Fibreculture Journal (Oct 2011)
FCJ-123 The Transversal Generic: Media-Archaeology and Network Culture
Abstract
This article argues that media-archaeology, when seen through the teleological feedback mechanisms of cybernetics, is not the radical appearance of non-linear history and practice but increasingly a cultural generic: the process of rendering the past into a material resource for the production of the (network capitalist) future. This idea of a generic archaeological impulse in contemporary network culture is nonetheless not one of cultural pessimism. (Non-) productive new avenues of theory and practice may still be derived from media-archaeology if its genericity is also understood as a generative transversal force which, in the sense of Francois Laruelle’s non-philosophy acts unilaterally across systems, transforming them ‘in the last instance’. In this paper I work with a similar notion of reverse-remediation in relation to artistic practices that can be labelled media-archaeological, understood here as appropriating obsolete or near-obsolete technologies in ways that refashion what we understand as the old and the new as well as questioning how this relationship has been captured and reduced by network capitalism into the analogue and the digital. The key feature of the practices considered is seen to be their transversality, as a working across the cybernetic and capitalist circulation of the old and the new, generating ‘the existence of unrealistic conditions of thought’ (Parisi, 2008). Unfolding from such unrealistic conditions are "reverse-remediations" that act out the politics of contemporary networked media through spatio-temporal hybridism. The article concludes with a case-study of the artistic re-deployment of the overhead projector as an excavation of how an unlikely contender for media art stardom may take up a transversal relation to the rising atemporality and real-time obsessions of media-archaeological network culture.
