The aim of the dissertation project is the systematic media-philosophical development of the concept of a “negative ambientiality.” The connection is sought between two intimately linked discussions of contemporary media theory/philosophical research: on the one hand, the renunciation of analysis of individual media in favour of an approach to media environments, media ecologies, networks, relations and co-existentialities, on the other hand a return to anthropological questions and a critique of anthropocentrism.
If references to ecological concepts in current media theory are often insufficient for the requirements of a posthuman mode of thought, as they tend to a truncation of environmentalism to systemic-technical principles, an alternative is refined in the form of attention to the historical genesis of the concept of the environment, as well as the medial structure of environments as a question about the modality of the relationship between subject and surroundings, the question of the materiality of the surroundings and the consequences thus implied for the relationship of human and non-human life forms.
In order to fulfil the potential of an environmental media philosophy, the unavailability of environments must be stressed and the control of an empowered subject in relation to its respective environment must be restricted. Approaches in this direction may be developed from the reception of the biologist Jakob von Uexküll, via Martin Heidegger, Giorgio Agamben and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In connection with Luce Irigaray’s deconstructive reading of Heidegger, three elements of negative ambientiality are outlined. It becomes clear that environmentality as an existential condition of life and mediality of the environmental cannot be separated and human and non-human life forms are mutually entangled on a post-humanistic level of communality.