scholarly journals Successful Paranoia: Friedrich Kittler, Lacanian Psychoanalysis, and the History of Science

2018 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-131
Author(s):  
Henning Schmidgen
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Media History ◽  
Original Research ◽  
Hermann Von Helmholtz ◽  
Friedrich Kittler ◽  
History Of ◽  
Conrad Ferdinand Meyer ◽  
History Of The University ◽  
The Media ◽  
Historical Accounts

With studies like Discourse Networks 1800/1900 and Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, Friedrich A. Kittler contributed significantly to transforming the history of media into a vital field of inquiry. This essay undertakes to more precisely characterize Kittler’s historiographical approach. When we look back on his early contributions to studies of the relationship between literature, madness and truth – among others, his doctoral dissertation on the Swiss poet and writer Conrad Ferdinand Meyer – what strikes us is the significance that Jacques Lacan’s structuralist psychoanalysis had in shaping the orientation of Kittler’s later studies. His intensive engagement with Lacan galvanized Kittler’s concern with the question of sex and/or gender in the evolution of the humanities as well as his concern with the media history of the university. At the same time, Kittler’s reliance on Lacan led him to a kind of history that is interested above all in the internal logic of discourse. As we see, for instance, in Kittler’s anecdotic treatment of 19th-century physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz, this historiography does not involve any original research in archives and/or museums. Rather, it builds upon existing historical accounts and focuses its analyses on the issue of symbolic structures. Instead of investigating the history of the material culture of science and technology, what is thereby ultimately reinforced is a philosophical idealism in which knowledge and paranoia become superimposed in and by means of an ‘original syntax’ (Lacan).

Modernism and the Media History of Obscenity

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Forster
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Media History ◽  
Media Ecology ◽  
Marshall Mcluhan ◽  
Friedrich Kittler ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Media ◽  
Lady Chatterley's Lover ◽  
The Way

This chapter surveys the history of obscenity in English jurisprudence, from the invention of obscene libel as a crime in the eighteenth century through the 1857 Obscene Publications Act and its 1959 reform. It draws on Marshall McLuhan and Friedrich Kittler to argue that the invention of obscenity, and its subsequent definitions and redefinitions, reflect changes in media ecology and technology. It begins by examining the 1960 trial of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, before surveying the history of obscenity, and concluding with readings of the way the technologically mediated character of obscenity is reflected in both James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as Young Man and Ian McEwan’s Atonement.

scholarly journals Museum cultural collections: pathways to the preservation of traditional and scientific knowledge

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 618-634
Author(s):  
Angela J. Linn ◽  
Joshua D. Reuther ◽  
Chris B. Wooley ◽  
Scott J. Shirar ◽  
Jason S. Rogers
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Alaska Native ◽  
The People ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of The University ◽  
The University

Museums of natural and cultural history in the 21st century hold responsibilities that are vastly different from those of the 19th and early 20th centuries, the time of many of their inceptions. No longer conceived of as cabinets of curiosities, institutional priorities are in the process of undergoing dramatic changes. This article reviews the history of the University of Alaska Museum in Fairbanks, Alaska, from its development in the early 1920s, describing the changing ways staff have worked with Indigenous individuals and communities. Projects like the Modern Alaska Native Material Culture and the Barter Island Project are highlighted as examples of how artifacts and the people who constructed them are no longer viewed as simply examples of material culture and Native informants but are considered partners in the acquisition, preservation, and perpetuation of traditional and scientific knowledge in Alaska.

“Picture it all, Darley”

2015 ◽  
Vol 70 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-101 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sari Altschuler
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Media History ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Two Stage ◽  
Race Politics ◽  
Current Events ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Media ◽  
Representational Limits ◽  
History Of Race

Sari Altschuler “‘Picture it all, Darley’: Race Politics and the Media History of George Lippard’s The Quaker City” (pp. 65–101) This essay adresses two related questions. First, how did George Lippard’s The Quaker City develop from a multimedia story told through newspaper conventions, illustration, and two plays into the novel that appeared in May 1845? And second, how did Lippard’s white-seduction narrative come to pivot around the nightmare of an ambiguously raced Devil-Bug? Joining these questions of form and content, I argue that the media history of The Quaker City is inextricable from its history of race. In the wake of the almost riot around the mid-serialization of his Philadelphia play, Lippard moved away from fictionalizing current events toward the “grotesque-sublime” through a broader critique of Philadelphia less open to charges of libel. This shift took place through the transformation of Devil-Bug, a character Lippard rapidly developed in the middle installments until he was complex enough to carry the new story. Turning the once-black Devil-Bug into his protagonist, however, required character developments that necessarily complicated the story’s representation of race, a process that occurred concurrently with events related to the work that highlighted the systemic oppression of African Americans. In winter 1844, troubles with two stage productions and his illustrator highlighted the problems of representing race. After a several-month hiatus, Lippard published new installments vituperously condemning the representational limits of these nonprose forms and turned to prose to develop his antislavery position through Devil-Bug. As a result of these confluent developments, The Quaker City became an antislavery text through the process of opening Devil-Bug’s character up to its own hybridity and interiority.

Mobile Electronic Media

Transfers ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-49 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heike Weber
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Electronic Media ◽  
Media History ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
Mobile Media ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Sport Activities ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

This article takes the history of mobile electronic media as a vantage point from which to view a transformation in everyday Western mobility culture. It argues that mobile media technologies rather than transport technologies constitute today's guiding symbols of mobility whilst mobility itself is seen as going beyond physical movement. In the late twentieth century, its understanding has been broadened and now refers to the mere capacity to be ready for action and, thus, movement. This shift from movement to the potential to move can be observed in the material culture of mobile media. Initially designed to accompany travel, tourism or sport activities, portable radios or cell phones have been increasingly used in stationary or domestic settings, thereby challenging the Western dualisms of mobile/sedentary and public/private. On a methodological level, a focus on mobile media history involves merging the fields of media and transport history with the aim of arriving at a comprehensive mobility history.

Images of Mithra

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philippa Adrych ◽  
Robert Bracey ◽  
Dominic Dalglish ◽  
Stefanie Lenk ◽  
Rachel Wood
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Careful Consideration ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Northern India ◽  
Simple Question ◽  
History Of ◽  
Nuanced Understanding ◽  
History Of Use ◽  
Historical Accounts

Images of Mithra begins with the seemingly simple question: what’s in a name? With a history of use extending back to Vedic texts of the second millennium BC, derivations of the name Mithra appear in the Roman Empire, across Sasanian Persia, and in the Kushan Empire of southern Afghanistan and northern India during the first millennium AD. Even today, this name has a place in Yazidi and Zoroastrian religion. But what connection have Mihr in Persia, Miiro in Kushan Bactria, and Mithras in the Roman Empire to one another? Over the course of the volume, specialists in the material culture of these diverse regions explore appearances of the name Mithra from six distinct locations in antiquity. In a subversion of the usual historical process, the authors begin not from an assessment of texts, but by placing images of Mithra at the heart of their analysis. Careful consideration of each example’s own context, situating it in the broader scheme of religious traditions and ongoing cultural interactions, is key to this discussion. Such an approach opens up a host of potential comparisons and interpretations that are often sidelined in historical accounts. What Images of Mithra offers is a fresh approach to figures that we identify as ‘gods’, and the ways in which they were labelled and depicted in the ancient world. Through an emphasis on material culture, a more nuanced understanding of the processes of religious formation is proposed in what is but the first part of the Visual Conversations series.

The Future of the Literary Past

PMLA ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 125 (4) ◽  
pp. 959-967 ◽  
Author(s):  
Meredith L. McGill ◽  
Andrew Parker
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Media History ◽  
Paper Machine ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Little Magazines ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Media ◽  
Serial Publication ◽  
Technology Grant

[B]y carrying us beyond paper, the adventures of technology grant us a sort of future anterior: they liberate our reading for a retrospective exploration of the past resources of paper, for its previously multimedia vectors.—Jacques Derrida, Paper MachineThis essay explores some of the ways that the contemporary mediascape has begun to transform the questions we can ask of our students and ourselves. Our subject derives from an undergraduate English course, Literary History and/as Media History, that we designed to address the lack of critical attention paid in the curriculum to the media of literary works. The course, whose catalog description follows, was intended to cover a lot of historical ground while highlighting theoretical questions that generally remain unasked in Norton Anthology–style surveys:Living in an era of rapid technological innovation, we tend to forget that print itself was once a new medium. The history of English and American literature since the Renaissance has been as much a response to the development of new material formats (scribal copying, printed playtexts, newspaper and serial publication, “little magazines,” radio, film, television, the internet) as it has been a succession of ideal literary forms (poems, plays, and novels). This course will survey literary works from the sixteenth to the twentieth century in relation to the history of media. What can these histories say to each other? Are they, indeed, one history?

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Florian Hoof
Keyword(s):  
Interdisciplinary Approach ◽  
Media History ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Business Consulting ◽  
Independent Form ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Media ◽  
Visualization Techniques ◽  
Global Growth

This introductory chapter establishes the book’s goal of recovering the media history of consulting and determining what the global growth of consulting knowledge can tell us about the modern world. The time span of the investigation, from 1880 to 1930, covers three parallel developments, which lead to a fundamental transformation of industrial knowledge structures. First, there is the constitution of an independent form of managerial activity in industry. Second, there is the establishment of the field of corporate consulting. Third, there is the emergence of a series of visualization techniques after 1880, which are at the disposal of the first two spheres, management and corporate consulting. These three tropes lead to a new form of visual management that follows from oral and written forms of management. The introduction describes the interdisciplinary approach the author adopts to trace the visual culture and historical epistemology of business consulting and consulting knowledge between media and business history and theory.

Digital Art and Experimental Color Systems at Bell Laboratories, 1965–1984: Restoring Interdisciplinary Innovations to Media History

Leonardo ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carolyn L. Kane
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Media History ◽  
Digital Art ◽  
Computing Technology ◽  
Media Arts ◽  
The Public ◽  
Experimental Art ◽  
Time Period ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Media

AT&T's Bell Laboratories produced a prolific number of innovative digital art and experimental color systems between 1965 and 1984. However, due to repressive regulation, this work was hidden from the public. Almost two decades later, when Bell lifted its restrictions on creative work not related to telephone technologies, the atmosphere had changed so dramatically that despite a relaxation of regulation, cutting-edge projects were abandoned. This paper discusses the struggles encountered in interdisciplinary collaborations and the challenge to use new media computing technology to make experimental art at Bell Labs during this unique time period, now largely lost to the history of the media arts.

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