thereby: mis-representation of the data word. This is known especially from
Compact Discs for music replay where in-built automated correction codes protect
against noise in the optical reading of "pits" and "lands" on the disc surface.
Flat temporality: transitive analysis and the microscopic gaze
Does the history of science function as a kind of mental telescope which looks at
scientific knowledge from a distance? The metaphor of the micro- or telescope (for
identifying ultra- and sub-time-critical intervals) turns history into a laboratory
experiment - the artificial extension or condensation of an (apparently) given
development. This procedure is well known from the time axis manipulation in the
simulation of physical processes like kinematics by analogue electronic computers.
There are moments of temporality which depend on such technologies in order to be
detected at all - just like Walter Benjamin defined the "optical unconscious" as
revealed only by the photographic lens.
The meaning of tradition shifts its focus from its previous emphatic macro-temporal
("history") notion to the analysis of the time-critical and time-basing micro-
mechanisms of transmission. While tradition has been associated with long-time
diachronic memories across deep historical time so far, this emphatic horizon now
shrinks to a mere almost synchronous extension of the present, its re- and protentive
short-time memory online - a dramatic shift of the temporal prefix in the age of
algorithmic, that is: regenerative (instead of inherited) memory.
wolfgang ernst technologies of tradition: between symbolic and material
(micro-)transmission
archives in liquid times
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