today’s Cake is
a Log, relations between media are studied within the totality of
the exhibitions.
All studies further demonstrate different approaches to inter-
mediality. While Ethnersson Pontara is making a careful formal
analysis of operatic qualities in the film, Gillgren’s focus is on the
themes of night and sleep. Spurred by Kristeva’s concept of in-
tertextuality, these themes are examined as realized in the sculp-
ture’s sixteenth-century multimodal environment and “migrating”
across then contemporary poetry and philosophy as well as into
present-day culture. Holdar’s case, which centers on the perfor-
mative transgression of human and non-human agency, makes
the argument that part of the performative force of Ono’s work
stemmed from the intermedial theory and practice in the artis-
tic milieu of the Fluxus movement. Daria and Kim Skjoldager-
Nielsen share Holdar’s interest in performativity, but combine it
with attention to remediation as an aesthetic strategy in the Hotel
Pro Forma exhibition. Hoogland makes a theatre historical case
16 The Power of the In-Between

of the complex “layers” of the photomontage, layers that are

traced to the media practices of illustrative drawings, light, play
script, and theatre photography. Bruhn and Thune share the inter-
est in intersubjectivity with Gillgren, but derive it from Mikhail
Bakhtin (rather than Kristeva). Besides making an analysis of
Calle’s exhibition as a Bakhtinian aesthetic and notably intersub-
jective object, the authors also use the study to develop a method
of analysis where the introductory step is to make an inventory of
“medialities” as a framework for analyzing meaning production.
The four studies in part two, “Networks,” more symmetrically
deal with, on the one hand, networks of different media, and,
on the other, networks of media in networks of societal distribu-
tion and ideological, political, and scientific discourses.43 Both as-
pects of networks are present in all four studies, albeit not equally
stressed. Anna Dahlgren and Staffan Bergwik emphasize networks
of media. In Dahlgren’s case, the central issue is the reproduction
of art. One of the important points demonstrated by Dahlgren
challenges any notion of a direct relationship between art and
reproductive media. The late nineteenth-century lithographic
album, around which she builds her media network, is a repro-
duction. It is, however, shown to remediate not only the original
works of art, but also photography as yet another medium of
reproduction. In Bergwik’s case, the widely distributed geography
books by the Swedish explorer Sven Hedin are analyzed as media
technological nexuses of “descriptive layering.” Bergwik inves-
tigates how the book’s interlayered photographs, drawings, and
texts are both transgressive of any particular media technology
and merging with the idea of a “panoramic vision” in early twen-
tieth-century geographical discourse. Elina Druker and Fredrik
Krohn Andersson, respectively, lay stress on networks of media as
vehicles for ideology and politics: the consumer society of the in-
ter-war era and the Swedish cultural policy of the 1970s. Druker
shows how the mass advertising of branded picture books and
short films echoes avant-garde and entertainment media genres
and thus not only interconnects media but also traditionally

43
Cf. the double sense of “networks of remediation” in Bolter and Grusin,
Remediation, 65–84.
 Introduction 17

separated categories like art and advertising. Krohn Andersson

traces the mediations of “the new cultural policy” in governmen-
tal bills, the architectonic space of the newly built cultural center
in Stockholm, and an information film as media channels for the
infected political issue of culture’s inherent openness. However, it
is Krohn Andersson’s contention that these mediations do more
than just realize the “new cultural policy”; in less controllable
ways, they introduce an element of uncertainty to it.
Part three, “Concepts,” also consists of four studies, that all
have a concept (or concepts) as object of study, although it is de-
rived from and elaborated against various materials. In this last
section, the reader will get acquainted with, in Sarah Callahan’s
case, the contemporary art genre of digital photography and
criticism of analogue photography; in Sonya Petersson’s study,
historiographic texts on the genre of illustration and the late
nineteenth-century illustrated press; in Erik Wallrup’s text, inter-
medial theory and a song by Arnold Schoenberg; and in Christer
Johansson’s case, media theory or, more specifically, the conceptu-
alizations of the relations between old and new media in the well-
known books of Bolter and Grusin and Lev Manovich. Callahan’s
name for the conceptual category she both tentatively starts out
from and offers as outcome is “the analogue.” It refers both to
a corpus of texts revealing a cluster of associations around ana-
logue photography and to an analytical strategy. From the point
of view of relations between old and new media, Callahan im-
portantly points out that “the analogue” is made visible by be-
ing folded against digital photography, which also means that the
later medium has, a posteriori, created that which preceded it.
The remaining three studies are all in different ways engaged in
critical readings. Petersson deconstructs the concept of illustra-
tion by attending to the inherent ambiguity of the “conventional
concept” and offers a demonstration of a tentatively defined al-
ternative concept. Wallrup’s concern is with the “song as event”
or an argument elaborated in reconsideration of what the author
argues to be “a semiotic overstatement” in intermedial theory,
where meaning in music is reduced to a sign. Lastly, Johansson
undertakes a “metatheoretical” re-reading of the works by Bolter
and Grusin and Manovich that discloses the internal architecture
18 The Power of the In-Between

of the texts: their conceptual transfers, use of metaphors, and pat-

terns of inference. The analysis shows how Bolter and Grusin’s
and Manovich’s concepts are a mix of traditional theorizing and
postmodern strategies, underpinning the author’s concluding sug-
gestion of new directions for future explorations of the relations
between old and new media.

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