A Primer to the Media Prehistory of the Present

Jussi Parikka’s What Is Media Archaeology? is the second book in as many years to be published in English with “media archaeology” in the title. The other is a collection of essays coedited by Parikka titled Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications (2011).¹ As the titles of both books suggest, media archaeology is a young field in the process of consolidating itself. While Parikka proposes that What Is Media Archaeology? can be seen as a companion to the other volume, it might more accurately be described as a primer. What Is Media Archaeology? is very much an introductory work—those well versed in media theory might therefore want to head straight to the other volume in order to see media archaeology in action, as it were—focused on summary and synthesis. Parikka performs both deftly and includes a summary paragraph and a list for further reading at the conclusion to each chapter as well as an ample bibliography at the end of the book. Still, the book is less a straightforward history of the field of media archaeology than a “cartography” of its methods; Parikka is concerned less with tracing a faithful representation of existing scholarship than with mapping a field of problems and possible connections (161). Combining theoretical and historical research, Parikka’s version of media archaeology seeks above all to think old and new media in “parallel lines” and turns to past media as a way to write a prehistory of the present: “Media archaeology is introduced as a way to investigate the new media cultures through insights from past new media, often with an emphasis on the forgotten, the quirky, the non-obvious apparatuses, practices, and inventions” (2).

The “archaeology” in media archaeology is fundamentally indebted to Michel Foucault. According to Parikka, one of the chief concerns of the field is to understand the role of media in shaping the conditions of knowledge. Equally important is Foucault’s use of “genealogy” and the way the vicissitudes of media history are materially inscribed on bodies and in machines. The most famous purveyor of this approach to media is, of course, Friedrich Kittler. Parikka thus devotes nearly an entire chapter to a clear and cogent summary of Kittler’s work. Wolfgang Ernst, perhaps less well known than Kittler to a North American audience, also figures prominently. Parikka levers Ernst to emphasize the archive as one the most significant technological and conceptual arenas for media archaeology.² The next “logical step” in extending Foucault’s notion of the archive is, Parikka argues, “for us to rethink the machine as the archive: the software, the hardware, the protocols and platforms which form the visibility, the audibility, the statements of what is” (87). Parikka describes the computer as a more literal archive—that is, as an actual storage space—and points to the challenges of preserving and organizing digital content as a potential zone of intersection between media archaeology and the digital humanities.

Drawing on Kittler and German media theory more generally, Parikka contrasts media archaeology with media studies and cultural studies as a method grounded in technical knowledge, going “under the hood” of media technology (89). This technical knowledge folds into a pursuit of “theoretical frameworks that go beyond user experience, hermeneutical interpretation and narrative” (125). Screen content, for instance, is secondary to the software and hardware that make it possible. One of Parikka’s interventions in this vein is to redefine imaginary media, which has been central to media archaeology and is typically understood as fabulated devices, “the stuff of dreams as well as nightmares, at times existing only in the minds of inventors or science-fiction writers” (44).³ Against charges that media archaeology may devolve into a fetishism for curios, Parikka forwards a properly materialist take on imaginary media as technologies that escape human perception, such as electromagnetic waves. He thus attempts to move imaginary media (and, by extension, media archaeology) from the margins to the center of the...