‘Media determine our situation’

1. ‘Media determine our situation’ (Friedrich Kittler)

2. What does it mean to teach and research in a university at a time when the technological conditions that structure teaching and research are changing so rapidly and so dramatically?

3. ‘Originary Technicity’ • Marx • Nietzsche • Freud • Heidegger • McLuhan • Derrida

4. André Leroi-Gourhan, technics and hominisation • Relation between bipedality, uprightness and the development of tools • Technics as zoological development • Relation between technics, history and memory • Gesture and Speech

5. Jacques Derrida • Of Grammatology • “Freud and the Scene of Writing” from Writing and Difference • Memoires: For Paul de Man • Archive Fever • Echographies of Television (with Bernard Stiegler) • Specters of Marx

6. Archive Fever • With the hypothesis of an internal substrate, surface, or space without which there is neither consignation, registration, surface nor suppression, censorship, repression, it prepares the idea of a psychic archive distinct from spontaneous memory, of a hypnomnēsis distinct from mnēmē and from anamnēsis: the institution in sum of a prosthesis of the inside. • To what degree psychoanalysis has been ‘determined by a state of the technology of communication and archivization’ and how it would have been determined had Freud and his contemporaries ‘had had access to MCI and AT&T telephonic credit cards, portable tape recorders, computers, printers, faxes, televisions, teleconferences and above all E-mail’

7. Archive Fever • Electronic mail today…is on the way to transforming the entire public and private space of humanity, and first of all the limit between the private, the secret (private or public), and the public or the phenomenal. It is not only a technique, in the ordinary and limited sense of the term: at an unprecedented rhythm, in quasi-instantaneous fashion, this instrumental possibility of production, of printing, of conservation, and of destruction of the archive must inevitably be accompanied by juridical and thus political transformations. • We should not close our eyes to the unlimited upheaval under way in archival technology. It should above all remind us that the said archival technology no longer determines, will never have determined, merely the moment of the conservational recording, but rather the very institution of the archivable event… this archival technique has commanded that which in the past even instituted and constituted whatever there was as anticipation of the future. • The archive has always been a pledge and as a pledge a token of the future. To put it more trivially: what is no longer archived in the same way is no longer lived in the same way. Archivable meaning is also and in advance codetermined by the structure that archives.

8. Memoires: For Paul de Man • In order to distinguish between Gedächtnis (thinking memory) from Errinerung (interiorizing memory)… de Man marks the irreducible link between thought as memory and the technical dimension of memorization, the art of writing, of “material” inscription, in short, of all that exteriority which, after Plato, we call hypomnesis. DeManian deconstruction… gives itself the means to not drive out into the exterior and inferior dark regions of thought, the immense questions of artificial memory and of modern modalities of archivation which today affects, according to a rhythm and with dimensions that have no common measure with those of the past, the totality of our relation to the world (on this side of or beyond its anthropological determination): habitat, all languages, writing, “culture”, art (beyond picture galleries, film libraries, video libraries, record libraries), literature (beyond libraries), all information or informatization (beyond “memory” data banks), techno-sciences, philosophy, (beyond university institutions) and everything within the transformation which affects all relations to the future. This prodigious mutation not only heightens the stature, the quantitative economy of so-called artificial memory, but also its qualitative structure – and in doing so it obliges us to rethink what relates this artificial memory to man’s so-called psychical and interior memory, to truth, to the simulacrum and simulation of truth, etc.

9. Bernard Stiegler • Technics and Time • Echographies of Television (with Jacques Derrida)

10. Mark C. Taylor • Errings • Imagologies • The Moment of Complexity

11. Gregory Ulmer • Applied Grammatology • Teletheory • Heuretics • “The Object of Post-Criticism” from Foster, H (ed), Postmodern Culture

12. George Landow • Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology

13. Donna Haraway • “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," in Simians, Cyborgs and Women

14. N. Katherine Hayles • How We Became Posthuman

15. Friedrich Kittler • Discourse Networks 1800 1900 • Gramophone Film Typewriter