The Shards of Zadar

By ‘unearthing’ artefacts from folded layers of time, media archaeology undermines linear historical discourse: in this regard, this chapter addresses an exemplary art-based project on the origins of cinema that takes the epistemological metaphor of ‘excavation’ at its word. In 2011, the Canadian artist Henry Jesionka discovers several ancient bronze and glass objects on a Croatian beach, dates the pieces to the first century CE, and identifies them as components of an intricate Graeco-Roman mechanism for the projection of moving images. This rewriting of media history not only illustrates how traits of materiality and contingency interfere with teleological history; it also reflects on industrial capitalism’s paradox claims of ‘reason’ and the ideological presuppositions of progress: Cornelius Castoriadis’s notion of a merely simulated Rationality of Capitalism (1997) suggests that traditional narratives of technological invention are invariably organized around a clandestine and insufficiently repressed nucleus of the unforeseen, unpredictable, and irrational. By admitting to a similar element of chance or lost control, Jesionka’s Ancient Cinema project and new founding myth of cinema comment on the logic of media archaeology as an expression of late capitalism’s waning belief in its own rationale.

White Noise

In the first study of its kind to engage media theory in addressing a particularly contentious issue—that of the supposed connections between ancient Greek, Hellenistic, and Roman elegy—this chapter investigates what is at stake in thinking about the dynamics of such a tradition, not in the familiar context of reception theory but in the context of media theory, where considerations of transmission and reception require us to consider the apparatuses of communication systems, the materials through which they achieve their discursive operations, and the noise that accompanies their broadcast. Taking Anne Carson’s Nox as a preliminary test case and then applying some of the principles of Ernst’s media archaeology to the medium of classical elegy, it argues for a new evaluation of elegy’s concerns with its own materiality and mediality, and thus its identity as an ongoing tradition.

The Fable of Arachne

This chapter explores the experimental and precarious character of the sense of touch in philosophy (Aristotle, the mystics, enlightenment philosophers), in artistic practice (Diego Velázquez) and in the physiological–anthropological discourse of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Lotze, Katz). It argues for a praxeological and media–ecological re-evaluation of the European philosophical discourse on tactility and against essentializing understandings of the sense of touch in order to rediscover one of its classic roots: the sense of touch as a medium of subtlety, as the basis of the capacity for aesthetic differentiation that bridges cognition and sensuousness and opens the psyche for new experiences.

Metaxy

Ancient Greek thinking harbours surprising insights into the logics of mediation, especially when it focuses on the various figures of elementary media. Among all the Greek authors, however, the most consistent attempt to systematize a reflection on media was arguably made by Aristotle. The chapter sets out a classification of the various figures of mediation that reoccur throughout the philosopher’s body of work, singling out three main figures: the mesotês in ethics, the meson in logic, and—the most revolutionary one—the metaxy in Aristotle’s theory of perceptual environments. Given that the metaxy has no specific form (it is literally formless), it constitutes a pure potentiality to take on any form. The analyses of the diaphanous medium and the potentiality of vision point in the direction of a true philosophy of mediacy, whose central axiom can be summarized as follows: mediacy indicates the capacity to take on the form of something without being (it).

Metaphysics and the Mathematical Diagram

Accounts of geometry are caught between the demands of history and philosophy, and are difficult to reduce to either. In a profoundly influential move, Plato used geometrical proof as one means of bootstrapping his Theory of Forms and what came to be called metaphysics, and the emergence of ontological modes of thinking. This has led to a style of thinking still common today that gets called ‘mathematical Platonism’. By contrast, the sheer diversity of mathematical practices across cultures and time has been adduced to claim their historical contingency, which has recently prompted Ian Hacking to question why there is philosophy of mathematics at all. The different roles assigned to geometrical diagrams in these debates form the focus of this chapter, which analyses in detail the contrasting discussions of diagrams, and of the linearization and spatialization of thinking, by Plato (especially Meno and the Republic), by the cognitive historian Reviel Netz, the media theorist Sybille Krämer, and the anthropologist Tim Ingold.

Manteia, Mediality, Migration

From the Oracle of Dodona to modern GPS, mediation and migration have been closely interrelated. In fact, migration can be conceptualized as passage through a complex field of decisions (junctions, entries, exits, obstacles, connections) whose every bifurcation is coupled to a medium to direct the migrant in her path. This chapter discusses this nexus between manticism and narratives of migration with regard to Greek mythology. In this respect, the shipwrecked alien Odysseus depends on a series of media; he descends to the underworld to consult the seer Tiresias as to how to operate in what Michel Serres calls a precultural topology of seams and fissures (the notorious vagueness of such auguries reflects both the uncertainties of migration and the rate of noise in media transmissions). Similarly, Oedipus’ visit at the Oracle of Delphi constitutes a crucial point in the mythological discourse as well as the protagonist’s topographical parcourse; it transforms the territory into a field of connections, alternatives, decisions, and catastrophes—a ‘tragic landscape’, which George Hadjimichalis’s installation Schiste Odos translates into various techniques of representation (scale models, maps, oil paintings, aerial photographs). Finally, such medializations also touch the migrant’s body. Derrida describes Oedipus at Colonus as a figure of transference and placelessness—marked, in Sophocles, by the unknown location of his grave—who nevertheless allows the founding of a new community, thus exhibiting the foreign as a politically and culturally creative factor.

Parmenides at his Typewriter

This chapter seeks to explore two writers who are crucial to the history of media theory, Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, and to show how their appeals to the Presocratic philosophers regularly touched on issues of deep importance to understanding the connections between philosophy and materiality. Drawing on the seminal work of Friedrich Kittler, the chapter traces the constellation of the central mediating symbols of the body, the hand, and the typewriter in Nietzsche and Heidegger, and argues that both writers stage their returns to the Presocratics in order to reflect on the correct media of philosophy.

Parrhasius’ Curtain, or, a Media Archaeology of a Metapainting

This chapter explores the media–archaeological foundations of trompe l’oeil painting in antiquity, specifically the famous contest between the Greek painters Zeuxis and Parrhasius as recounted by Pliny the Elder. The anecdote is well known: whereas Zeuxis had painted a picture of grapes that deceived the birds who flew up to peck at them, Parrhasius won the palm for deceiving his rival with a painting of a curtain that compelled Zeuxis to ask that it be raised and the picture shown for his appraisal. Modern accounts and even depictions of the contest have universally taken for granted the formal realism of this painting, its extreme illusionism, as the catalyst of its deceptive power. By contrast, this chapter examines Parrhasius’ curtain from a media–theoretical perspective, which considers the order of representation in relation to the experience of beholders in real space. In short, it argues that the success of Parrhasius’ picture had less to do with its technical virtuosity than its shrewd understanding of how to produce the conditions for depictive and bodily co-presence.

The Seal of Polycrates

This chapter explores Kittler’s claim that media provide models and metaphors for the senses, as well as ‘gadgets’ for conceptualizing the soul. Drawing on the role of the seal-ring (daktylios), in Greek philosophical models of sense perception, memory, and knowledge acquisition, together with examples of classical intaglios, it explores how practices of sealing were fundamental to the ‘cultural techniques’ (Kulturtechniken) through which Greek society reflected upon its own practices of transmission and communication. As ‘indexical’ devices, seals anticipate the later development of printing, sound recording, photography, and film, offering a prehistory of analogue technologies that operate by means of the stamp, imprint, or trace. These themes are explored in relation to Herodotus’ tale of the seal of Polycrates, which is read as a Kittlerian ‘discourse on discourse channel conditions’ in which the materiality, facture, and instrumentality of the tyrant’s ring invite reflection upon the text’s formation of its own systems of inscription and communication. The episode’s later reappearance in Posidippus’ ekphrastic Lithika demonstrates how, in operating as an interface for the transmission of data between different media, the seal and its impression also constituted antiquity’s archetypal intermedial device across the ‘discourse networks’ of the Archaic, Classical and Hellenistic periods.

Friedrich Kittler’s Alphabetic Realism

Friedrich Kittler’s late studies on the Greek alphabet reveal a surprising fact about his work: Although he is commonly called the father of German media theory, Kittler actually advocated a realist concept of mediacy that privileges the representational qualities of media. Such a concept is fundamentally at odds with the basic assumption of all media theory—namely, the notion that media do not simply represent reality but shape or even constitute it in the process of mediation. The chapter traces the evolution of Kittler’s thinking of media to show how the Greek alphabet came to be the ‘perfect’ medium in Kittler’s historical and theoretical framework and how Pre-Socratic Greece serves as the imaginary setting for Kittler’s idea of immediate sensation and communication, a ‘direct’ contact with or access to reality.