Discourse 31(1/2): On The Genealogy of Media (2009)

“‘On the Genealogy of Media’ invokes a tradition for thinking about technology, which passes from Nietzsche through Heidegger and Freud. As a collection on media, however, these texts gathered together in this special issue include few Nietzsche readings—or even Nietzsche references—in their thread count. Indeed, Nietzsche is not typically considered a thinker of media technologies. But his genealogical interpretation of the Mass media as being on one uncanny continuum of valuation from Christianity to nihilism influenced, together with either Freud’s or Heidegger’s input, the media essays of Walter Benjamin as much as the media oeuvre of Friedrich Kittler. Following Nietzsche, then, a genealogy of media means, as in Heidegger’s questioning of technicity, that whatever technology may be it presupposes assumption of a certain (discursive) ready positioning for (and before) its advent as actual machines to which the understanding of technologization cannot be reduced. Freudian psychoanalysis views media technologies as prosthetically modeled after body parts and partings. A primary relationship to loss (as the always-new frontier of mourning where reality, the future, the other begin or begin again) is, on Freud’s turf and terms, the psychic ready position that is there before the event or advent of machinic externalities.” (from the Introduction)

With texts by Friedrich A. Kittler, Klaus Theweleit, Craig Saper, Gregory L. Ulmer, Rebecca Comay, Laurence A. Rickels, Barbara Stiegler, Tom Cohen and Avital Ronell.

Guest Editor: Laurence A. Rickels
Publisher Wayne State University Press, 2009
ISSN 1522-5321
182 pages
via Project Muse

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Tomislav Medak, Petar Milat (eds.): Idea of Radical Media (2013) [English/Croatian]

This is the “reader from the Idea of Radical Media conference, held June 7-8, 2013 in Zagreb, Croatia, and organized by the Multimedia Institute. The conference took place in the context of the exhibition Prospects of Arkzin and the media action Installing the Public, both revisiting the Arkzin phenomenon two decades later. Arkzin was a collective and a publication that emerged out of the Anti-War Campaign in the early 1990s and gave a theoretical and polemical voice to anti-nationalist positions. The publishing and activist practices of Arkzin anticipated and reflected the practices of tactical media that were crystallizing from a particular confluence of a political moment marked by the post-socialist transition, post-Yugoslav conflicts and alter-globalist contestations, and a technological moment of the rise of early Net.

However, the conference and the reader have a broader aim. On the one hand, we wanted to look back at the practical articulations and discursive re-articulations of radical media practices in arts, mass communication and political work and over the last two decades. On the other, to reasses the notion of radical media from a broader historical perspective and the critical perspective of the current political moment.” (from the Introduction)

With essays by Clemens Apprich, Eric Kluitenberg, Jodi Dean, Matteo Pasquinelli, Branka Ćurčić, Alessandro Ludovico, Anthony Iles, Joanne Richardson, Vera Tollmann, Katarina Peović Vuković and Ana Peraica.

Idea of Radical Media / Ideja radikalnih medija
Publisher Multimedia Institute, Zagreb, 2013
ISBN 9789537372101
256 pages

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See also Prospects of Arkzin catalogue (48 pp, 2013)

Hans Günther, Sabine Hänsgen (eds.): Soviet Power and the Media (2006) [Russian]

Proceedings from the conference “The Political as Communicative Space in History” (Bielefeld, October 2003) devoted to the comparative analysis of the media in the Soviet Union of the 1920s and 1930s provide a pioneering media-theoretical exploration of the role of radio, film, photography and print in the engineering of the communist Soviet power.

Sovetskaya vlast’ i media [Советская власть и медиа]
Publisher Akademicheskiy proekt, St. Petersburg, 2006
Open Access
ISBN 5733103353, 9785733103358
621 pages

Reviews: Wolfgang Schlott (Die Welt der Slaven, 2007, DE, PDF), Alexander Prokhorov (Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, 2007), Alexander Ulanov (Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2007, RU), Jana Klenhova (ArtMargins, 2008), Yuliya Liderman (Usloviya teatra, RU, 2010).

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