Passages Across Thresholds

This essay examines concepts of multimodality, intermediality and intertextuality within a wider cultural context of boundaries and transgressions. Earlier concepts of passages and thresholds may enrich today's understanding of recent mixtures and flows across borders within contemporary digital media culture. Charting traces from Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project through the borderlands of a contemporary shopping centre, this study explores late modern thinking about flows across borders in media culture and cultural studies, in which contextualising, dialogic and critical interpretation assume crucial functions. The combination of 'multi' and 'inter' stresses plurality and interrelations rather than monolithic and essentialist reductions. The first section presents sociological, anthropological and philosophical ideas of passages and borderlands. The second part outlines important kinds of media passages through real and virtual spaces. The third segment discusses interrelations between multi- and inter-concepts that have taken on a crucial significance for cultural theory, suggesting new ways of understanding their mutual connections.