‘Media determine our
situation’
(Friedrich Kittler)
• What does it mean to teach and research
in a university at a time when the
technological conditions that structure
teaching and research are changing so
rapidly and so dramatically?
‘Originary Technicity’
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Marx
Nietzsche
Freud
Heidegger
McLuhan
Derrida
André Leroi-Gourhan, technics and
hominisation
• Relation between
bipedality, uprightness
and the development of
tools
• Technics as zoological
development
• Relation between
technics, history and
memory
• Gesture and Speech
Jacques Derrida
• Of Grammatology
• “Freud and the Scene of
Writing” from Writing and
Difference
• Memoires: For Paul de
Man
• Archive Fever
• Echographies of
Television (with Bernard
Stiegler)
• Specters of Marx
Archive Fever
•
With the hypothesis of an internal substrate, surface, or space without which there is neither
consignation, registration, surface nor suppression, censorship, repression, it prepares the idea of
a psychic archive distinct from spontaneous memory, of a hypnomnēsis distinct from mnēmē and
from anamnēsis: the institution in sum of a prosthesis of the inside.
•
To what degree psychoanalysis has been ‘determined by a state of the technology of
communication and archivization’ and how it would have been determined had Freud and his
contemporaries ‘had had access to MCI and AT&T telephonic credit cards, portable tape
recorders, computers, printers, faxes, televisions, teleconferences and above all E-mail’
Archive Fever
•
Electronic mail today…is on the way to transforming the entire public and private space of
humanity, and first of all the limit between the private, the secret (private or public), and the public
or the phenomenal. It is not only a technique, in the ordinary and limited sense of the term: at an
unprecedented rhythm, in quasi-instantaneous fashion, this instrumental possibility of production,
of printing, of conservation, and of destruction of the archive must inevitably be accompanied by
juridical and thus political transformations.
•
We should not close our eyes to the unlimited upheaval under way in archival technology. It
should above all remind us that the said archival technology no longer determines, will never have
determined, merely the moment of the conservational recording, but rather the very institution of
the archivable event… this archival technique has commanded that which in the past even
instituted and constituted whatever there was as anticipation of the future.
•
The archive has always been a pledge and as a pledge a token of the future. To put it more
trivially: what is no longer archived in the same way is no longer lived in the same way. Archivable
meaning is also and in advance codetermined by the structure that archives.
Memoires: For Paul de Man
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In order to distinguish between Gedächtnis (thinking memory) from Errinerung
(interiorizing memory)… de Man marks the irreducible link between thought as
memory and the technical dimension of memorization, the art of writing, of “material”
inscription, in short, of all that exteriority which, after Plato, we call hypomnesis.
DeManian deconstruction… gives itself the means to not drive out into the exterior
and inferior dark regions of thought, the immense questions of artificial memory and
of modern modalities of archivation which today affects, according to a rhythm and
with dimensions that have no common measure with those of the past, the totality of
our relation to the world (on this side of or beyond its anthropological determination):
habitat, all languages, writing, “culture”, art (beyond picture galleries, film libraries,
video libraries, record libraries), literature (beyond libraries), all information or
informatization (beyond “memory” data banks), techno-sciences, philosophy, (beyond
university institutions) and everything within the transformation which affects all
relations to the future. This prodigious mutation not only heightens the stature, the
quantitative economy of so-called artificial memory, but also its qualitative structure –
and in doing so it obliges us to rethink what relates this artificial memory to man’s socalled psychical and interior memory, to truth, to the simulacrum and simulation of
truth, etc.
Bernard Stiegler
• Technics and Time
• Echographies of
Television (with
Jacques Derrida)
Mark C. Taylor
• Errings
• Imagologies
• The Moment of
Complexity
Gregory Ulmer
• Applied
Grammatology
• Teletheory
• Heuretics
• “The Object of PostCriticism” from Foster,
H (ed), Postmodern
Culture
George Landow
• Hypertext: The
Convergence of
Contemporary Critical
Theory and
Technology
Donna Haraway
• “A Cyborg Manifesto:
Science, Technology,
and SocialistFeminism in the Late
Twentieth Century," in
Simians, Cyborgs and
Women
N. Katherine Hayles
• How We Became
Posthuman
Friedrich Kittler
• Discourse Networks
1800 1900
• Gramophone Film
Typewriter
• http://conferencereport.blogspot.com