Katie Price and the good folks at Jacket2 Magazine requested short answers to a quick question on how media archaeology informs literary studies. Along with great responses by Aaron Angello, Jussi Parikka and Jane Birkin, I contributed the following paragraph:

If you believe that media archaeology largely coalesces in the writing of Friedrich Kittler, then media archaeology wouldn’t exist without literary studies! As others before me have pointed out, in many ways Kittler’s Discourse Networks works because of all the literary examples he relies on to make his argument – examples of how, after 1900, literature registers what he calls “a histrionics of media.” While he does also write that 1900 equally marks the disintegration of poetry, I’ve always thought what he really means is that this point marks the disintegration both of what had, up to that point, appeared to be the necessity of creating lyric, expressive poetry and of poetry as an art form that depends on creating the seamless, naturalized illusion of the human as separate from, above and beyond, the technological world. So, of course people continue to read and write lyric poetry all over the world after 1900; but now the poetry world is augmented with pieces that are non-semantic gurgles, grinds, glitches, eruptions, shrieks, howls, and so on – pieces that register the media effects of their time (I’m thinking of the Dadaists’ and Futurists’ visual and sound poems or dirty concrete poetry by Steve McCaffery or bpNichol’s and John Riddell’s experiments with the photocopier).

So while I do use the Media Archaeology Lab to work through a version of media archaeology that concerns itself with excavating failed media or dead ends in the history of technology, I am equally fascinated with what I’ve been calling “media poetics,” or poetry that registers media effects and that does not necessarily demand hermeneutic interpretation. For me, media archaeology’s most significant contribution to literary studies is the way it frees us from constantly, and only, interpreting content and allows us to go back and re-see poetry from the 20th and 21st centuries as inscriptions that record experiments with the limits and possibilities of writing media.