energy and speed of electricity - the road of the imagination when it is touched by
the sight and the immediate contact of ancient remains and grasps the truth in a
flash, without any intermediate steps. (Gossman, 1983, p. 49).
The antiquarian approach to the past is by taking the archaeological materiality
remaining from the past at face value: "There is something about the walls of Rome
that moves the inmost depths of man. When a metal plate is struck, the iron
resounds and the echoing is stopped only by laying one's finger on it. In the same
way, Rome moves the spirit that is in communication with antiquity all that was
slumbering within him." (Bachofen, as quoted in Gossman, 1983, p. 46f)
Knowledge transfer is dependent on the receiver to resonate with its carrier
oscillations; by converting analogue waves into symbolic frequencies, they can be
accessed by mathematical reasoning (Erlmann, 2010). Aby Warburg in his concept
of persisting visual gestures in occidental cultural history refers to sub-cultural
mimesis, somewhat replacing the notion of diachronic tradition by the notion of
almost immediate transmission between sender and receiver when tuned to each
other (Warburg, 2010, p. 640) - a model rather derived from the engineering of
wireless communication than from historical hermeneutics.
Material philology: The Case of Lapis Satricanus
What happens if cultural heritage is subjected to the microscopic gaze? The title of a
German publication from 1973 on the scientific (rather than hermeneutic) analysis
of art historical artefacts is expressive: Art works can be examined "under
microscope and x-ray". Media archaeology here literally means temporal analysis of
cultural objects by technical, non-human agents, measuring media by
archaemetrics. (Riedere, Von Rohr, 1973)
Archaeology is not just an auxiliary discipline to history, but as well a genuinely
alternative model of processing data from the material archives of the past. Radical
materialism is a provocation to the historical discourse itself.
While historical discourse strives for narrative coherence, the archaeological
aesthetics deals with discrete, serial strings of information which - in an age of
computing - gains new plausibility against literary forms of historical imagination
developed in the nineteenth century.
In a methodological sense, there is a structural affinity between computer-assisted
archaeology as material-orientated science and philology - as long as its
hermeneutic method is being replaced by statistical analysis (Boneva, 1971).
Inbetween the material monument and the philological record stands the
inscription (Stefan, 1971).
The dissonance between archaeology and history is exemplified by the controversial
interpretations of an ancient inscription discovered in Italy some thirty years ago,
the Lapis Satricanus which seems to bear (and thus authenticate) the name of one
of the founders of the Roman republic hitherto considered to be a rather fictitious
character in ancient historiography. This case at the same time figures significantly
wolfgang ernst technologies of tradition: between symbolic and material
(micro-)transmission
in the methodical debate between the Arnaldo Momigliano and the Hayden White
schools of history. The insistence on archaeological aesthetics, i. e. discrete and non-
narrative data analysis in the representation of this fragmented bedrock of evidence,
turns out to be a quality of resistance against the national or ideological will for
narrative myth-building in history.
In his demand for textual information the historian tends to forget about the
materiality of the data carrier. Let us take the early Roman inscription stone
excavated in ancient Satricum near Rome as an example: "Once the position of the
block with the inscription had been photographically documented and sketched
this and the two others displaying the same characteristics were transported to the
Dutch Institute at Rome for preparation of the publication and to await placement
in a museum" (Stibbe, 1980, p. 27) - just what happened to the ancient inscription
stone figuring in Mengs' above-mentioned Allegory of history.
The act of discursivation, i. e. the scientific publication and subsequent discussion of
this archaeological sensation made the material original almost redundant; in the
meantime, the inscription stone stayed away hidden in the basement of the Dutch
Archaeological Institute in Rome - in the architectural "unconscious", surrounded
by metal shelves. As if the hermeneutic focus on the historical meaning of the
inscription and its communication by publication got rid of its materiality; the
material memory here belongs to storage as encryptation. History is about discursive
reading and writing:
"So often have we all used such publications that we can easily forget that they are
not the real thing. Even with a scrupulously accurate editor, there are features of the
original which are not reproducible: most obviously we lose the document as an
archaeological artifact (Dymond, 1974, p. 55)
From epigraphic inscription to volatile data: "Forensic" media
archaeology
Matthew Kirschenbaum examines the characteristics that govern writing,
inscription, and textual transmission in all media: erasure, variability, repeatability,
and endurance (Kirschenbaum, 2008). Significant attention is being paid to storage
in its most material incorporation: the hard drive. Understanding storage devices is
essential to understand digital media. Different from electronic media, which
operate predominantly in the "live" mode, digital data and signal processing always
require intermediary storage - short time memories which are activated so fast that
their sheer existence escapes the comparatively slow human perception.
Towards a material philology: just as the humanities discipline of textual studies
examines books as physical objects and traces different variants of texts, "computer
forensics" - in a truly media-archaeological way - encourage to perceive new media
in both material and logical terms (electronic platforms, programming systems).
The lectio difficilior in philological hermeneutics is matched here by a close reading
of, for example, the function of cheque bits (specially coded additional impulses) in
a data word since pulse trains which represent numbers are electronically vulnerable
in internal transmission to all kinds of noise which easily leads to a transformation,
archives in liquid times
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