Actio in distans: a Critical Node of Technological and Social Mediation

This chapter advances actio in distans (AID)—“action at a distance”—as a conceptual hinge for a critical sociology of media and ICT-mediated social life. Recalling early modern debates on non-local causality, AID is reworked as a metaphor and framework to analyze how mediation reconfigures agency, causality, and locality across social space and time. Against fantasies of immediacy, the chapter argues that distance is not a residual obstacle to be eliminated by technology but an ontological condition of social action and an epistemological strategy for grasping complex mediation. Drawing on Marx’s method in the Grundrisse, the analysis frames distance as what links sense-based concreteness to richer “concretes-in-thought,” enabling critique without fetishizing either abstraction or technology. The Organic Composition of Capital (OCC) is developed as an illustrative model of AID: a social form that dialectically binds technological organization, labor, and value, foregrounding mediated change and class antagonism rather than technological determinism. Building on this, the chapter critiques technological fetishism and the agnostic ideology of data science, showing how “action without distance” and “distance without action” obscure social relations and de-politicize knowledge. Finally, AID is applied to spatial dynamics—space–time compression, abstraction, fixation, and distantiation—highlighting media as infrastructures of capitalist circulation and governance that simultaneously connect and alienate. Overall, AID is proposed as a productive, unfinished lens for reconstructing mediation as a socially total, historically specific, and conflictual process.