Nonhuman Photography by Zylinska Joanna;

Author:Zylinska, Joanna;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: media studies; theory; art; digital; posthumanism; philosophy; camera; machine
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2017-11-16T05:00:00+00:00

Geomedia

The material manifestation of this geological significance is of particular interest to me here precisely because it allows us to confront the transience of our human needs, attachments, desires, and memories with the more permanent record of human and nonhuman life that endures in time. If we think in terms of deep history, we can say that the past leaves an imprint of itself in the rocks, or even—although this may perhaps still seem to be an association too far—that the past photographs itself. In what follows, I will argue that the link between fossilization and photography is more than just a metaphor and that this conceptualization can tell us something new both about the photographic medium and about its conditions, which are also the conditions of our existence: light, energy, the sun. This proposition brings us back to one of the key lines of argument of the present chapter, and of the book as a whole: namely, that photography as a conventionally recognized human practice is just part of what we earlier termed the photographic condition of the universe.

Thinking about media in geological terms inscribes itself in what Jussi Parikka identifies as the wider “drive toward geological and geophysical metaphors in media arts and technological discussions.”18 This drive can be explained by the fact that science itself “implicitly perceived the earth as media,” analyzing fossils as it did, and still does, in terms of “records,” “indices,” and “biofilms.”19 Writing, reading, and interpretation therefore seem to reside at the very heart of what have become known as the earth sciences.20 Indeed, John Durham Peters explains that for both Darwin and his close friend Charles Lyell—known as the founder of geology—“the earth is a recording medium,” even if a “profoundly fallible one. At best it inscribes ruins, enigmas, and hieroglyphics; at worst, blank stretches of oblivion. In their conviction that history can be memorialized only in fragments, Lyell and Darwin form one strand in a modern conversation about the nature of media inscription.”21 For Peters, such historico-geological interpretations inevitably involve distortions that result from temporal transmissions across deep time. He reminds us: “Knowledge is necessarily historical, even in sciences where history might seem irrelevant. The universe is a text, a distorted text, that comes from afar—a classic hermeneutical situation.”22 This conclusion should not be misread as an attempt to “reduce” everything to textuality, the way proponents of materialist thinking sometimes tend to dismiss references to language, but should rather be seen as an intimation that the universe presents itself to us through the tropes, tools, and media we ourselves have forged as part of our becoming-human. (It may indeed present and reveal itself entirely differently to different species or classes of beings, but our knowledge of that presentation will be limited to the material and conceptual tools at our disposal, including our very concept of “knowledge.”) For this reason, drawing on Jacques Derrida’s philosophy, Gary Hall explains that the currently championed opposition between textuality and materiality is actually something of a

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