Cultural Techniques, Media History, and the Art of Poetry: T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets

This article investigates literature from the vantage point of media theory. The text I analyse and use as my example is T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, a highly philosophical and self-reflexive poem which is, however, not explicitly concerned with new media technology or the transmission, storage, and processing of information. Cultural techniques, media theory, and network theory will serve as the theoretical background against which I will flesh out the non-technological and philosophical implications of mediation as discussed and theorised in the poem itself. Thus, the main aim will be to foreground the work’s own aesthetic foundations as media theory or, more precisely, as a theory of mediation depending on a set of cultural techniques. In order to achieve this, the article looks at literature as a medium that reflects on its dependence on a material entity and on its place within a diachronic and synchronic media network.