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Yesterday’s Hadaly

Bibliographic Data

ID11660312
AuthorsPaul Flaig (0000-0003-4608-2091, University of St Andrews, corresponding author)
Year2018
Volume33
Issue2
Pages105-137
Publication date2018-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueCamera Obscura Feminism Culture and Media Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0270-5346 • E-ISSN: 1529-1510
PublisherDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/02705346-6923130
OpenAlexW2894179227
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited7

This essay offers a feminist critique and correction of media archaeology. Media archaeology has developed over the last two decades as a historiographic response to increasingly advanced contemporary media technologies and, with them, changing accounts and archives of earlier analog media networks. Redressing the absence of an explicitly feminist media archaeology, the essay focuses on the medium of the gendered telephonic voice and the method of voicing. The former is inspired by the extraordinary prevalence of feminine voices deployed in media old and new, while voicing is inspired by Jacques Derrida’s turn from phonocentric presence to telephonic writing. The essay elaborates this concept of voicing by contrasting Derrida and other philosophers of voice with the desexualizing approach taken by media archaeologists, focusing on Wolfgang Ernst’s version of media archaeology as cold, timeless bachelor-machine. It concludes by turning to the digital resurrection of Thomas Edison’s phonographic female dolls by a no less gendered technology, an optical scanning system named IRENE (Image, Reconstruct, Erase Noise, Etc.). Tracking “female noise” from Homer’s Sirens to Edison’s dolls, IRENE to Apple’s Siri, it argues that media archaeology should have as one of its essential conditions feminist critique. Media archaeology would do well not to repress this critique, considering the no less gendered fantasy of a neutral thinking of objects stripped of desire, a fantasy likewise voiced by Siri and her sisters, spokeswomen of neoliberal, digital capitalism

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Art history · Bachelor · Fantasy · Literature · Postmodernism · Rhetoric · Sociology · Theology · Voice · Yesterday · Cybernetics and Technology in Society · History · Philosophy

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  • Digital Memory and the Archive

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  • My fair ladies

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  • Sonic Time Machines

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  • On Software, or the Persistence of Visual Knowledge

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  • The Poverty of Philosophy

    Alexander R Galloway•Critical Inquiry•2013

Unique citing works2
Citations per year0,33
Citation span2020 - 2025 (6)
Citation velocityrecent
Highly citedNo
Citation typesNeutral: 2

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