Digital memory and the archive

277 Pages·2012·3.31 MB·English

by  Wolfgang Ernst

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Digital Memory and the Archive
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Electronic Mediations
Katherine Hayles, Mark Poster, and Samuel Weber, Series Editors
39. Digital Memory and the Archive
Wolfgang Ernst
38. How to Do Things with Videogames
Ian Bogost
37. Noise Channels: Glitch and Error in Digital Culture
Peter Krapp
36. Gameplay Mode: War, Simulation, and Technoculture
Patrick Crogan
35. Digital Art and Meaning: Reading Kinetic Poetry, Text Machines, Mapping Art,
and Interactive Installations
Roberto Simanowski
34. Vilém Flusser: An Introduction
Anke Finger, Rainer Guldin, and Gustavo Bernardo
33. Does Writing Have a Future?
Vilém Flusser
32. Into the Universe of Technical Images
Vilém Flusser
31. Hypertext and the Female Imaginary
Jaishree K. Odin
30. Screens: Viewing Media Installation Art
Kate Mondloch
29. Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games
Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter
28. Tactical Media
Rita Raley
27. Reticulations: Jean-Luc Nancy and the Networks of the Political
Philip Armstrong
26. Digital Baroque: New Media Art and Cinematic Folds
Timothy Murray
25. Ex-foliations: Reading Machines and the Upgrade Path
Terry Harpold
(continued on page 266)
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Digital Memory
and the Archive
wolfgang ernst
Edited and with an Introduction by Jussi Parikka
Electronic Mediations, Volume 39
university of minnesota press
minneapolis • london
For publication information on previously published material in this book,
see pages 245–46.
Copyright 2013 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
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permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
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Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu
ISBN978-0-8166-8199-0
The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.
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contents
Archival Media Theory: An Introduction to Wolfgang Ernst’s
Media Archaeology Jussi Parikka / 1
Media Archaeology as a Transatlantic Bridge / 23
Part I. The Media-Archaeological Method
1 Let There Be Irony: Cultural History and Media Archaeology in
Parallel Lines / 37
2 Media Archaeography: Method and Machine versus the History
and Narrative of Media / 55
Part II. Temporality and the Multimedial Archive
3 Underway to the Dual System: Classical Archives and
Digital Memory / 81
4 Archives in Transition: Dynamic Media Memories / 95
5 Between Real Time and Memory on Demand: Reflections
on Television / 102
6 Discontinuities: Does the Archive Become Metaphorical in
Multimedia Space? / 113
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Part III. Microtemporal Media
7 Telling versus Counting: A Media-Archaeological Point
ofView / 147
8 Distory: One Hundred Years of Electron Tubes, Media-
Archaeologically Interpreted, vis-à-vis One Hundred
Years of Radio / 158
9 Toward a Media Archaeology of Sonic Articulations / 172
10 Experimenting with Media Temporality: Pythagoras,
Hertz, Turing / 184
Appendix. Archive Rumblings: An Interview with Wolfgang Ernst
Geert Lovink / 193
Acknowledgments / 205
Notes / 207
Publication History / 245
Index / 247
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Archival Media Theory
An Introduction to Wolfgang Ernst’s
Media Archaeology
Jussi Parikka
Traditionally, archives have had an interesting aura despite the grayness of
the concrete walls surrounding them. We tend to think of archives as slightly
obsolete and abandoned places where usually the archivist or the caretaker
is someone swallowed up in the dusty corridors of bureaucracy, informa-
tion management, and organizational logic that makes the archive a system.
What characterizes such systems is that they are not always understandable
or accessible to an outsider. We do not often visit archives, but the archives
still have a keen interest in us. The Stasi archives, opened after the fall of
the Berlin Wall and the German Democratic Republic in the early 1990s, are
a case in point. Those archives recorded a large number of lives down to
the most boring details, documented in meticulous fashion, including tran-
scribed voice recordings as well as photographs. Getting to an archive is not
always that easy, either. One needs to obtain permissions, make arrangements,
follow strict rules of conduct, and get introduced to the whole system of how
the archive has been organized. For sure, from a theoretical point of view,
the postmodern theory surrounding amusement parks, visual culture, spec-
tacle, and so forth was perhaps more exciting than focusing on the archive as
a core site of modernity in its gray administration culture.
And yet suddenly archives are popping up everywhere. A lot of our
software-based interaction online now has to do with archival metaphors.
We see this in ways ranging from the replacement of “Delete” or “Trashcan”
1
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on our e-mail screens with “Archive” to attempts to offer new kinds of storage
space—mistakenly conflated with “archives”—for the numerous traces we
leave of our personal lives—photographs, sound files, videos, documents. We
are miniarchivists ourselves in this information society, which could be more
aptly called an information managementsociety. Hence we see the business
of cloud storage, mobile storage, and such flourishing. We also see this in
business models of social media: the so-called free platforms we are using to
connect to friends and to share ideas, links, and preferences for films and
music are all material for data mining, which is the new form of subsump-
tion of our lives into capitalist production and accumulation of value. This
algorithmic unconscious of social media cultures knows a lot about us and
is often keen not only to keep but to sell those data to third parties.
The archive-oriented media theory of Wolfgang Ernst (1959–) fits per-
fectly into the double bind of the modes of storage and transmission between
old media and new media cultures. One of the last media theorists not to use
a mobile phone, engage in any other form of the latest gadgetry, or even have
a home Internet connection, Ernst is, however, completely up-to-date con-
cerning the changes in our regimes of memory in software cultures. He is
part of the breed of media theorists who are keen to do their own electronics,
repair old media apparatuses, and browse through shops with old computers
in order to find material for thought for, in Ernst’s case, theoretical writings.
Therefore, his way of mobilizing media archaeology into an analysis of the
technics of cultural memory, analysis of the technical media machines of non-
human kinds, and elaboration of theoretical ideas in digital humanities in
medium-specific ways is at the same time something that feels new but is
also recognizable to anyone who has at least a basic knowledge of some of
the arguments of German media theory.
This introduction to the collection of writings by Wolfgang Ernst—the
first to come out in the English language—elaborates the main thrust of his
brand of media archaeology, as well as the other concepts that are featured in
the chapters of the book. The introductory text also addresses their intellec-
tual context as part of new themes in media theory: time-critical media, the
archive, and diagrammatics. The purpose of this book is to give voice to one
of the names that have appeared in recent waves of media-theoretical debates
in Germany. Ernst is not yet so well known in English-speaking academia,
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archival media theory 3
but because of his controversial suggestions his theoretical insights are exactly
the food for thought we need in our current debates in digital humanities
and new media theory. He is also part of the generation influenced directly by
the late Friedrich Kittler (1943–2011), along with such theorists as Bernhard
Siegert, Wolfgang Schäffner, and others. Hence the book is not only about
and by Ernst but about the alternative ideas concerning media and technol-
ogy that are arising as part of our humanities culture. These alternative ideas
have often been branded as “German media theory,” but at the same time
they open up a much more heterogeneous set of thoughts, as I want to briefly
outline in this introduction to Ernst and the context in which his theories
have emerged.
Address Space: From a Historian
to a Media Archaeologist
The term media theoryis often a catch-all term that does not account for the
variety of disciplinary perspectives that fit the category. In the case of Ernst,
we need to acknowledge his background in more traditional humanities.
Reading Ernst’s writings from the 1990s to more recent years, one can notice
a shift in perspective. He was trained as a classicist and historian, and his back-
ground is in the more traditional ways of thinking about history as present
in our culture. Yet in media-theoretical debates, most of the texts we might
have read from Ernst seem to remind us of Kittler’s polemic texts about
the emergence, nature, and effectiveness of media technologies for our per-
ceptual capacities, which emphasized the need to see media history through
ruptures, not continuity. Media history is not a progress story—or a story
of a decline of civilizations—but is continuously written anew and branded
by discontinuities. And yet Ernst is not directly a follower or a student of
Kittler despite the fact that he is emblematic of what can be seen as the “Kit-
tler effect”: the remarkable influence Kittler’s theories have had on a range of
debates not only in Germany but in Anglo-American countries and interna-
tionally, fostering a whole debate on media materialism and technodetermin-
ism.1As Geoffrey Winthrop-Young notes, the ones who too loyally follow
Kittler—the so-called Kittler school—are a less engaging posse anyway. It
is more interesting to try to pick up on some of the points of the material
and to develop a historically tuned understanding of the contexts of media