The gay science of Media Archaeology

The influence of German media theory --or what could partly be called the "gay science" of 1980s media archaeology (these are Bernhard Siegert's words)-- to American discussions is of major interest to a wider range of theoretical debates. Digital Humanities is (=should be) one of these, in it's insistence to bridge art and science-knowledge. In this context, John Durham Peters' text "Strange Sympathies: Horizons of Media Theory in America and Germany" is of great us. In short, it outlines through a comparative perspective and through two key figures (James Carey and Friedrich Kittler) some of the peculiarities of both traditions. What we get in Peters' text is an insightful mapping of some of the debates why things have picked up - and not. It chooses to try to synchronize some of the ideas that at times stand way apart, but in a historical fashion.

Indeed, what Peters is able to show is how the differences are not matters of merely translation and language - but the wider academic background from which ideas come from. Suffice to quote him in full:

"The standards in German media scholarship are so much higher - in terms of knowledge of languages, history of science and technology, philosophy, the arts, and literature - that I sometimes despair of German media theory ever fully crossing the Atlantic. Bernhard Siegert's splendid Passage des Digitalen, for instance, provides quotations in seven languages and features mathematical equations; American publishers I have tried to interest in its translation tend to quiver in fear. Doctoral students in the United States in media studies are generally expected to be publishing three or four years after the bachelor's degree, and many of them barely learn to read another language, let alone mathematics, history, philosophy, physics, literature, or programming. However iconoclastic Kittler may seem, he is a traditional Ordinarius in his deep and deeply footnoted command over a domain of learning."

And yet, the recent years of American media theory - platform studies, software studies, computer forensics - have been able to offer their own exciting further-development of some media materialist themes. Some of these have been insisting on a fuller understanding of the scientific basis through which humanities can really be become particular - not by distancing but engaging head on. The take on "revisiting humanities" that Peters maps as one of the useful legacies of German theory is something that Digital Humanities seems to want to do -- and with an emphasis on digital, computing tools, but the epistemological consequences and field is much deeper than tools. To follow Peters's reasoning, reading Kittler, we have a long tradition of science-arts collaboration, and quantification as part of what the humanities is about. Perhaps it was only because of the birth of social sciences and such, as part of biopolitical regimes of national modernity since the 19th century that gave such a bad name to quantification (and which scholars like Latour are trying to salvage with help from Gabriel Tarde). Indeed, a critique of "language/meaning/interpretation-only humanities" (such as Gadamer) has become a stock in trade part of material critique of some humanities (I myself have carried my own arguments into that debate of "against interpretation, against Gadamer", but in Finnish mostly).

Peters writes:
"The split of Geist and Natur, even when it produced some compelling accounts of the uniquely humane office of language, literature, and history by figures such as Hans-Georg Gadamer and Hannah Arendt, ultimately impoverishes self-knowledge among us humanoids. There is no human world without a medium: whether the body, the voice, the text, or the computer screen, there's always a medium with its carrying capacities and standards. Human life is mediated - by nature, medicine, texts, buildings, lenses, hearing aids, digital bits, not to mention drugs, food, climates, water supplies, microbes, and other people."

Despite the shortcomings of various theorists, for instance Kittler, of not addressing gender, being disinterested in political economy, and often being a bit too much at home in the conservative political camp, some of the inspiration of the approaches is still for me, exactly as Siegert flags it, "gay science": exciting, fresh, and different.

(note: Siegert talks of media archaeology as gay science in the 2007 translated, Winter 2008 issue of Grey Room. The article is called "Cacography or Communication?" and is translated by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young).

Pedagogics of Mathematics according to V. Bush

Digital Humanities debates have been enthusiastically -- and for a good reason -- addressing the technologically enhanced research and education situations. Such debates have been asking the question 'what happens when we are able to rethink (I am tempted to say "deterritorialize") our institutional and personal habits when it comes down to processing knowledge'. As such, this is not very new. The long histories of optical technologies as part of the academic and teaching processes are known, and similarly we should look at more recent histories of computing in this light. Indeed, what is curiously often missing is an acknowledgement of cybernetics as a mode of thinking across the disciplinary boundaries. Naturally not without its problems whether pinpointed in terms of the ethics of research (the certain control-based mode of understanding knowledge/systems) or institutional affiliations (military ties for instance), cybernetics however was able to build such islands of crosstalk between disciplines that are now being hailed as new with computational methods in humanities. Other people are pretty much on the ball on this one when it comes down to elaborating the debates - see for instance Ian Bogost's recent writings - and I have been more interested in thinking what is left on the outskirts of the debates; for instance media theory, or more specifically media archaeological approaches.

Whether media archaeology is part of "Digital Humanities" is another question; but at least it can provide further insights into ways of thinking computationally. A good example is the work of Vannevar Bush - well known especially for his Memex-device which surely features in some Digital Humanities self-reflections - and his differential analyzer. Besides being a tool for solving, well, differential calculations obviously, it ties interestingly as part of histories of not only computation but also data visualisation. Bush was occupied with the "integraph" calculating instrument already in the 1920s, for integrating functions, where the method of drawing graphical curves was an essential part of the process (of course, dealing with analog computing). (See Mindell's Between Human and Machine, p.153-154).

Already Mindell flags the idea that we are dealing here, very concretely, with a graphical user interface, but also the wider interest Bush had in graphical notation. For Bush, such modes of calculation+graphics was a way to think in terms of diagrams, and learn mathematics through the mechanical aid. As such, for Bush it was part of a wider pedagogic way of thinking: mathematics could be taught in such machinic assemblages. Such realizations from the 1930s and 1940s serve as good reminders of the various early ideas in terms of methodologies for enhanced learning - and environments of technical learning. We need to keep both eyes open - one for the technical side, the other for the graphic/aesthetic side that often becomes more understandable through methodologies known from visual culture studies -- but also media archaeology.

In other ways too, Mindell's book mentioned above is a great source. It shows the work of pre-cybernetics as a significant platform for signal based technical media cultures. Furthermore, it is able to introduce many forgotten ideas and contexts. One such fascinating one that contributes to a further visual media+computation-link is Gordon Brown's 1938 dissertation on the "cinema integraph" that continued the work in combining graphical methods with mathematics of integration. Again, part of the histories of analog computing, but something that in a fascinating way highlights the reliance on other media materials of its time. In short, Brown's innovation (suggested by N. Wiener) was to continue the work in using photocells for tracking and analyzing curves necessary for the calculation - but enhancing this with the transparency of the film material so as to be able to increase the speed of the operation: "Norbert Wiener, who advised the Bush laboratory on calculating machines suggested a way to speed up calculation by lightening the load, literally, on the mechanisms. Plot images of functions on film, Wiener suggested, shine light through the film and electronically integrate the light passing through it with a photocell." (Mindell, 2002, 164). This idea that never picked up really was however a good example of the various intermedial relations in those earlier cultures of innovation -- already completely "multi-media".