Generic mediality, and the Real as the physical substance of technical criticality (gk. krinein, Ermessen). by Vera Bühlmann A response to Mark Hansen’s lecture „speculative phenomenology of micro-temporal operations“ . Hansen’s lecture and my response were held at the joint annual conference of the Society for European Philosophy and the Forum for European Philosophy, September 3-5 2014 at Utrecht University, with the annual theme: Philosophy after Nature. http://philosophyafternature.org „Algebra is the art of subsuming givens under a rule“ (Immanuel Kant) There are phenomena that are to be considered as genuinely simulacral but nevertheless real, Mark Hansen has just maintained in his talk. And he suggests, this is not a capitulating gesture but one of intellectual reclamation: Phenomena, if they are mediagenic, as I would call them, i.e. if it is technical instruments rather than natural bodies directly that render them apparent and perceivable in the first place, then they can be approached within the framework of what Hansen calls speculative phenomenology. My paper will focus on the peculiar role that channels play in such instrumentally augmented perception. In my understanding, Hansen’s phenomena resemble the role of the Deleuzian dark- precursors – neither predicative nor directly anticipative, they are also not quite premonitions, because it is not a message whose content is sinister that they have to deliver, and neither are these phenomena, despite their simulacral nature, apparitions that merely pretend to be what they in reality cannot display and effectuate. Mediagenic phenomena, in Mark Hanson's project, are accredited a reality that is genuinely natural, and hence can be approached in the registers of physics, because they correspond to real magnitudes which manifest in nothing else but the discretable and registerable, physical actuality of their apparent appearance – i.e., their mode of appearing. I call their reality genuine because these phenomena are not in need to be legitimated and authorized as „substantial“ by way of testing and determining what may have in fact, that is, in a