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69 Jussi Parikka

Jussi Parikka

Green Media Times: Friedrich Kittler and

Ecological Media History

Introduction

There are very different notions of materiality that have been circulating

in international media and cultural studies discussions during the past few

decades. In a cultural and media studies context, materiality is meant to

focus on something different than the same word within a GermanMedien-

wissenschaftcontext. In Britain, on the axis of universities from Lancaster

to London with the centre at Birmingham in the Midlands, materiality

quite often calls to mind a lineage starting from Raymond Williams cul-

tural studies emphasis, and its modern variations. University departments

still carry a strong legacy of cultural studies, and even in media studies,

the technical specics of media culture are often left to colleagues in the

sciences and engineering on the other side of the Faculty lines. This empha-

sis often has to do with the birth of the Birmingham school of cultural stu-

dies in the 1960s, and its aftereffect on modern cultural and media stu-

dies departments across UK. In such a heritage, materiality is often related

to ( human ) experience. The critique of positivism in this tradition might

assume forms that emphasise the empirical above theoretical considera-

tions. The construction of meaning is a central feature through which to

understand the living materiality of media practices, and media materia-

lism reverts to concrete practices of cultural production in specic spatio-

temporal settings.1Therefore, it is no wonder that the teachings of the likes

of Friedrich A. Kittler did not always nd fertile ground across the Channel,

despite his admiration for certain sites of British culture: the Cambridge of

Turing and Pink Floyd, Bletchley Park, and the London of rock engineering

culture and studio technologies.2But as we know, he admired neither Bri-

tish cultural studies, nor the rising hegemony of English-language interna-

tional universities. Indeed, as a theoretician, he was invested in writing analternative history of media and materiality, even if the latter s focus chan-

ged in his later work on the love life of the Greeks a mediatic affair. The

Kittler that is internationally known as a material media historian, especially

in the Anglo-American world, is both lauded and reviled for his empha-

sis on the primacy of technology. This Kittler is the scholar interested in

the triangles of war, science and engineering, as indexes for what huma-

nitiesshouldbe about in the Turing age. In this sense, there was always a

strong normative sense in Kittlers provocations that had an inuence on his

historical methodology too. For people trained in contextual thinking, some

of his demands always felt somewhat anachronistic. Kittler s methodologywas partly recognizable for those knowledgeable about Foucault, but also

( 1 ) Nick Couldry, Inside Culture. Re-Imagining the Method of Cultural Studies, Los Angeles

London New York 2000, p. 1112.

( 2 ) On re lated topic s, see Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, Cultural Studies and German Media

Theory, in: Gary Hall and Clare Birchall ( eds.), New Cultural Studies. Adventures in Theory,

Edinburgh 2006, p. 88104.

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70 Green Media Times: Fr iedr ich Kit tler and Ecolog ical Media His tory

puzzling when it came to ideas such as those expressed in Optical Media:

to take Claude Shannon s mathematical theory of communication of 1948,

and to transpose it as a method through which to map media history before

the term media was even properly used in the way in which we understand

the term. This was the model of seeing history through the set diagram

of Source-Coding-Channel-Decoding-Reception. The engineered model isdetoured around the semiotic understanding it received in Anglo-American

hands, and returned to its mathematical roots and therefore also those

roots planted as the initial stages of an investigation of media history. It is

a sort of a backwards recursion, variations on a theme.3As John Durham

Peters notes in his introduction to the English translation of Optical Media,

we nd a specic understanding of a materialistic media methodology in

Kittlers relation to time. The difference to British cultural studies, for exam-

ple, is not always evident, even on the level of topics: it is as if institutions,

people and political agency are pursuing Kittlers agenda! Indeed,

Optical media is clearly interested in the development of institu-

tions such as Edisons Lab, the ways that marketing imposes com-

promises between consumers and engineers, the unique histo-

rical conditions that enabled the emergence of photography in

the 1830s, and the ways that war nancing affected the develop-

ment of television. His celebration elsewhere of the technologi-

cal bricoleur who, with soldering gun in hand and DOS screen in

view, recongures the user-friendly interfaces of dumbed down

technologies, certainly suggests an activist role for at least those

with an engineering bent. Indeed, in his 1990s campaign against

Microsoft Windows, Kittler could sound a bit like a cultural stu-

dies type praising the agency of ordinary folks who rewrite the

dominant code for their own purposes.4

As Peters suggests, it is as if Kittler and the Brits share something of the

1970s: a punk culture or at least an attitude. And yet, we know that Kit-

tler s punk attitude really had more to do with Pink Floyd and with know-

ing how to solder. Punk cultures celebration of the amateur, who does not

have to possess musical talent or even know how to play, was far removed

from Kittler s emphasis on insider knowledge of hardware and software.

While punk bands inuenced by the Sex Pistols learned to play basic chordsand to write anarchist lyrics, Kittler investigated what makes songs hap-

pen by building his own synthesiser, which is now being reconstructed by

artist Jan-Peter Sonntag and other supporters. Aside from any references to

punk culture, we should seriously consider the centrality of timein Kit tler s

media history. As a media historian, Kittler articulated materiality as part of

the humanities agenda. In this way, he also posited new notions of media

ontology and temporality. In this paper, I will address this entanglement of

materiality and time, and ask if there are ways to expand Kittler s media

historical interests to something I will call non-mediatic media material-

ity which leads to a different approach to media temporality as well.This approach is not interested in explaining Kittler s stance, but rather

( 3 ) On recursion and Kit tler, se e Geoffrey Winthrop -Young, Kittler s siren recursions , in:

Stephen Sale and Laura Sal isbury ( eds.), Kit tler Now: Current Perspectives in Kit tler Studies,

Cambridge ( Forthcoming ) 2013.

( 4 ) John Durham Peters, Int roduction: Friedrich Kittler s Light Shows, in: Friedrich Kittler,

Optical Media, trans. Anthony Enns, Cambridge 2010, p. 7.

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71 Jussi Parikka

in variations: how to continue and develop Kittler s inspiring accounts of

media and time, and how, on an international level, his work is giving rise to

further variations on the theme of media ecology . Indeed, Kittler has thor-

oughly inuenced much of post-cultural studies media theory and media

ecology over the past several years in Britain, for instance.5Beyond this link,

however, I want to open up the possibility of thinking about ecology moreliterally with Kittler.

The Place of Media Matter

It goes without saying that Kittler was devoted to analysis that paid close

attention to the materiality of contemporary media technologies. The inves-

tigations carried out under the inuence of Foucault ( and Lacan early on )

are mappings of the contemporary. What separates Kittler from otherwise

appropriate references to established traditions of media theory in Canada

primarily McLuhan and Innis is his penchant for factual detail and tech-

nical specicity. His approach never assured that the facts were necessarily

correct in the end, but it was still a systematic way of dealing with media

historical topics in the present that did not consider technology a mere

externality. For later commentators, this explains why his theory s relation

to the anthropotechnics tradition from Leroi-Gourhan to Simondon, and

even to Stiegler, continues to attract interest.

Naturally, for Kittler, the absence of media from media theory was

one of the worst possible starting points. It s dreadful when media schol-

ars ponticate about computers without ever having looked underneath the

lid.6A narrative of his early career might be told through the technologies

he used to write, from typewriters to electric typewriters, to computers that

expressed the internalized Nietzschean mantra, and complemented with his

1970s synthesizer building. In this context, one can already speak of the

two forms of Foucauldean inuences of the 1970s mobilizing into what was

later called media archaeology: 1 ) a descent in the historical sense, through

the archival, and as genealogical mapping of the contemporary moment,

2 ) and in the technological sense, an under-the-hood methodology of

media theoretical excavation that departs from what Nick Montfort later

called screen-essentialism , toward software, hardware, and further levels.There is much more to visual culture than merely the screen and its images.

This double movement characterizes much of Kit tler s inuence both in

terms of media studies and practice-based research. Especially the latter

is often undertaken outside of universities: much of the Kittlerian spirit ( to

use a counterintuitive term for someone who wanted to chase spirits out of

Geisteswissenschaften) can still be seen in hacktivist practices. In any case,

the double movement between history and technology constantly focuses

on the materiality of the object in Kittler s media history. So what is the

place of materiality in his media historical account ? What are the sugges-

tions offered and which characterize the idea of media materialism as itpertains to the imagined brand of German media studies ? Put simply, the

analysis of technical media cultures is an epistemological border patrol

( 5 ) See Matthew Ful ler, Media Ecologies. Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture,

Cambridge / MA 2005.

( 6 ) Friedrich Kittler, The Cold Model of Structure. Friedrich Kittler interviewed by Christoph

Weinberger, in: Cultural Politics vol. 8 / issue 3, 2012, p. 379.

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operation that at least implicitlyproduceslists of media: What are media ?

is a question answered through the various operations in which it is being

exercised. Methodological choices are always ways of producing stable

objects, and as such, an archive of what counts as media. In a similar way

to what McLuhan achieved, German-based media studies such as Kittler s

and many more recent ones ( e. g., in the Kulturtechnikendebates ) have suc-cessfully expanded the denition of media beyond mass media, to practices

of technology that condition formations of knowledge and serve as a his-

torical ontology7for current investigations too. For McLuhan in Understand-

ing Medianearly fty years ago, it meant extending the denition of media

to allow for analyses of roads and housing, clothes and clocks.8The list is

expansionist, in the sense that media studies as a discipline has appropri-

ated not only historiographical methods ( Foucault and new historicism led

to media archaeology ) but also those of anthropology and other humanities

elds.9Pushing the boundaries of media studies has even created a discourse

of media studies in the past tense, as well as claims that the notion itself has

become redundant: What were the media ? becomes as pertinent a ques-

tion as the claim that there isno media .10Rather than expressing a nihilis-

tic sentiment intended to close down media studies departments some-

thing that one might suspect in the UK, for instance, given the long-term

political attacks by conservative voices against such new disciplines the

idea that there is no media actually aims to capture the pragmatic aspects

of how to approach the materiality of the object. Indeed, instead of closing

the discipline down by denition an ontological project Eva Horn posits

the lack of media in media studies as a radical opening:

Perhaps such an anti-ontological approach to media, a radical

opening of the analytical domain to any kind of medial process,

has been more productive and theoretically challenging than any

attempt, however convincing, at answering the question of what

media are.11

Siegfried Zielinski s most recent book [ Nach den Medien ]seems to develop

this thought in the same vein.12

Now the media exist in superabundance, there is certainly no

lack. For the thoroughly media-conditioned individuals theycannot possibly be the stuff that obsessions are made of any

longer. What has now turned into a given that is at one s dis-

posal, is utilized and defended as property but it is no longer a

coveted object of desire. In this specic sense the media have

( 7 ) Bernard Sieger t, The Map is the Territory, Radical Philosophy 169, ( September / October

169 ), p. 15.( 8 ) Mar shall McLuhan, Understanding Media. The Extensions of Man, London New York

1964 / 2001.

( 9 ) Bernhard Siegert, Cacography or Communication ? Cultural Techniques in German Media

Studies, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, in: Grey Room 29, 2008, p. 2729.

( 10 ) See Claus Pias ( eds.), Was waren Medien, Zrich 2011; Eva Horn, There Is No Media, in:

Grey Room 29, 2008, p. 613.

( 11 ) Horn, There is no Media, cf. note 10, p. 8.

( 12 ) Siegfried Zielinski, [ nach den Medien ]. Nachrichten vom ausgehenden zwanzigsten Jahr-

hundert, Berlin 2011.

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73 Jussi Parikka

become superuous / redundant. Through the monumental exer-

tions of the twentieth century, they have also become time-

worn / shopworn / used up / spent.13

Zielinski laments the disappearance of the critical moment from the promise

of media, and calls attention to the abundance of media-related discoursethat itself is emptied of any particular critical force. Indeed, his observation

targets a contemporary analysis of the globalization of digital economy as a

oating signier through which media can assume any meaning. However,

what if one takes the last part of his critique literally and begins to examine

all the used up and spent media technological devices, infrastructure, and

materials ? Discourses of media obsolescence, dead media, and more recen-

tly, zombie media , take up this speculation, as do an increasing number of

accounts in media analysis, which acknowledge the environmental hazards

that technologies carry with them.14At rst, the issue of environmental

dangers of chemicals and metals feels removed from discussions of media

materiality, but it actually provides positive feedback that helps expand

our thinking about media materiality. In short, media materiality and this

is a necessary simplication for my purposes here has been successfully

expanded and intensied by media theoretical accounts such as Kittler s,

and therefore, a new arena of media history has opened up that eschews

worn out statements about the primacy of mass media. However, media

history has also concentrated on specic ways of understanding materia-

lity. In Kittler s work, especially his writings from the 1980s and 1990s, this

approach implied a focus on the engineering and scientic contexts of tech-

nical media, with his occasionally heavy emphasis on war. I will not reca-

pitulate Kittler s main points in detail here. It will sufce to recall his early

notes on the need to update Foucault s archaeology to methodologically

suit the technical media age ( instead of focusing solely on books and archi-

ves ); his suggestion to update Lacan by incorporating the symbolic logic of

information technology; and his meticulous close readings of analog and

digital technical media. In the words of Markus Krajewski, who provided a

short memorial reminder on Kittler s behalf:

One of his most prominent demands was that nowadays peo-

ple should not only be obliged to learn to read and write. It is

now also one of the required fundamental cultural techniques tounderstand how computers can be directed. After writing whole

books about the subtle effects and inner-political aspects of

( 13 ) Ibid., p. 16. Translation from: Sieg fried Zielinski, The Media Have B ecome Super-

uous, in: Continent issue 3:1, 2013, http: // www.continentcontinent .com / index.php / conti-

nent / artic le / view / 136 [ last accessed on 29. 09. 2013 ].

( 14 ) On zombie media, see Garnet Hert z and Jussi Parikka, Zombie Media. Circuit Bending

Media Archaeology Into An Art Method. Leonardo vol. 45 / 5, 2012, p. 424430. For generalreferences to some recent literature on media, the environment, and waste: Jennifer Gabrys,

Digital Rubbish. A Natural History of Electronics, Ann Arbor 2011; Jussi Parikka ( ed.), Media-

natures. The Materiality of Information Technology and Waste. 2011, online book under

http: // www.livingbooksaboutlife.org / books / Medianatures [ last accessed on 29. 09. 2013 ].

Richard Maxwell and Toby Miller, Greening the Media, Oxford 2012. Sean Cubitt s work has

also been pioneering in this eld, where issues of media waste and the environmental load of

advanced technologies must be considered in relation to global media governance. See, e.g.,

Sean Cubitt , Current Screens, in: Oliver Grau, with Thomas Veig l, Imagery in the 21st Cen-

tury, Cambridge / MA 2011, p. 2126.

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alphabetization [ ], Kit tler demanded an equal level of know-

ledge in writing computer sources among students, scholars, and

intellectuals.15

The nucleus of this knowledge comprises the painstaking cultural techniques

of coding, understanding C and Assembler, algorithmic thinking, and thewider computer infrastructure that governs knowledge. Similar to the way in

which writing in the age of word processing is subsumed under the logic of

executable commands, and the whole corporate logic in which technicity is

hidden, the historical method and the archival moment are to be subsumed

only to the logic of technical media.16As suggested above, it is not only the

choice of hardware objects based on the primacy of the materiality of the

technological and hence the pejorative accounts that condemn Kittler as a

hardware fetishist masquerading as a media historian but also the metho-

dology itself that is based on this primacy: the historical methodology that

begins with Shannon and Weaver s mathematical theory of communica-

tion.17Kittler summarized this idea in the speculation that [ p ]erhaps tele-

communications brings history itself, which was always a metaphor for the

possibility of written inscription, to a point beyond which it is no longer his-

tory in the traditional sense.18In different ways, similar ideas have guided

post-Kittler developments in media archaeology, too, including how histori-

cal time has been transposed as technological time: the Eigenzeit of the

machine as a specic instance of microtemporality, as Wolfgang Ernst sug-

gests, leads from a media-theoretical intervention to media historical meth-

ods.19However, there is another sort of media materiality attached to differ-

ent temporalities that escapes most of these accounts. Indeed, what if there

is a way of tapping into media temporality other than that of the machinic

time, and what if there is another materiality of the media which, para-

doxically, is not only related to media devices and infrastructures ? Should

we also attend to the broken and discarded machines, to obsolescence ?20

Should we pay attention to material things that are not yet media in the tra-

ditional sense ? This might imply a focus on rocks, minerals and metals as a

metallurgical prelude to media before its time.

( 15 ) Markus Krajewski, On Kittler Applied: A Technical Memoir of a Specic Conguration in

the 1990s, in: Thesis Eleven 107 / 1, 2011, p. 35.

( 16 ) See Fr iedrich Kittler, There is No Media, in L iterature, Media, Information Systems,

Amsterdam 1997, p. 149.

( 17 ) Kittler s re ception in the Anglosphere has often been characterized by pejorative

accounts. These are critically mapped and discussed by Geoffrey Winthrop Young: And since

there is a lot to fear in Kittler he has acquired an impressive litany of labels: techno-deter-

minist, anti-humanist, reactionary modernist, military fetishist, disgruntled literary scholar

suffering from a s trong case of physic s envy, Eurocentric Heideggerian clone, and so on.Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, Krautrock, Heidegger, Bogeyman: Kittler in the anglosphere, in:

Thesis Eleven 107 / 1, 2011, p. 8.

( 18 ) Kittle r, Optical Media, London 2009, p. 4345.

( 19 ) Wolfgang Ernst, Gle ichursprnglichkeit . Zeitwesen und Ze itgegebenhe ite technischer

Medien, Berlin 2012.

( 20 ) Cf. Kittler, in an interview: The fact that Foucault and I had such an interest in functio-

ning machines as opposed to broken ones, like those in [ Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari s ]

Anti-Oedipus may have been what united us. Kittler, The Cold Model of Structure. cf. note 4,

p. 380.

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75 Jussi Parikka

Ecology as Non-Mediatic Media Materialism

Kittler s media historical framework has paved the way for a reconsideration

of media materiality. However, it concentrates on specic technological and

scientic frameworks, whereas there are certain contexts that are increas-

ingly important to considerations about which materialities and temporali-ties of media interest us analytically. Indeed, media studies as a discipline is

founded on objects that it, itself, has posited as media.21This sense of mate-

riality exists in a systems-theoretical loop, so to speak. But it remains clear,

as a matter of environmental importance as well, that we must consider an

expanding list of objects, including media events, as relevant to our analy-

ses. These new objects also necessitate broadening media historical inquiry.

In short, this new perspective corresponds to the environmental urgency of

electronic waste as a global problem, as well as other environmental factors

that condition digital technologies: e. g., cloud computing s massive use of

CO2

-releasing energy, such as coal and raw materials, which comprise one

set of material conditions that extend media materiality to media ecology.

Here, media ecology does not refer to ideas stemming from the Canadian

school of media studies from McLuhan to Neil Postman, but rather to the

concrete connections that media as technology has to resources ( as in the

Heideggerian concept of standing in reserve ) and nature. As noted above,

the media ecological context has been increasingly broached in recent media

theory, screen studies, and media history. Aside from an interest in the cur-

rent ecological problems caused, for instance, by toxic screen technologies,

media ecology also implies rethinking the temporal regimes of media tech-

nologies themselves. Indeed, this is where the expansion of what counts as

media materiality feeds back into the question of what temporalities count

for our horizons of media history. In a similar way to Kittler, who paved the

way for an expansion of material questions and methodologies, as well as

a specic understanding of the temporal nature of technical media,22we

might use the theoretical seeds as an impetus to broaden this agenda fur-

ther toward the non-mediatic basis of technical media: from minerals to the

scientic development of synthetic materials, and to the afterlife of media

technological waste, we encounter not only an alternative materiality but

also an alternative temporality of media. Through a selection of what sort

of objects media studies deals with, one opens up a different sort of media

historical / temporal horizon, too. For instance, one could consider mediastudies to include objects such as plastics, wood, plywood, copper, alu-

minum, silver, gold, palladium, lead, mercury, arsenic, cadmium, selenium,

hexavalent chromium, and ame retardants.23A list like this one, which can

be found in electronic waste management manuals as well as in a document

distributed to health ofcials enumerating the toxic materials inside infor-

mation technology, contains materials that leak not only into nature but

also into media theoretical accounts. On the other end of the spectrum, one

could include rare earth minerals necessary for the specic effects of audio-

visuality. Coltan is the conict mineral that appears in accounts by several

recent theorists, but there are dozens of others which are of importance forgeopolitical and material reasons: lanthanum, cerium, neodymium, yttrium,

( 21 ) Wolfgang Hagen, Wie is eine eigentlich so zu nennende Medienwissenschaft mglich ?,

in: Claus Pia s ( ed.), Was Waren Medien, Zrich 2011, p. 94.

( 22 ) Axel Volmar ( ed.), Zeitkritische Medien, Berlin 2009.

( 23 ) V. N. Pinto, E-waste Hazard: The Impending Challenge, in: Indian Journal of Occupatio-

nal and Environmental Medicine, August 12, 2008 ( 2 ), p. 6570.

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and praseodymium are examples of what makes our media truly media.

Aside from the ofcial mines, many of which are concentrated in China,

there is also the widespread illegal business of rare earth mineral mining.

Along with new mines, one can reuse mines that already exist: an old cop-

per mine might turn out to be rich in indium, which is part of visual culture,

too, in the form of LCD and LED displays. This is a different sort of reme-diation culture than some earlier uses of the term have indicated.24This col-

lection of media objects a kind of a media history of the materialities of

media from minerals to discarded and waste objects includes a change of

horizon. It does not focus on the use-time of media anymore, or even on

the time of inventions. Its epistemological shift is one of an episteme that

expands to the grounding scientic cultures in which the wider set of mate-

rialities are to be discovered. In a way, instead of networking technologies,

perhaps we should examine copper and copper mines, too, since approxi-

mately the middle of the nineteenth century. Kittler does not neglect this

topic altogether; after all, he wanted to move from the body to the realm of

materials and physics. This tendency is evident, for example, in the Optical

Medialectures of the late 1990s:

The only thing that remains is to take the concept of media from

there in a step also beyond McLuhan to where it is most at

home: the eld of physics in general and telecommunications in

particular.25

However, when we enter into this eld of physics, we need to ask: why stop

here ? If we take a more courageous step forward, and combine a Kittlerian

media history of physics with Manuel Delanda s call for a thousand years

of non-linear history, we enter a new temporal horizon. In short, Delanda s

project mapped non-human agencies, including rocks, which played a role

in the world of human affairs through architecture and other formations. His

physics and complexity theory, which inuenced historical methodology,

is also driving historians such as Fernand Braudel toward new non-human

regimes, and even irts with the idea of a social history of mineralisation.26

The point becomes even clearer if we relate it to media waste. Scholars such

as Jennifer Gabrys have argued that media waste pushes dead media and

obsolescence discourse into new and interesting areas. We should expand

the media history discourses and practices of framing time inside museumsand collections of objects to failures, breakdowns and the broken. This is

an argument that Jennifer Gabrys makes as well, and I have elaborated on

it in terms of the general accident of digital culture . Gabrys formulates it

as follows:

Any museum or archive in which electronics are held is a collec-

tion of repeated obsolescence and breakdown. But failure is only

one part of this story. Whether in a state of decay or preserva-

tion, obsolete devices begin to express tales that are about some-

thing other than technical evolution.27

( 24 ) Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media, Cam-

bridge / MA 2000.

( 25 ) Kit tler, Optica l Media, cf. note 18, p. 32.

( 26 ) Manuel Delanda, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, Cambridge / MA 2000.

( 27 ) Gabrys, Digital Rubbish, cf. note 14, p. 104.

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77 Jussi Parikka

Gabrys suggests including speculative questions such as: can we gain a new

perspective on media history from the point of view of dust ? What is the

temporality of dust and then, more signicantly, what are the specic

temporalities that media technology produce on the level of materials and

toxins ? This is one specic attempt to tackle the issue of speed, and instead

of increasing speed, we might examine the slowness of material decomposi-tion.Gabrys underscores another aspect of media temporality, in which the

surface of ephemerality, afliated with software cultures and information

understood mathematically, is embedded in specic materialities of moder-

nity: such media materials include plastic, copper, mercury and lead, which

are substances thicker and more enduring than any transcription of ones

and zeros ,28as well as beryllium, cadmium, and brominated ame retar-

dants. This approach involves a mix of temporalities, which do not proceed

merely from the alternatives of acceleration vs. obsolescence, but arise out

of a more complex mix of materialities that time . As Gabrys puts it ,

[ m ]aterials are caught in a tension between the quick and the

slow. Ephemerality can only hold at one level; it instead reveals

new spaces of permanence. Throw away plastic to discover it

lasts for an ice age. The balance of time shifts. The instant plas-

tic package creates new geologies. We now have mountains of

congealed carbon polymers. Entirely new landscapes are built up

around the fallout from the momentary and the disposable. So

this is not just a story about the vaporization of all that is solid ;

rather, it suggests that new forms of solidity new types of hard-

ware emerge with the program of disposability.29

In other words, in response to accusations about the hardware fetishism

of media historical methods, one might say that we have never been hard

enough. This reply refers to the fact that aside from the hardware of media

technologies, there is the hardness of which the hardware is composed: the

aforementioned lists of materials, toxins and others that contribute to an

ecological and environmental awareness of technical media. Maxwell and

Miller elaborate on this point in detail in Greening the Media, which offers

a researched perspective on the chemical and material basis of media, from

mass-manufactured paper to networks and technological screens.30This

question is also about ontologies: what is the ontology of media historicalmateriality, what is its focus, and on which metal does materiality focus ?

In short, perhaps we need concepts to account for the multiple materiali-

ties at play when considering media history a laminated ontology of mul-

tiple levels which allows us to speak with ease about the different aspects

of media across code, interfaces, hardware and, I would add, environmen-

tal concerns, and even labour.31Green( er ) media technologies is a topic that

has moved from the policy and awareness agendas of NGOs to the acade-

mic work of media scholars as well. However, aside from concrete empiri-

cal work and a challenge to contemporary media policy, the topic of green

media technologies may be able to offer theoretical innovation. Discussingmedia, ecology, and waste constitutes one pole of the discussions relating

( 28 ) Ibid., p. 87.

( 29 ) Gabrys, Digital Rubbish, cf. note 14, p. 88.

( 30 ) Maxwell and Miller, Greening the Media, cf. note 14.

( 31 ) David M. Berry, Critical Theory and the Digital, New York London 2014, p. 6063. See

also Jussi Parikka, What is Media Archaeology ? Cambridge 2012, p. 163164.

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to the anthropocene, one of the concepts which, itself, is a curious exam-

ple of epistemological concepts / objects shifting across disciplinary bounda-

ries in twenty-rst century academic debates.32But perhaps Kittler s media

historical impetus toward materiality can provide a way to address the

emerging concept of the anthropocene. Similar to the way in which histori-

ans like Dipash Chakrabar ty have called attention to the need to reconsiderthe eld of history in relation to its Other that is, natural history media

history should also be able to reconvene around shared topics and concerns

that attach it to ecology. This does not imply the media ecology we inhe-

rited from McLuhan and Postman, but rather one that has been inuenced

by the more science-sensitive Kittler and that has been pushed toward an

environmental agenda. A green Kittler might not sound correct, in light

of Kittler s own legacy, but it might present new ways to think about media

history. Media ecology would imply an agenda wherein media materia-

lism shifts from a perspective on devices, technological inventions, and the

agency attributed to the scientic basis of technical media, to the materials

and material sciences on the outskirts of these interests. Instead of speaking

of networks, we could speak about the copper inside cables or the gutta

percha insulating them in the nineteenth century; instead of screens and

computer graphics, vectors and bit mapping, we could talk about the che-

mical basis of Cathode Ray Tubes ( CRT ), LCD and plasma-screens. Indeed,

knowledge of screen technologies here becomes a question of energy con-

sumption, for example: the knowledge that LCD-technology reliance on

mercury-vapor uorescent backlights consumes less energy than electrolu-

minescent phosphors, a detail pointed out by Sean Cubitt.33LCD technolo-

gies make a difference to CRTs, a screen media technology that might have

accompanied much of our post-World War II lives as part of what theorists

then referred to as the simulation, spectacle and emergence of visual cul-

ture but which also are intensive risks in terms of their components ( lead,

toxic phosphors, barium ) and energy consumption.34Cubitt implicitly raises

the media historical point we are after: should we try to radicalize Kittlers

media historical methodology and push media studies out from its sole

focus on media, to the world of chemicals and materials, and even energy

consumption ? This would mean that a Green Kittler would not imply a

Kittler that is any less hardware-oriented perhaps this eld would be even

harder, with its focus on the rocks, minerals and materials of which media is

constituted, and whose histories are those of minerals, the soil and geolo-gical formations.

Jussi Parikka teaches at the Universi ty of Southampton, Winchester Schoo l of Ar t.

( 32 ) However, we need to remember that in the 1870s, the geologist Antonio Stoppani was

already writing about the anthropozoic era in a similar manner, emphasising the emergence of

a new geological era because of human actions.

( 33 ) See Cubitt, Current Screens, cf. note 14.

( 34 ) Ibid., S. 2228.

Documents

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