In Media Mire: Peatlands and Elemental Mediation

This essay explores the shifty but fertile ground of conceptualising peat as a form of media, bringing it into dialogue with two distinct strands of media theory before addressing the benefits of such a move against the backdrop of the relationship between humans and their environment. First, the essay demonstrates how peat fulfils the three media functions identified by Friedrich Kittler—processing, storage, and transfer—bringing this into contact with the notion put forward by ecologist Harry Godwin (1981) that peat, in acting as a fossilised record of ecological change and an archaeological repository, is archival. Second, the essay explores peat in dialogue with scholarship that pushes beyond a singular understanding of media as human-centred technical objects or systems designed for the transmission of signals and symbolic meaning (e.g., Jue, 2014; Peters, 2015; Young, 2020; Zylinska, 2017), examining a conception of peat as what John Durham Peters calls an ‘elemental’ medium, and arguing that peat and peatlands should be understood as both material and environmental mediators of human and non-human worlds at multi-temporal, interscalar, and multi-species levels. Finally, the essay explores the consequences of the move to theorize peat and peatlands as media, arguing that adopting this approach facilitates creatively speculative possibilities for thinking with peatlands and peat in the service of reframing our political-ethical relationship to bogs and mires and the urgent need for generalised ethico-aesthetic repair. In reframing peat as a ‘material witness’ (Schuppli, 2020) and embracing its complex and ambiguous ontological nature, the essay suggests the potential for pluralising modes of engagement with the shifting materiality of peatlands and muddy worlds more generally, providing an epistemic check on established categories of kknowing and being and the tendency to conceptualise Anthropocenic mediation from a human-centred perspective.