Thursday 26 May 2011

Kill the darling part 10: off with the quote!

This one is a short one. Would have been nice to keep it in a longer form (now only a reduced reference) as it articulates well the lack of politics in a lot of media archaeology; or lets put it more diplomatically, the danger of veering towards enthusiasm for what Tim Druckrey aptly calls "oddball paleontologies". This quote is from Druckrey's Foreword to Zielinski's Deep Time of the Media.

"How a media archaeology can constitute itself against self-legitimation or self-reflexivity is crucial as if it is to circumvent the reinvention of unifying, progressive, or “anticipatory” history—even as it is challenged to constitute these very vague histories as an antidote to the gaping lapses in traditional historiography. Indeed it is this very problem that afflicts media archaeology. The mere rediscovery of the forgotten, the establishment of oddball paleontologies, of idiosyncratic genealogies, uncertain lineages, the excavation of antique technologies or images, the account of erratic technical developments, are, in themselves, insufficient to the building of a coherent discursive methodology.” (Druckrey 2006: ix).

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