Biopolitics

Foucault Agamben

camp

German Media theory

Kittler—Foucualt—discourse theory—techno-epistemic

Positive history (dates that mark shifts)

Enabled by a series of related assumptions(some of which are disavowed—German media theorists might not recognize or wish t contest my account here):

  1. materiality of an object (ontology as physics—not metaphysics)
  2. Materiality is the limit of history—nothing outside it.
  3. raw materials of history are not metaphors—raw data—but literal.
  4. History is chronological and linear; read backwards from the present—Turing and the computer—the past is full of precursors, “same economy of signs” and analgoies
  5. Metaphors are necessary but are contained—secondary.
  6. Machine is inhuman; data processing, information data
  7. An instrumental account of technology (no essence of technology or techne).
  8. Literature, literary theory and art are secondary; side effects of media changes. Barthes, Nabokov
  9. Psychoanalysis is a side effect (Freud and Lacan).
  10. Social control warfare model—bureaucracy, modernity, warfare, biopolitics, carceral society, society of the spectacle
  11. Media are specific; there is no such thing as media.
  12. Failure, error, and so on are limited to a pragmatic model—accidents—“noise” that may be inevitable but that is also reformable and prefectible(Seth Lerer on paratext).
  13. Aesthetic is set off against the office, bureaucracy, and so on.
  14. A narrative and anecdotal history
  15. Social control model of bureaucracy , modernity, biopolitics
  16. Speiker—archive versus art

Science Studies / Information Science

Texts are linked to writing in the ordinary sense; distinguished from objects recorded by different apparatuses.

Latour and Weibel back to things and object-oriented theory.

  1. Democracy linked to things being made public—parliament of things. Factual
  2. aramis—history of a technology-- narrative history.

Biology, Posthuman, and rhetoric—DNA and genome—wetwares—junkware

Textual Criticism / History of the book

materilaity

versus

Deconstruction

Paper machine versus paper machines

Page, document, text, literature all questions—no outside of metaphysics—technology essence—work of art—terrain of Heidegger—destruction

Psychoanalysis as a scene of writing

Arche writing versus writing

Autobiography

Literature, law, art, parergon, parages

Archive—fever

Refusal of all dialectics (Heidegger and Derrida).

Aporetology

Tendency of positive histories to self-deconstruct –vismann, one of the strongest, moves to Melville and Kafka—to literature. A sense of irony about the records—are they complete. And aesthtic—statues-already happening in the archive—auratic effects.Kittler’s argument in Discourse networks proceeds as a series of inventive readings of canocnical works of German literature. Ditto of Dracula; of the double. History becomes literary—narrative (novel) and anecdote. Junkware--book of life—

My project is not to reprogram these models of positive history thorugh deconstruciton but to reformulate biopolitics as a question of the and the archive and of the text or photo a and subjectile—how one adheres to other as a metaphor for reference. Move to hauntologralogy o fhte archive and “unreadability—or closed reading—resistance ot reading as reading related to storage, shelving, research, living a bare life virtually, autoarchiving. Taking irony and absence of dialectics seriously. Problem of media shared by deocnstruction rather than resolved, but staged differently,sometimes as a lapse or a tangential anecdote, or bibliography, and so on.

Resnais films—slips of papers are central for Krajewski—boxes, cardboard—assumes a straightforward topological. But the library is ot a place of memory—nor are the camps—the library is routing—a narrative—but also discontinuous—book-centric. But lots of stuff not placed—not valued. An iterrogative mode ot eh film—haunting by statues(texts and statues in de Man Shelley Disfigured) and archons (guards, like statues). Printing of index cards veruss handwriting. Books don’t have cells—the library is single whereas the camp is multiple—different styles of architecture for eachcamp. Not a uniform style.