Technologies of Tradition:
Between Symbolic and Material
(Micro-)transmission1
introduction: Cultural analysis in the media-archaeological way
The analysis of the mechanisms of cultural tradition is a subject which traditionally
requires training in historical studies. The following argument claims that there is
an alternative way of approaching that subject: media archaeology as a research
method. Inspired by Michel Foucault's Archéologie de Savoir (1969) but being more
precise in extending this approach to material and technological culture, media
archaeology does not primarily locate cultural phenomena by discourse analysis, but
seeks to unreveal the Foucauldean archive of cultural knowledge in the grounding
(German Erdung, a technical term in electro-engineering) in both material and
logical artefacts (see Parikka, 2012). Media archaeology stratigraphically discovers a
layer in cultural sedimentation which is neither purely human nor purely
technological, but literally inbetween (Latin medium, Greek metaxy): symbolic
operations which turn the human into a machine as well as they can be performed
by machines.
In comparison with classical archaeology, media archaeology shares the interest in
material culture. There is a specific affinity between media archaeology and the
analysis of cultural engineering. What differentiates technological objects from
archaeologically excavated cultural artefacts from past civilizations is their essence
as conceptual circuit diagrams and source codes. Technological objects come into
being (technically as well as logically) when being biased with electric current -
contrary to a simple museal assembly. This escalation is articulated in the different
emphasis between a historiographical "history of things" and a media-
epistemological analysis of micro-physical materialities (Lubar, 1993; Galison,
1997).
As an emergent, cross-disciplinary field of epistemological inquiry and lab-based
experimentation debate, media archaeology is still open for ongoing redefinition.
Some of its practitioners agree in an interest to revisit and reconstruct media from
past cultures with particular attention to obsolete and outmoded media
technologies and cultural engineering practices, for the sake of challenging some of
wolfgang ernst
1 This text originates from the following keynote speech, but was substantially rewritten: "(Micro-)
Transmissions. Technologies of Tradition", Keynote speech to interdisciplinary Ph.D. student seminar
Materiality and Historicism of the Norwegian research school "Text, Image, Sound, Space", Centre
Franco-Norvégien en Sciences Sociales et Humaines (FMSH), Paris, 25-27 January, 2012.
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