A Review of What is Media Archaeology?

An interesting take on What is Media Archaeology? in Reviews in History. Not sure if I agree with all of the notes made by the reviewer, for instance:

"Alongside the sophisticated middle-class consumer preferences and jaundiced post-Cold War politics sit references to all the popular cultural theories imbibed by the part of that generation that stayed on at university to get PhDs."

Indeed, I go through the consumer culture fascinated by "Retro", but to me it is better to take that aboard, instead of neglecting it. The reviewer writes earlier that I spend a bit too time on quirky things, instead of docile normality, but then also writes that I focus on "middle-class consumer preferences...". I would just say that indeed, I do both. Both the consumerised retro and vintage, and fascination with the past -- and the more interesting alternative insights into how to think technology and time. The slightly twisted, alternative, parallel and just off the radar approaches in artistic projects and historical examples are ways to actually approach the "normal".

Also, in terms of "popular cultural theories" I thought actually that the likes of Zielinski, Ernst, Siegert recent platform studies, software studies, and even Kittler are not really that well known (, especially in the Anglo-American world (Kittler is definitely not well known in UK academia) -- hence instead of exactly focusing on the canon (except for instance Foucault), I decide to do focus on slightly less debated theorists, and emerging directions, to illustrate new ways of understanding the theoretical force of media studies. Even the likes of Aby Warburg, or more generally German tradition of Bildwissenschaften are not always well known in current discussions in art and cultural theory/academia! This is why at times the "rediscovery" of writers such as Flusser makes exciting things happen. They open new paths in the brain, even in academia.

Don't call him a media philosopher!

It was one year ago that Friedrich A. Kittler died. The German newspapers reacted, and slowly, The Guardian too, with a couple of writings and a podcast. I think that was it, for the English-speaking mainstream press. I wrote this piece for The Guardian.

The academic discussion picked up speed even more, during the past year. It has included  fantastic pieces like the memoir by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young of the Kittler-before-Kittler (i.e. the early 1980s one) '"Well What Socks is Pynchon Wearing Today?" A Freiburg Scrapbook in Memory of Friedrich Kittler' in Cultural Politics Volume 8, Issue 3, and a forthcoming ZKM conference Of Gods and Scripts around the Mediterranean, newspapers are doing more stories.

Some newspaper stories did second rounds through social media repostings. Here is for instance FAZ: Jede Liebe war eine auf den ersten Blick.

Indeed, Kittler got the human (well, actually "spirit", "the mind", Geist - Geisteswissenschaften) out of humanities, and inserted the machine. Suddenly, inside the body we found all kinds of hardware. Typewriters, grammophones, circuit boards, computer chips.

However, don't inscribe "media philosopher" on his grave stone.

And no, he did not like being called a media archaeologist either.

A Kittlerian moment with numbers

Pythagorian prayer to the Tetractys
"Bless us, divine number, thou who generated gods and men! O holy, holy Tetractys, thou that containest the root and source of the eternally flowing creation! For the divine number begins with the profound, pure unity until it comes to the holy four; then it begets the mother of all, the all-comprising, all-bounding, the first-born, the never-swerving, the never-tiring holy ten, the keyholder of all".
-  quoted from the tweet by Symposion (@Kittler_ZKM), posted Thu 11th Oct, 2012.

Low light of the past

"We make our journeys out there in the low light of the future, and return to the bourgeois day and its mass delusion of safety, to report on what we've seen. What are any of these 'utopian dreams' of ours but defective forms of time-travel?"

These are the words of Thomas Pynchon in Against the Day (2006), one of the favorite fiction writers for media theorists and media archaeologists.

Could we say the same thing about the past , as journeys to the past that are like defective forms of time-travel? To past times when old technologies were once new, and puzzled and awed, with their low lighting, crackling, noise, and pixelated style? 

See for instance some of Torsten Lauschmann's works...also on now at John Hansard Gallery, in Southampton.

Technological Archaeologies of Fetish

For some while, before really picking up on researching and writing what turned out as Insect Media I was gathering material and ideas for something on "Technological Perversions" - a sort of a theory/cultural history of the entanglement of perversions and modern technology. Similarly as Insect Media turned out to be a reading of technology and media through the non-human (compound) lense(s) of the insect, this book was to become a similar take - but through sexual perversions. Fetish, perversions, desire gone awry, etc. as the insights into modern relations to/with/in technology.

The underbelly of such narratives and dispositifs reveals a more interesting insight into the proximity with technology as desire - and one involving truly non-human objects. As such, there is indeed something there of the beautifully fetishistic relation that one finds more often from classifications of sexual perversions. Kraft-Ebing's grounding work would in this sense have to be read as part of the constellation, but also captured in poetic form in a range of literary work.

Indeed, Thomas Pynchon would have a special place in that book - here writing of the "top of a lady's stocking, this transition from silk to bare skin and suspender", in Gravity's Rainbow (A book of weird entanglements of erections, engineering and modern science indeed):

"It's easy for non-fetishists to sneer about Pavlovian conditioning and let it go at that, but any underwear enthusiast worth his unwholesome giggle can tell you there is much more here--there is a cosmology: of nodes and cusps and points of osculation, mathematical kisses . . . singularities!"

Within a couple of sentences, Pynchon carries this topological connection to further topologies: stocking to singularities, to cathedral spires, mountain peaks, the Rocket in the sky.

How Many Media Archaeologies?

I gave recently some talks in Canada -- a talk and a seminar at Western University in London, Ontario, and then the keynote at the Canadian Communication Association-conference.

Here is the first talk, How Many Media Archaeologies? as an audio recording.

Cultural Technique?

If you are wondering what the term Cultural Technique(s), or in its native language, Kulturtechniken, refers to - this is the quote you need. In most articles on the topic, Thomas Macho's words are recounted, and used so why not recirculate them once more:

"Cultural techniques—such as writing, reading, painting, counting, making music—are always older than the concepts that are generated from them. People wrote long before they conceptualized writing or alphabets; millennia passed before pictures and statues gave rise to the concept of the image; and still today, people sing or make music without knowing anything about tones or musical notation systems. Counting, too, is older than the notion of numbers. To be sure, most cultures counted or performed certain mathematical operations, but they did not necessarily derive from this a concept of number."

- Thomas Macho, “Zeit und Zahl: Kalender- und Zeitrechnung als Kulturtechniken,” in
Bild-Schrift-Zahl, ed. Sybille Krämer and Horst Bredekamp (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag,
2003), 179. (The passage translated by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young).

Quoting this also hints at what I am occupied with now - together with Winthrop-Young and Ilinca Iuraşcu; a special issue on Cultural Techniques for Theory, Culture & Society.