History and its shadow: thinking about the contours of absence in the construction of media history

Abstract

The recent increase in the deployment of the term apophany in the humanities probably says something about the current state of things. One might credit this interest in finding meaningful patterns within random data – or something like pattern recognition – to the ever more frequent shifts in theoretical framing and reference, to the dramatic increase in access to ideas both scholarly and not, and to the non-stop process of reorientation required in a 24/7 networked culture where ideas and responses trade at unprecedented speed. If you try plugging the term (or your theorist or jargon of choice) into Google's Ngram, a set of patterns will appear in graphic form, tracked along a timeline.1 Ngram also serves as a reminder of why, in the early days of ‘big data’ and data mining, patterns abound. As theoretical stances find themselves on ever-faster cycles of boom and bust, they appear, when viewed from a distance (or through the zig-zagged graphs of Ngram), like a stubborn twitch in human behaviour … a compulsion to impose form and coherence onto dynamic data sets. At a more meso-level, we might see the patterned and accelerating rise and fall of theoretical frames as a response to the escalating institutional demands of universities that they provide the building blocks of reputation, offer publication opportunities, and serve as instantiations of larger resonances that loosely connect and render coherent the intellectual project of the humanities. Less lock-step than frame of reference, these discursive turns offer their participants reinforcement if not a fleeting sense of consensus, just as much as they offer targets against which to react and rally. Up close and on an everyday level, we need not so much to look at them as a set of behaviours as to take them on their terms, and press them for their meanings, insights and implications.