What Is Media Archaeology? Jussi Parikka.

Abstract

The title of Jussi Parikka’s most recent work on new media asks a question whose answer should provide insight into some of the most dynamic scholarly trends in cultural studies, media studies, and history today. What Is Media Archaeology? provides a wide-ranging overview of the amorphous ‘field’ of media archeology, a subject that Parikka points out covers a shifting terrain of trans-disciplinary methods and subject areas. Employing this geographic terminology, Parikka calls his work a ‘cartography’ of media archeology and attempts to map a number of intersecting arenas of theory and practice. Although the book occasionally threatens to overwhelm its ostensible subject by annexing a number of adjacent subject areas, it should provide a solid grounding in contemporary debates for researchers, teachers, and students. Parikka’s interest in media archeology lies not only in uncovering past technologies and ‘old new media’ for their own sake but also more generally in using such work to reflect on contemporary ‘digital culture’. His goal, he writes, is both to outline current debates in media studies and to propose new directions for media archeological research. The book ends up focusing more on the former goal, while the author’s own proposals emerge in a somewhat elliptical fashion. Parikka returns frequently to two guiding theoretical directions: Michel Foucault’s work on archives as systems of power that structure what can be known and stored and Friedrich Kittler’s discussion of ‘discourse networks’ and call for media-specific investigation. Although Parikka offers separate chapters on, for example, new media archives and German media theory, references to these two theorists recur throughout the book. Chapter 1 introduces What Is Media Archaeology? by identifying four key areas in which the field has emerged: inquiries into modernity, film studies, histories of the present, and alternative histories. Parikka identifies the power of media archeology as a ‘spirit of thinking the new and the old in parallel lines’ (p. 2)—a methodology that results in a view of media history that is not linear or teleological but, rather, layered and sedimented.