Jussi Parikka, Qu’est-ce que l’archéologie des médias ? (traduction Christophe Degoutin), Grenoble, UGA Éditions, 2018

Translation of Jussi Parikka’s, What is media archaeology? John Wiley & Sons, 2013.

Publisher’s webpage: https://www.uga-editions.com/menu-principal/collections-et-revues/toutes-nos-collections/savoirs-litteraires-et-imaginaires-scientifiques/qu-est-ce-que-l-archeologie-des-media–282025.kjsp

For the original French version of this review, see here: https://wp.me/p8w5Ao-uR

Media Archaeology (MA) stands out as a research movement whose originality relies on how its methods mimic, for a large part, its areas of study: taking side roads to explore the relationships between arts, science and technology, stopping to look at unique and unconventional objects in the history of media, this movement refuses any posture of systematic rationalization. For more than a decade it has developed internationally, but less so in France until the second half of the 2010’s. Nonetheless, the French reception has been positive, under the guidance of prominent figures such as Literature and Media Arts professor Yves Citton. Small collectives support MA from different disciplinary perspectives taking an interest in new media technology and creativity, starting with cultural and art history, philosophy of art, literary and cultural studies, as well as, from a more hands-on point of view, art and design. Indeed, the French have been welcoming MA through rather isolated appropriations in the midst of interdisciplinary practices – mirroring in this the international diffusion through fields of studies. Because of this, MA has seldom been in dialogue with classical disciplinary approaches.

What is Media Archaeology? is a book summarizing this approach, by UK-based scholar Jussi Parikka, one of the most active theoreticians behind MA. It was first published by Polity Press in 2012, then translated into French in 2018. Parikka tries to synthetize the movement which carries a strong heterogeneity, both in its practices and theories. Looking for an epistemological and methodological common ground, the author calls in the tutelary voices of Erkki Huhtamo[1], Siegfried Zielinski, Wolfgang Ernst, Thomas Elsaesser, as well as Friedrich Kittler, who influenced these self-proclaimed media archeologists. More generally, MA comes within the scope of human sciences, borrowing from philosophy and influenced by aesthetic or literary critical analysis. While it is not a handbook of methods, it takes on a theoretical perspective and tries to further it into methodology by suggesting, as we said before, that there is a symmetry between objects and the ideas used to study them. This implies that numerous objects that have been marginal to the positivist version of the history of media technologies could reveal the archaeological conditions that allowed media to exist more broadly. In this, submitting them to analysis would enable us to produce alternative ideas and imaginaries beyond this normative history, with a critical point of view. Indeed, this archeology that is borrowed very explicitly from Foucault, aims at founding a cultural and critical epistemology of technologies that both give form to and deform our perception and consumption of media beyond dominant representations. Looking at the past as well as the present, Parikka claims also, for MA, a cartographic consideration of media, qualifying and classifying spaces and times neglected by the main social and technical framing of memory and attention. On a theoretical level, the MA approach is based on self-justification, relying on a few key concepts crafted on the basis of metaphors that can appear a little obscure, reducing their heuristic potential. However, on a more practical level, it reveals the riches of history turned into a cabinet of curiosities. In this, it takes on the filiation of classical humanism with much originality, while putting in perspective definitions of humans and their technical environment as they were discussed in the 20^th century, from Foucault to Latour. In order to do justice to the didactic ambition of the book – largely intelligible for any curious reader, but seemingly aimed primarily at a readership of researchers and artists – we will concentrate now on its efforts at synthetizing epistemological and methodological aspects of the movement.

Parikka, looking to give an epistemological justification to MA, situates it at both proximity and distance from cultural history and studies, to which it is generally associated, using the theories of the former to renew the latter and vice versa. MA resists confinement to historiographical methods, which would focus on media of the past and criticize retrospective and anachronistic approaches, as well as to the sole analysis of representations characterizing cultural history. Insisting on studying relationships between media (“intermediality”), it is careful to go beyond the idea of media convergence, that became banal after twenty years or so of media studies. Doing so, one of its main criticisms is about the amnesia of contemporary media studies, digital in particular. Instead, it chooses to focus on the diversity and diversification of media techniques since the 19^th century. Thus, out with old and new media, and in with a perpetual re-mediation based on technical mutation and hybridization, away from a mere evolutionary continuity. Media are thus conceived as medium, i.e. the mediatic qualities they deploy through techniques on which they are based (focusing on their use) rather than on transmission models (that would focus on audiences and representations). As such, their analysis is positioned within a critique of modernity, in which users have a political culture rooted in the attention economy. Spectacle media have been making use of and incorporating such mechanisms of attraction since the industrial era, according to Tom Gunning, invoked by Parikka. The first two chapters set the epistemological frames in this way, with a few simplifications in regard to the academic fields from which MA tries to differentiate itself in order to claim its own identity.

The first chapter retraces the genealogy of founding works for MA, starting with new cinema studies up to software studies. The renewing of the culturalist approach is illustrated with many details, by resorting to diverse scientific methodologies – whether theoretical or instrumental – from the history of science and technology to experimental psychology, with forays into marginal domains such as psychotechnics. This makeshift curiosity about disciplines testifies to a more general ambivalence carried by MA: through the pages, it is sometimes not clear if the intention is about the studied object, the theory, the methodology or the analytical tools… For instance, when Parikka depicts the general idea of cinema as a nervous system, according to a metaphor both organic and technical, is it due to a projection of the psychotechnical gaze on media, a way to look at things adopted by MA? Or the theme that is actually studied by the media archaeologist? However, focusing in and out as the book does has the merit of showing that media can be studied not only through the cultural lens, but also through the technical, social, political and even physiological and affective. Thus, senses are always articulated within the media context, meaning that modes of sensation are structured by technical media, as shown for instance by the evolution of haptic interfaces that reorganize sensory capabilities (tactile reaction, recoding of movement and voice…) throughout the ages. Taking an interest in the material bodies of media, MA follows this sensory logic in the bodies of the individual as well as the social body, postulating that subjects are produced though media techniques. The corporal analogy is based on the idea that media program social structures and behaviors by inscribing into them ways of doing, seeing, making do or making see, and by giving the power to know how to write (or not). Software is the last avatar of these processes, locking or unlocking capabilities and knowledge with scripts of code. In line with 19^th century German moral philosophy, resumed by Kittler with a strong influence on MA, social education would be rooted on the programming of bodies, themselves considered as systems of inscription. What could appear as deterministic theory actually reveals that there is something common to technical media and knowledge instruments: writing – or more generally speaking inscription, an intellectual as well as material technology.

The concept of “imaginary media”, in an eponymous second chapter, is especially interesting considering the riches of examples it illustrates and how it reflects on media time and space. Imaginary media push to reexamine media history by drawing attention to objects that are not perceived as pertaining to the media field – either because they show elements that are not traditionally considered by media studies, or because these objects are curios still not identified outside of the mainstream history of media. This concept is defined as “tightly interlinked with non-human technical media […] media of non-solid, non-phenomenological worlds” (pp. 58 and 62 ). In this, they hold or reveal dimensions of technologies that go beyond immediate perception and even understanding, as well as dimensions of media not limited to representation, but including their experience and interaction with users’ behavior. Parts about the material perception of death, absence, extra-terrestrial in transmission cables or wireless waves, as supernatural or occult histories – even marked by delirium and paranoia related to modern age pseudo-sciences, shed light in a stimulating way on the use of media as various means and phenomena of mental and social manipulation. MA appropriates Foucauldian episteme and exemplifies it efficiently thanks to these alternative histories or counter-histories of technical media, as well as the idea of history as multiplicity, in reference to Walter Benjamin. It is also with a Benjaminian posture that Parikka explains that the making of concepts has to do with, paraphrasing him, allegories that are to thought what ruins are to things. Indeed, MA bases its analysis on fragments as well as on strange and hidden things, in order to talk about more general issues – media and mass culture, technical media and capitalism, etc. However, some attempts at requalifying critical ideas into theories (or allegories?) that belong to MA tend to confuse the reader, who could be left doubtful of the heuristic power of profuse metaphors. It is the case, for instance, for those related to the conceptualization of time in the study of technical media. Thereby, Zielinski’s “variantology”, aiming at resisting “first time” variations and forms of normalization produced by epoch-related media obsessions, sounds like the mere rewording of the Foucauldian concept duo: archaeology (alternative histories) and genealogy (critique of the idea of origins). His proposal to think about “paleontological time”, in opposition to eschatological time, is one of these new metaphors which we doubt adds much to the landmark criticism of linear readings of time in the history of technology. In a similar fashion, other conceptual borrowings, for instance Erkki Huhtamo quoting French historian Fernand Braudel about various durations of history, are probably evoked too rapidly for the reader to appreciate their subtleties. The taste for metaphorical concepts in MA, inherited explicitly from Post-structuralism, finds its own limitations in the efforts made by Parikka to create a synthesis: seldom developed, they run the risk of turning against themselves if taken to the letter – for instance the idea of “speculative conglomeration” (p. 146 ) related to the artistic theory of Garnet Herzt, a close collaborator of Parikka. In this light, meaning is hard to grasp in a few passages, because their metaphors tend to rest on forceful claims that remain unexplained – for instance, the idea put forward by Alex Galloway and Eugene Thacker who are at the forefront of software studies, that writing theory is equivalent to writing code.

Efforts made for elucidation at a methodological level do compensate these conceptual blurs; in part because they shed light on very original aspects of technical media objects (and not only original objects). This comprises most of the third chapter, that focuses on the issue of materiality, primarily under the aegis of Friedrich Kittler. In conversation with critical analysis à la Frankfurt School or Cultural Studies, Kittler has defended the interest for formal sciences (mostly mathematics and logic) and engineer sciences to enrich the study of everyday technical media culture. With the idea of “media-machine”, Kittler focuses on what is not (only) discursive in media: their technical capacity to record and act on events, their tendency to build worlds. This enables us to read media as machines, an approach particularly relevant to digital media thanks to their software as well as hardware dimensions, their programs, protocols and platforms, which constitute many layers that mediate discourse materially, and which condition their visibility and their legibility, rather than merely transmitting them. This materialist reading is rather useful, extending the critique of representation to that of the social body. The claimed interest for science and technology is one of the strongest points of the methodological as well as critical commitment, as testified by projects for the natural history of electronics (for instance Jennifer Gabrys’ work on e-waste, p. 166-167 ). Another relevant example regards issues about gender embodied by women at work, recurring throughout the book. Artist Zoe Beloff’s work illustrates how women’s bodies have been made (and not only represented) passive throughout the history of (pseudo-)science and technologies: from female mediums with magnetic or electric strength, to telegraph typewriters and computer female operators who input, transmit, compile and calculate data. In this embodied approach, women become historical figures of “in-between transmission”  (p. 107). Another original and “embodied” angle exemplifying this materialist methodology is the attention given to technical and media phenomena like noise, frictions, disruption, enabling the study of the rough and neglected aspects of digital culture that are too often shown as smooth and utopian. The various disciplinary derivatives find a justification, in this case drawing on information theory, in order to establish a physics of noise, understand its connection to control of transmission, and from there, the ecology of contemporary media. From optic telegraphs to digital networks by way of meteorological tools of analysis, the media archeological methodology reveals fascinating stories of interception, jamming, tweaking, even very current “fake news”. The link between the critical premises and the materialist approach sometimes runs the risk of determinism still palpable in parts where argumentation is less supported and more axiological. What “really counts as media”, claims Parikka, is what the systems create to their own ends, like in the postal system where what exists is only “what can be posted” – an instance that is arguably not convincing (pp. 78-79 ). Another example or argument-less assumption: this section where designers are described as first-hand media critics because they are able to create worlds. It would be giving much power to the system creator, an idea that is relevant to the theory of the modern subject produced by the social and technical system, but that seems to be reintroducing an eschatological view refuted elsewhere in the book. These critical conclusions are in sharp contrast with the imaginary of multiplicity presented by the media archeologist and, regretfully, reduce sometimes its analytic capabilities.

At the level of methods, Parikka develops at length, in a fourth chapter, new definitions of technical media archives based on the materialist approach. To this end, he invokes Kittler once again, whose reinterpretation of Foucauldian arguments produce the methodology of “discourse/network”, in which machines are considered for themselves as knowledge objects, devices that testify to the recording, the conservation and the serial organization of discourse in networks. Moreover, machines are witness to these aspects precisely because they act upon them. The works of Ernst complete this contribution to media machines perceived as archives. Thus, these machines present, more than represent, operations and processes of discourse organization. One of MA’s strong points is to materialize in a radical fashion what was already evoked in the history and anthropology of material knowledge and intelligence technologies[2]. In this perspective, Parikka takes on the great example of Matthew Kirschenbaum who suggests studying the hard disk in order to develop a “digital humanism”. Nonetheless, a few shifts in how archives as an object of research are described might bring some confusion. Indeed, in the introduction, archives are considered “one key institutional ‘site’ of memory” (p. 15 ), symbolic of the modern State – a recurrent definition throughout the book, in particular related to technologies of bureaucratic control (and office management techniques in themselves). Parikka considers the evolution of this notion in regard to digital technologies that has led, according to him, to an apparatus “[…] increasingly being rearticulated less as a place of history, memory and power, and more as a dynamic and temporal network, a software environment, and a social platform for memory – but also for remixing” (p. 15 ). Social media archives become “less official archives” rather than files to get rid of for administration outsourcing purposes. Indeed, it is enticing to think about the reorganization of archives under a mediation paradigm – rather than conservation – and through real-time processing – rather than collecting; but assessing this shift in the basis of popular and everyday practices in order to evaluate the new logics of power archives sounds like a shortcut. More generally, this shortcut tendency is a lack of MA-based analysis: aiming to criticize places of power, the choices to identify them from the margins sometimes lead to not analyzing them at all: where is the study on institutional digital archives that would support the paradigm shift emphasized?

MA’s critical stance probably thrives better in marginal places – relatively to the internalist academic dialogue, like those of the meeting between arts and sciences. The last chapter focuses on these places where the MA approach can bring alternatives in making, and not only in discourse and theory. Thus, the re-mediation process and research objects for the academic can be the fruit of another research that is materialized and produced in media archeology-inspired works of art (explicitly or not). MA’s tinkering thought – or “thinkering”, a term borrowed from Huhtamo (p. 157 ) – is best understood and concretized in these places, even if it can be obscure in the theoretical or methodological parts. It would probably be an error to see in these works solutions to problems posed by modernity: the insistence on everyday creativity, the eulogy of remix and the critique of the myth of originality are very well-known proposals in artistic avant-gardes whose tradition is kept alive by MA. This could appear as a paradox, considering the questioning of ideologies of the new brandished by media archeologists. However, the interest of MA for the avant-garde spirit, that could seem nostalgic at first sight, is the occasion of a vivid dialogue beyond disciplinary and institutional borders. In conclusion, this book will undoubtedly pave the way for the opening of new and hybrid research and a deepening of these debates.

Notes

[1] With whom Parikka had previously edited the collective book Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications (University of California Press, 2011).

[2] For instance, in France, the idea of « knowledge places » (Qu’est-ce que les lieux de savoir, Christian Jacob, Marseille : OpenEdition Press, 2014).

Reviewed by Camille Paloque-Berges