Translation and the materialities of communication

This article provides the theoretical coordinates for a set of concerns recently emergent in the humanities that place materiality and its cognates, mediality and technicity, at the centre of intellectual enquiry. The fields of media theory and media philosophy on the one hand, and book history and textual bibliography on the other, despite tenuous links between their intellectual traditions, have each in their own way highlighted the importance that objects, things, media and machines play in the very stakes of civilization. This article works through the implications of this thinking for translation and the study of translation.