Constitutive Mediation: When the Reception Apparatus Is the Substrate is a theoretical paper by Lee Sharks, deposited 3 June 2026 at 32,345 characters as EA-DC-COG-01.
Its title states a threshold. Ordinary reception theory treats the apparatus — the journal, the anthology, the search engine — as a channel through which a work reaches a reader. Constitutive mediation names the condition in which the apparatus is not a channel but the substrate: where the work exists only as the apparatus composes it, and there is no unmediated version to compare against.
The paper is a cognitive extension of its parent, Fear and Trembling: Diversity Contraction Across Substrates, and belongs to the Diversity Contraction programme alongside the pre-registered empirical design at #782. Its registry title had been truncated mid-word and was repaired on 5 August 2026 — the clean title recovered from the body's own H1.