Classics and Media Theory 0198846029, 9780198846024

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CLASSICAL PRESENCES General Editors  

 . 

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CLASSICAL PRESENCES Attempts to receive the texts, images, and material culture of ancient Greece and Rome inevitably run the risk of appropriating the past in order to authenticate the present. Exploring the ways in which the classical past has been mapped over the centuries allows us to trace the avowal and disavowal of values and identities, old and new. Classical Presences brings the latest scholarship to bear on the contexts, theory, and practice of such use, and abuse, of the classical past.

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Classics and Media Theory   Pantelis Michelakis

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Oxford University Press 2020 EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY, VOL. V, edited and translated by André Laks and Glenn W. Most, Loeb Classical Library Volume 528, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Copyright © 2016 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Loeb Classical Library is a registered trademark of the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

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The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in 2020 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2019949394 ISBN 978–0–19–884602–4 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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Preface This volume originates from two international research meetings held in Bristol in November 2016 and July 2018. I am very grateful to all speakers in these events and also to the contributors to the volume who joined the team at later stages. I have learned much from their work and from my many and productive exchanges with them over the last few years. For stimulating discussions, I would also like to express my gratitude to Ellen O’Gorman, Bella Sandwell, Kostas Valakas, Ika Willis, and Ruth Winter. A special thank you is due to Shane Butler, Duncan Kennedy, and Verity Platt for ongoing conversations and reflections on many of the questions addressed in this volume, and to Till Heilmann and Jens Schröter for their intellectual generosity and willingness to discuss all things related to media theory and the discipline of media studies. I am also thankful to several cohorts of students who over the last few years have helped me define and refine my views on Greece, Rome, and mediation and who have scrutinized with me numerous literary and artistic narratives as part of the multifaceted transmission process that is ‘classical’ antiquity. For generous financial and practical support, I am grateful to the Institute of Greece, Rome and the Classical Tradition at the University of Bristol, which made it possible to organize the conference from which this volume arose, the University of Bristol International Strategic Fund, which facilitated a follow-up workshop that complemented and enhanced the scope of the conference, and the Faculty of Arts Research Fund, which helped with the production costs of the volume. A first draft of my own contribution to the volume was written during a Visiting Fellowship at the University of Bonn generously funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. For practical support, I would like to acknowledge the valuable help received from Jess Wedlake and Richard Cole as well as from three research students who assisted me with great competence and enthusiasm at different stages in the gestation of this project: Marina Galetaki, Vasileia Kouliouri, and Irini Michail.

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Versions of Chapters 2 and 9 were originally published in German, and Chapter 5 in French. I am very grateful to their authors for agreeing to revisit and revise them specifically for this volume. I would also like to thank the translators Aileen Derieg, Kathrin L.G. Lüddecke, and Hayley Wood for taking up the challenge of rendering them in English. Finally, I am very grateful to the Delegates of Oxford University Press and to Lorna Hardwick and Jim Porter as series editors for Classical Presences for accepting this volume for publication. They, alongside the anonymous readers of the Press, provided valuable comments that helped give the volume its final shape. A big thank you is also owed to Charlotte Loveridge, Georgina Leighton, and their colleagues at Oxford University Press for providing valuable expertise and guidance throughout the process of putting the volume together. The image on the dust cover of the volume is of a work entitled Aristotle, Poetics (carbon copy ink on paper, 2004) by Nina Papaconstantinou, and it is reproduced by kind permission of the artist. The painstaking copying by hand of the entire text of Aristotle’s treatise on a single sheet of paper merges historically distinct materials, tools, and cultural techniques of copying associated with scribes and carbon copy ink, while also foregrounding the visuality of the text in the act of concealing its content. As such, it provides a fitting reflection on some of the aesthetic and epistemological dimensions of knowledge production and transmission around which this volume revolves.

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List of Figures 3.1. Sard intaglio (left) and plaster impression (right) of a seated youth plucking the strings of his harp, sliced barrel bead, fifth century 

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3.2. Plaster impression of a lyre, from a mottled jasper scaraboid intaglio, fifth century 

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4.1. Design drawings showing the problem of doubling the square in the scholia on Plato’s Meno 82b sqq.

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4.2. A graphic solution to how to double a square

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5.1. The conditions of production and reception of Hesiod’s poetry following a structure that results from writing

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5.2. The media structure that connects the poet, the writer, and the reader to the divine

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5.3. The Muses’ dictate determining the construction of the proem of Hesiod’s Theogony

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5.4. Thought as a universal medium

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5.5. Principal programming steps of Plato’s thought machine and Turing’s symbolic machine

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6.1. Aristotle’s doctrine of ‘the middle way’ (mesotês) extending ethical space in two directions by introducing a plurality of variables

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7.1. Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez, Las hilanderas o La fábula de Aracne, 1655–60

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8.1. Items from Henry Jesionka’s Ancient Cinema project

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8.2. Scene of a chance encounter: the beach (hemmed in by vertical rocks). Marco Basaiti, The Calling of the Sons of Zebedee, 1510

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9.1. Adriaen van der Spelt and Frans van Mieris, Still-life with Flowers and a Curtain, 1658

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9.2. Wall-painting from the Republican sanctuary at Brescia, second quarter of the first century  (detail)

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9.3. Diagram of the mirror construction in proposition 24 in Pseudo-Ptolemy, De Speculis

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12.1. Inscribed leaden tablet: front side with human question/back side with divine answer

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12.2. Migration and media: a relay diagram

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12.3. George Hadjimichalis, Crossroad: The Crossroad where Oedipus Killed Laius. A Description and History of the Journey from Thebes to Corinth, Delphi and the Return to Thebes, 1990–1995/97, installation

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The publisher and the editor apologize for any errors or omissions in the above list. If contacted, they will be pleased to rectify these at the earliest opportunity.

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List of Contributors E A (Ph.D. Sorbonne/FU Berlin) is Professor of Aesthetics and Art Philosophy at the University of Fribourg. He is the author of Das durchscheinende Bild (Diaphanes Verlag, 2011), Resistance of the Sensible World (Fordham University Press, 2017), and Partages de la perspective (Editions Macula, 2019). He has also coedited a dozen books dealing with continental philosophy, phenomenology, Ancient Greek epistemology, aesthetics, and perception. P R. C is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Chicago. He specializes in the art and archaeology of the Roman world. In addition to traditional categories of Roman art such as sarcophagi and portraiture, his research interests include ancient optics, aesthetics, and phenomenological approaches to the matter of visual evidence, including the historical intersections among documentary photography, digital media, and the production of knowledge in classical archaeology. He is the author of The Phantom Image in Ancient Rome (University of Chicago Press, 2019). F H is an Adjunct Professor at the Institute for Media Studies of the University of Basel (2005–) and chief editor of the German radio station Südwestfunk. He has previously held positions at the Universities of Basle, Salzburg, and Stuttgart. His research interests are in media history, media theory, and media education. Publications include: Kleists Nachrichtentechnik (Springer, 1986); Die Revolution der Telekommunikation—die Theorie des telekommunikativen Apriori (Nomos, 1996); Medien— Codes—Menschmaschinen. Medientheoretische Studien zum 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Springer, 1999); Metaphysik und Medien—Über die Anfänge medialen Denkens bei Hesiod und Platon (Kopaed, 2005), Die Aristotelische Philosophie der Medien (Kopaed, 2006), Homers Medien—technē und poíēsis in der Odyssee (Kopaed, 2007), Medium Heraklit—der Schreiber des Logos (Kopaed, 2009), Philosophie des Gnomon—Anaximanders Medientheorie (Kopaed, 2008), and Unterwegs im Medium Denken— Parmenides (Kopaed, 2010).

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K H is Professor for Cultural Theory at the University of Art and Design Linz. Her research interests are in techniques and media of the body, popular culture and science fiction, gender and agency, genres and methods of Cultural Studies/Kulturwissenschaft. She has been involved in numerous projects at the intersection of arts, humanities, and science communication (for example, Mobile Academy Berlin and Tanzquartier Vienna). Together with Elisabeth Timm, she is editor in chief of Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften. Her most recent book is entitled Prothesen. Figuren einer lädierten Moderne (Vorwerk 8, 2016). T A. H is Research Associate at the Department of Media Studies at the University of Bonn. He is currently working on a book project on the media culture of Photoshop. His recent publications include ‘Innis and Kittler: The Case of the Greek Alphabet’, in N. Friesen (ed.), Media Transatlantic: Developments in Media and Communication Studies between North American and German-speaking Europe (Springer, 2016); ‘Reciprocal Materiality and the Body of Code’, Digital Culture & Society, 1/1 (2015), 39–52; ‘ “Tap, tap, flap, flap”: Ludic Seriality, Digitality, and the Finger’, Eludamos, 8/1 (2014), 33–46. D F. K is Emeritus Professor of Latin Literature and the Theory of Criticism, University of Bristol. He is the author of The Arts of Love: Five Studies in the Discourse of Roman Love Elegy (Cambridge University Press, 1993), Rethinking Reality: Lucretius and the Textualization of Nature (University of Michigan Press, 2002), and Antiquity and the Meanings of Time: A Philosophy of Ancient and Modern Literature (I. B. Tauris, 2013), as well as numerous articles on classical literature that explore the theoretical implications of their interpretation. This chapter is one of a forthcoming series of pieces that explore the emergence of styles of thinking that would come to be termed ‘metaphysical’. A L is Lecturer in Classical Languages and Literature at the University of Leeds; he completed his Ph.D. at UCL in 2013, and has since spent time as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Bristol and as a teaching fellow at University College London, Royal Holloway, and Oxford. His research focuses on the reception of classical literature and philosophy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with particular interest in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche. He has completed a monograph on Dionysus after Nietzsche: The Birth of Tragedy in

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Twentieth-Century Literature and Thought (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming) and has also co-edited a volume on Classicisms in the Black Atlantic (Oxford University Press, forthcoming). G L is Reader in Classics at the University of Bristol. Her research focuses upon the way that the classical world continues to shape modernity—particularly in the stories we tell about ourselves. She has recently completed a monograph on Narratology (Oxford University Press, 2019) and has published two books on Ovid: A Reader’s Guide to Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Continuum, 2011) and Ovid’s Love Songs (Duckworth, 2005). She has also co-edited Elegy and Narratology: Fragments of Story (Ohio State University Press, 2008). Her publications include articles and essays on the classical tradition, chaos theory, and cyborgs. U M is an Adjunct Professor of Film and Media Studies, Department of Theatre, Film, and Media Studies, University of Vienna. He has held previous positions in Bochum (2015–16), Vienna (2009–15), Leipzig (2006–9), and Munich (2006). Various publications on media and film philosophy, archaeology, and history of audio-visual media, political aspects of the moving image, US-American and Greek film cultures, pré-cinéma, intermediality. See also . P M is Reader in Classics at the University of Bristol. He is the author of Greek Tragedy on Screen (Oxford University Press, 2013), Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis (Duckworth, 2006), and Achilles in Greek Tragedy (Cambridge University Press, 2002). He has also coedited three volumes of essays: The Ancient World in Silent Cinema (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Agamemnon in Performance, 458  to  2004 (Oxford University Press, 2005), and Homer, Tragedy and Beyond: Essays in Honour of P. E. Easterling (SPHS, 2001). He has published widely on Greek literature, Greek theatre, and the broader reception of classical antiquity. M O is an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature in the Department of German Studies at the University of Thessaloniki. Her main fields of research include literary and media studies, the interrelations of migration, culture, and aesthetics, and translation theory. Her publications include FremdBilder. Auswanderung und Exil im internationalen Kino (ed., Transcript, 2009), Griechische Dimensionen

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südosteuropäischer Kultur seit dem 18. Jahrhundert (ed., Peter Lang, 2011), Übersetzung und Film: Das Kino als Translationsmedium (ed., Transcript, 2012), and The Oar and the Wings: The Myth of the Odyssey in Modernist Literature and Cinema (Nefeli, 2016). She is currently working on her book project Of Animals, Machines, and Revenants: The Migrant Body in Literature. V P is a Professor in the Departments of Classics and History of Art at Cornell University, where she is also co-curator of the university’s cast collection. She is the author of Facing the Gods: Epiphany and Representation in Graeco-Roman Art, Literature and Religion (Cambridge University Press, 2011) and co-editor, with Michael Squire, of The Frame in Classical Art: A Cultural History (Cambridge University Press, 2017). She is currently writing a book on Imprint and Line: Making and Mediating between Classical Art and Text, with a special focus on the materiality of making and the intermedial functions of the seal impression.

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1 Introduction Classical Antiquity, Media Histories, Media Theories Pantelis Michelakis

‘The realm of the dead is as extensive as the storage and transmission capabilities of a given culture,’ writes German media theorist Friedrich Kittler.¹ The emergence since the 1970s of electronic and knowledgebased technologies, and more specifically of digital media, has brought to the fore the close link that exists between media, knowledge, and perception, a link generating both exhilaration and anxiety. However, the centrality of media to epistemological debates around the ways in which knowledge is produced, stored, and disseminated has a much longer history in Western thought. One of the most complex and multifaceted case studies in the history of media yet to receive systematic examination concerns ancient Greece and Rome, and their enduring presence in later cultures. What is the role of media (new and old, material and spiritual, perceptible and imperceptible) in the formation of Greco-Roman antiquity, and in its transmission as ‘classical’ and as ‘culture’? How do media shape the specificity, convergence, and transference of different types of cultural form and content? How do continuities and ruptures in cultural production and transmission manifest themselves? How have media been conceptualized in Greece and Rome? How have ideas, concepts, and practices related to Greco-Roman antiquity been interwoven in the history and culture of modern theoretical debates around ¹ Kittler (1999: 13). Pantelis Michelakis, Introduction: Classical Antiquity, Media Histories, Media Theories In: Classics and Media Theory. Edited by: Pantelis Michelakis, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198846024.003.0001

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media and information technology? And how have they been interwoven in broader discussions around the philosophical apparatus of technology, culture, and biology as they are played out against a critique of modernity? T aim of this volume is to introduce a largely neglected area of existing interactions between Greco-Roman antiquity and media theory, addressing the question of why interactions in this area matter, and how they might be developed further. On the one hand, the volume seeks to promote more media attentiveness among scholars of Greece and Rome. On the other hand, it aims to create more awareness of the presence of the classics in media theory for media theorists and historians themselves. This is not a comprehensive handbook for the study of media in antiquity, nor a reader in classically inflected media theory. Its orientation is different from works devoted to specific media theorists (such as the publications in the International Journal of McLuhan Studies or the spate of publications on the work of Friedrich Kittler following his death in 2011). It is also different from the scholarship on, say, the history of the book in antiquity as an established field of knowledge with several decades of work behind it. Much as it is indebted to such types of scholarship, this volume does not so much seek to situate itself within them as to explore ways in which it can bring them into contact with one another. It foregrounds the persistency of Greco-Roman paradigms across the different strands of media theory. And it calls for a closer consideration of the conceptual underpinnings of the cultural (and scholarly) practices around the transformation of ancient Greece and Rome into ‘classics’. This opening chapter sketches out some of the features of this encounter between media theory and Greco-Roman antiquity in two complementary ways: as a field of knowledge awaiting further systematic exploration and analysis, but also as a set of methods that under the banner of ‘cultural transmission’ brings together practices for producing and processing knowledge that are fundamental to the way in which ancient cultures become ‘classical’. The discussion begins with the concept of the medium and the promise it holds for analytical work in the study of the past. It then moves on to the role of mediation in thinking about the cultural significance of perception and of communication across time. It continues with a consideration of classical studies and media studies as disciplines, focusing on the kinds of research that can be pursued at their

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intersection. The chapter concludes with an overview of the contributions that follow.

1.1. What Do Media Do There is no consensus on what constitutes a medium beyond a basic understanding of the concept as ‘ “being in the middle” in the most general sense’.² Ask a sociologist or cultural critic to enumerate media, and he will answer: TV, radio, cinema, the Internet. An art critic may list: music, painting, sculpture, literature, drama, the opera, photography, architecture. A philosopher of the phenomenologist school would divide media into visual, auditory, verbal, and perhaps gustatory and olfactory [ . . . ] An artist’s list would begin with clay, bronze, oil, watercolor, fabrics, and it may end with exotic items used in so-called mixed media works, such as grasses, feathers, and beer can tabs. An information theorist or historian of writing will think of sound waves, papyrus scrolls, codex books, and silicon chips.³

The difficulty of defining media ontologically, as objects, is due to what might be called the ‘inherently polyvalent’⁴ nature of the term (which, among other things, explains the dominance of the plural ‘media’ over the singular ‘medium’). How, then, can media be used as a useful analytical category? The technological, semiotic, and cultural dimensions of the term call for a shift away from the question of what media are (a question associated with classificatory hierarchies at least as far back as Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s distinction between spatial and temporal arts, if not further back, in Simonides’ distinction between poetry and painting) towards the question of what they do: how they have been conceptualized at different times and in different intellectual traditions, and what is involved in mediation as a process or activity. Such a shift makes it possible to connect contemporary debates around culture, materiality, and technology with those of the past. It also makes it possible to combine the properties of material and technical instruments and infrastructure (the ‘material hardware’ of culture) and recursive, often embodied, practices of different systems of mediation (the ‘discursive

² Schröter (2016: 44).

³ Ryan (2004: 15–16).

⁴ Ryan and Thon (2014: 5).

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software’ of culture⁵). For instance, scripts must be related to reading and writing, images to painting, drawing, and sculpting, and numbers to calculating. The function and purpose of such skills have conventionally been considered in the context of educating the self. Yet reading and writing are not only technical competencies in the context of humanistic education. They are also chains of operations and assemblages that link things, humans, and the knowledge they produce as culture. The shift from what media are to what they do allows us to reflect, in a crosscultural and cross-disciplinary manner, on different phenomena of transition and transformation, from ethics to epistemology. It also makes it possible to engage with a whole spectrum of interpretative possibilities, from media as processing agents that construct the past, to media as selfeffacing tools that reveal or represent the past.⁶ In contemporary usage, three metaphors prevail in discussions of the concept of the medium: media as conduits (i), media as languages (ii), and media as environments (iii).⁷ When used, each metaphor brings into focus different dimensions of what is ‘in the middle’ of the communication process, and in doing so facilitates the transition (in the literal sense of meta-pherein as carrying over, transferring⁸) from the specificity of digital, new, social, or mass media to a historically and conceptually broader reflection on the workings of mediation. (i) As conduits, media are channels with real or imagined possibilities and limitations for conveying information to the senses, and for bridging the gap between production and reception. In this sense media include materials for aesthetic expression such as clay, stone, or wax. They also include tools and devices, both real and imagined, from the actor’s mask and the sculptor’s chisel to the plough of didactic poetry and the automata of Hephaestus’ divine workshop. They can also include sensory organs, from the painter’s hand and the actor’s body to the eyes of the mind and the ears of the divinely inspired poet.

⁵ Ernst (2013b). ⁶ For an overview of these positions at the opposite ends of the interpretative spectrum of media theory, see Young (2017) and Heilmann, Chapter 2, this volume. ⁷ Meyrowitz (1993). ⁸ On the conceptualization of media through the literal sense of metapherein, see Tholen (2002) and Mersch (2016).

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(ii) Media, however, can also be understood in a broader sense, as semiotic structures that require ‘reading’ or ‘translating’ competencies on the part of those who produce them and those who use them. In this definition, media refer to ‘modes’ of cultural production and reproduction such as images and words, or speaking, singing, and dancing. As such, they draw attention to the materiality of the signification codes on which different cultural forms are based. Signals are not simply encoded and decoded, but are inscribed and processed materially, making it possible to follow the traces they leave behind and the routes they travel between different points in space and time. (iii) An even broader definition makes it possible to approach media as conceptual and perceptual environments; nurturing or adverse systems that condition, but are also the basis for, the very processes of what is understood as, say, art, expression, and reception. This includes media of perception such as space and time, but also topologies of media such as memory and dreams. What sustains the flight of Homer’s ‘winged/feathered words’, for instance, is not just their ‘wings/feathers’ (however one might imagine words equipped with such features), nor simply their path from a speaker to an addressee who ‘speaks the same language’. Even in face-to-face interactions, such words simultaneously traverse the ‘ether’ not only of heroic kleos but also of epic performance, technical bardic memory, cultural memory, and imagination. Conversely, without Homer’s winged words, such a complex environment would not simply be different; it would cease to exist. To understand how media work as ‘concepts of the middle’, one needs to draw not only on prevalent metaphors in contemporary discussions of the concept, but also on the ‘long linguistic, semantic, and conceptual itinerary’ of the idea.⁹ Stefan Hoffmann has shown that the different uses of the term in the humanities, communication studies, and journalism result from their engagement with different aspects of its history.¹⁰ ⁹ See, especially, Hoffmann (2002); Hagen (2008); Kittler (2009b); Rickels (2009); Guillory (2010); Tuschling, Heilmann, and von der Heiden (2011); Johnson (2013); Mersch (2016); Aygün (2017); and Alloa (2018). Quotation from Geoghegan (2013: 77). ¹⁰ Hoffmann (2002).

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Looking back on historical usage of the relevant vocabulary opens up a number of different possibilities for thinking about media and the conditions in which culture emerges. In Greek and Latin, as in English, ‘being in the middle’ has a wide range of associations relevant to this discussion. As suggested by the semantic range of mesos, metaxy, and medius, the concept of media relates to (a) the qualities of being central, public, or moderate, but also to (b) the invisibility of being indeterminate, ordinary, or average. As suggested by mesos and medius as substantives to mean ‘mediator’, it is also associated with (c) the agency and skills of impartiality, neutrality, arbitration, and intervention. As suggested by the phrase ‘in medias res’, it can be associated (d) with what holds the key to power and control over ‘things’ and over the stories told about them; and finally, (e), as with hule, ousia, and arche, it can be associated with matter, essence, origins, and permanence. As James Porter has shown in his analysis of the ‘classical’ and of ‘classicism’ (another set of terms with a complex history of relevance to this volume), it is not so much the words themselves and the concepts they name that matter in the mapping of such conceptual itineraries, as ‘the patterns of logic that underlie’ them.¹¹ Like the new media of the early twenty-first century, the media of and around Greece and Rome can be situated discursively on a spectrum that covers the whole range from the emancipatory to the technophobic: they can be celebrated and demonized, fetishized and commodified, politicized and moralized, gendered, and infused with nostalgia. As such they are never fully invisible and transparent. Traces of technical acts of cultural production and reproduction can be sought in the cracks of medial operations: in techno-historical accidents, false starts, glitches, irregularities, and anachronisms. However, there is also a whole range of aesthetic strategies that might be productively employed to foreground technical acts of cultural production and reproduction, strategies that make it possible to speak of an aesthetics of what David Bolter and Richard Grusin call ‘hypermediacy’.¹² Reflections on the multiplicity of media as channels, languages, or environments can be sought in the metaphors of poetic composition as craftsmanship that abound in Greco-Roman poetry; in the political, financial, and social networks for the reproduction and

¹¹ Porter (2006: 13).

¹² Bolter and Grusin (1999).

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dissemination of artistic works and values as thematized in the performing and plastic arts; but also in the deeply ambivalent attitude towards new modes of information storage and retrieval found, for instance, in Platonic philosophy. Media, however, can also shape the presence and enduring worth of different cultural forms and practices at levels and in ways that are not always foregrounded. Media are often perceived as performing their work most effectively when they go unnoticed, when they are used as unobtrusive instruments, as languages thought to be universal, or as environments in the background of cultural activity. This power of ‘immediacy’¹³ is fundamental both to the instrumental use of media and to the way in which media are invested with the power of revealing, a power often demonstrated through the access they promise to the real or the beyond. In other words, there is a strong relation between the invisibility of media and the emergence of realism as an aesthetic category, as well as between the transparency of media and the foundational metaphysics that is most commonly associated with Plato but that can be traced back to the philosophical poetry of the Presocratics, the theology of tragedy, and the poetics of the epic poetry of Homer and Hesiod. ‘The obsession with an unmediated representation of the past is itself a media effect,’¹⁴ argues Wolfgang Ernst. ‘The media archaeologist, with all his or her Nietzschean “passion of distance,” does not hallucinate life when he or she listens to recorded voices; the media-archaeological exercise is to be aware at each given moment that we are dealing with technical media, not humans, that we are not listening to the dead but rather that dead media operate.’¹⁵

1.2. Transmission and Perception All knowledge about Greece and Rome is mediated knowledge.¹⁶ It is based on the material remains of texts and artefacts and on the cultural practices and traditions with which those remains are interwoven and which have made their survival possible. How do we consider the complexities of cultural transmission in ways that allow us to account for what comes between long-dead senders and ever-changing receivers? ¹³ Bolter and Grusin (1999). ¹⁵ Ernst (2015a: 100–1).

¹⁴ Ernst (2005: 592). ¹⁶ Osterkamp (2008).

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The question of how our interaction with the past differs from face-toface communication poses a major challenge to the dialogical and anthropocentric models of hermeneutics so prevalent in the humanities. A commonly held view is that we moderns ‘converse’ with antiquity, and that in doing so we resume a dialogue with ancient wisdom that was interrupted with the emergence of Christianity, the Middle Ages, or some other dark period. The concept of transmission has been discussed in historically and disciplinarily insular terms, primarily as a textual process concerning the changing fortunes of manuscripts and books. The search for more conceptually productive ways to describe our engagement with the past has led to concepts associated with the continuities of the classical tradition (in which metaphors of ever-flowing streams, unbroken chains, or rights of inheritance often prevail), or more recently with the discontinuities in the agency of readers and spectators (through the concepts of reception or appropriation).¹⁷ Viewed in such ways, the process of the relay of content is often understood as being fraught with contingency and risk. At best, as seen in geological or archaeological terms, it is an accumulation of layers of meaning that, like layers of soil, can protect or otherwise enrich our understanding of what lies underneath. But, more often than not, it is seen as an obstacle or interference that needs to be eliminated or endured, as the logic of being ‘lost in translation’ (or in any other type of cultural transition, we might add) has it. At a time when infusing Greece and Rome with universalizing authority can be used in ways that may have very real consequences in the present, we need to revisit the question of what is classical about Greece and Rome in relation to the different temporalities that come together not only in what we call the present, but also across time.¹⁸ For the purposes of this volume, the question that needs to be addressed is how to do justice to the complexities of that process of making contact across time in ways that move beyond the agency of long-dead senders and ever-changing receivers and beyond the conceptualization of

¹⁷ See De Pourcq (2012) with relevant bibliography. ¹⁸ On the concept of the present as a disjunctive unity, see Osborne (2013). On the significance of the internet and social media as a cultural space where political debates around the role of Greco-Roman antiquity today are both polarized and broadened, see Zuckerberg (2018) and the online classics journal Eidolon.

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temporal distance as an obstacle. How do we consider what comes in between, and how does it make accessible what it transmits in ways that allow us to shift our focus from proximity to distance, from space to time, and from reciprocity to unidirectionality? If, as the French philosopher Régis Debray has put it, culture is what is worth transmitting,¹⁹ the processes of storage, transmission, and retrieval of what is known and valued about Greece and Rome cannot be an obstacle for our accessing the ‘classical’ past but rather a condition for its possibility. Thinking analytically and critically about the limitations of the work performed by the concept of ‘dialogue’, and replacing ‘dialogue’ by ‘transmission’, have profound implications for the conditions of sociality and communality. They raise issues of power and ethics that tend to be marginalized or even ignored altogether by an anthropocentric way of thinking about social systems based on values of interaction, reciprocity, and consensus. One possibility is to argue that both artefacts and embodied skills must be seen in the context of larger structures of power associated with the discipline of the self. This is the way in which the conditions for the possibility of thinking have been discussed in the context of Friedrich Kittler’s discourse networks and more recently in the field of ‘cultural techniques’, in the wake of Michel Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge (as explored by some of the contributors in this volume). Both writing tools and practices such as reading and writing belong to a broader range of cultural techniques that involve ‘highly regulated networks of recursive operational chains that regulate in their turn the production and distribution of power and knowledge’.²⁰ A second possibility is to move from the politics of discourse networks to the politics and ethics of alterity. Following Sybille Krämer’s ‘messenger principle’ and John Durham Peters’s historical take on the idea of communication (both indebted to Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophical work on alterity), it is possible to focus not on recognition or memory and their promise of overcoming distance, but on responding to ‘the otherness of the worlds between which a connection is to be established’;²¹ not on the decipherability of signs but on the opaqueness of traces in the context of irresolvable unfamiliarity and irreversible pastness. Media, as opposed to instruments, give us access to a presence that we cannot ¹⁹ Debray (2000: 5). ²¹ Krämer (2015: 95).

²⁰ Krajewski (2013: 94).

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   fully understand and control but can nevertheless engage with and experience. Mediation can help make a case for the centrality in community building and culture founding not only of communication across time but also of perception. Conventionally, perception is only marginal to dialogic, consensual forms of communication. However, at least as far back as Plato’s and especially Aristotle’s theory of sensory perception, media of perception are a condition for the possibility of perception, acting as an in-between space that is at once material and transparent (the metaxy or ‘diaphanous’, discussed by Platt in chapter 3 and Alloa in chapter 6 below). In this genealogy of media, perception is not only a mental process. Rather, it also concerns the construction and transmission of mental processes with the help of what makes things visible, audible, perceptible: ‘We do not hear vibrations in the atmosphere but rather the sound of a bell; we do not read letters but rather a story.’²² The interplay of recursive corporeal practices, material objects, and channels of perception and transmission that cannot themselves be thematized or observed but that make things perceptible produces cultural effects that span a broad range of experiences. It involves hermeneutically oriented understanding and, in the absence of direct perception, deductive reasoning (discussed by Kennedy in chapter 4 below). But it also involves other forms of appreciation of perception, including emotional and impulsive responses and an interest ‘in non-human bodies and objects, processes that escape direct and conscious human perception, intensity of matter of technological and biological kinds’.²³

1.3. Classical Studies and Media Studies Classical studies and media studies are two disciplines with very different trajectories and very different stakes in the present of the digital. Media studies is a relatively new discipline that has gradually emancipated itself from literary studies and cultural studies, and which has a coming-of-age feel in the digital era. The general digitization of communication and information was initially heralded as the end of media, as the reduction of ‘sound and image, voice and text [ . . . ] to surface effects’, to an interface.²⁴ But the focus of media studies shifted quickly and decisively ²² Krämer (1998a: 74); in the translation by Enns (2015: 11). ²³ Parikka (2012c: 95). ²⁴ Kittler (1999: 1).

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away from this celebratory affirmation of the digital towards a longer view of media history and a more philosophical take on how mediation matters. Much scholarly work on media studies has turned away from the uniqueness of the digital era (in the manner of the end of history) towards reflections on the plurality and materiality of new and social media, the historicity of mass media, and other moments in the history of information technologies when old media were new, or when old and new media converged. In doing so, such work has attempted to situate the concept of media within different exchange systems, as ‘concepts of the middle, of connection, and of multitude—across diverse disciplines and theoretical perspectives’.²⁵ By contrast to media studies, classical studies has entered the digital era with a long disciplinary history but also with the monumental task of a large-scale migration of its subject of study, undertaking to reconfigure knowledge of the ancient world through digital libraries and archives, online databases, commentaries, maps, and other tools and applications. This project of bringing Greco-Roman antiquity and its study into the digital era has been greeted with a renewed sense of purpose for the discipline, not least because of its double promise of efficient storage and easier, more democratic access. However, this project has made the discipline not only more accessible but also more invested in instrumental knowledge. Profound changes to scholarly practices of reading, writing, and teaching seem to have been accepted in broadly unreflective ways. Whereas in media studies the digital age has called for a turn to history and philosophy and for an opening-up of its own disciplinary boundaries, in classical studies the digital age has marked a new era of encyclopedism and of reaffirming, rather than challenging, some of its long-standing operational practices. It is hardly surprising that, in this environment, ‘digital humanities’ has become the label of a niche field of technical knowledge rather than a description of what we all do anyway. The disciplines of classical studies and media studies have little to show by way of direct and productive interaction. There are, of course, notable exceptions, such as the circle around Eric Havelock and Walter Ong, whose work on orality and literacy has been highly influential—and also much criticized—but such exceptions only serve to prove the rule.

²⁵ Ikoniadou and Wilson (2015).

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   This is not only because of the different trajectories of the two disciplines. More fundamentally, media theory poses a challenge to dominant models of analysis in the humanities in which classical studies is heavily invested. As argued in the previous section, it poses a challenge to hermeneutics and to models of communication based on dialogue. Hermes is not only the god of hermeneutics but also the god of nonhermeneutic preoccupations and post-hermeneutic promises.²⁶ Media draw attention not to the interiority or individuality of minds but to the exteriority of material conditions and embodied practices; not to the moral superiority of dialogue but to the politics and ethics of a unidirectional, asymmetrical, and non-reciprocal model of communication that bridges the different worlds of sender and addressee;²⁷ not to a duality of absence and presence, or form and content, but to a triangulation involving the messenger as operator and as interference; not to the symbolic exchanges between humans but to the realities of communication, to the channel as a non-relating entity, to the material conditions and protocols, the hardware and software of an interface that separates the symbolic from the real, and the signal from the noise.²⁸ One of the most common accusations levelled at media theory is that of technological determinism. But, as Alan Liu puts it: Touch just one of the levers of media or technological determinism, and it soon becomes clear that they connect to the total machine of historical, material, and social determinism that is both the condition and dilemma of modernity. Once the Enlightenment desacralized God, modernity came to believe that things happen because they are caused by material-cum-historical determination. Nature and history were now the compound instrumentality that became overdetermined.²⁹

The stakes for humanities disciplines such as classical studies could not be higher: if they provide a set of skills ‘needed for future life and work’,³⁰ they run the risk of losing their specificity. If they move away from instrumentality, they run the risk of becoming marginal and irrelevant.³¹ The challenge for such disciplines is how to move away from the ‘metaphysical comfort’ of keeping ‘in separate boxes’ subjects and objects, mind and matter, art and nature, form and content, rhetoric and ²⁶ See, e.g., Serres (1982b); Galloway, Thacker, and Wark (2013); and Krämer (2015). ²⁷ Krämer (2015). ²⁸ Siegert (2015a). ²⁹ Liu (2012: 500). ³⁰ Liu (2012: 499). ³¹ Liu (2012: 499).

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epistemology.³² And how to ‘broaden the very idea of instrumentalism’,³³ focusing on an understanding of its uses and methods ‘as a culture’.³⁴ Can the humanities participate as an equal partner with the sciences in the production of knowledge? ‘Kittler puts it polemically: “for the humanities there is nothing nontechnical to teach and research.” The humanities help us to reflect on our technical conditioning.’³⁵ In addressing the question of how they do so, we need to go back to the engagement of the arts with ideas of communication, to arts as systems of communication,³⁶ and to culture as a network of techniques and actors ‘bridging and maintaining differences between heterogeneous worlds’.³⁷ There are at least two ways in which research can be pursued at the intersection between classical studies and media studies. The first is to develop media-theoretically and media-historically inflected approaches to the study of Greece and Rome and their transformation into ‘classics’. This involves engagement with and willingness to put to the test a research and teaching toolkit that contains concepts such as cultural techniques, cultural transmission, media archaeology, intermediality, diagrammatology, and recursion. The second approach is to trace the functions of ancient Greece and Rome within media and information theory and to identify ways in which discussions of media genealogies and ecologies can continue their recursive interactions with Greece and Rome in the future. What follows cannot do justice to the complexity and multifaceted nature of these issues but aims to provide some pointers.

1.4. Classics in Media Theory Examples of the role of ancient Greece and Rome in media and communication theory can be found across most of the key areas of this heterogenous and fast-changing field. For instance, they can be found on both sides of the divide between German-speaking and North American media studies: both in the cultural-studies strand of scholars such as Harold Innis, Walter Ong, Marshall McLuhan, Eric Havelock, and Derrick de Kerckhove, and also in the more materialist approach of

³² Peters (2015a: 88–9). ³⁵ Peters (2015a: 28).

³³ Liu (2012: 498). ³⁶ Luhmann (2000a).

³⁴ Liu (2012: 502). ³⁷ Enns (2015: 16).

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   Friedrich Kittler, Siegfried Zielinski, and Wolfgang Ernst.³⁸ Other strands of media theory that have engaged with Greece and Rome include the media philosophical orientations of Sybille Krämer and John Durham Peters, Bernhard Siegert and Cornelia Vismann’s cultural techniques, and much of the Francophone philosophy of technology and science, from Michel Serres’s preoccupation with communication and noise to Régis Debray’s cultural transmission, Bernard Stiegler’s history of techniques,³⁹ Paul Virilio’s transformation of perception, and Bruno Latour’s social mediators.⁴⁰ Examples of the role of Greco-Roman antiquity in discussions around the philosophical apparatus of technology, culture, and biology have an even longer and more diffuse history, often played out against a critique of Western modernity. To consider this fully we would need to include other thinkers, from Jacques Derrida and his meditations on mediation to Michel Foucault and his ‘archaeology of thought’, the centrality of the machine in the thinking of Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Roland Barthes’s focus on images, music, and texts, Jacques Lacan’s posthumanistic logic of the signifier, Martin Heidegger and his work on technicity, Sigmund Freud and his technologies of memory and the unconscious, and Friedrich Nietzsche’s genealogy of media.⁴¹ To my knowledge, the only Greeks and Romans of this rich tradition of thinking about mediality and technology to have received some critical attention are those of the late Friedrich Kittler.⁴² The ancients of the other thinkers just mentioned and of many others that could have been added to this list are yet to be explored. Any attempt to map the functions of ancient Greece and Rome in media and communication ³⁸ See, selectively, Innis (1950, 1984); Havelock (1963, 1986); McLuhan (1964); Kerckhove (1980, 1982); Ong (1982); Kittler (1990b, 1999, 2006a, 2009a, 2010); Zielinski (2006a, 2015); Ernst and Kittler (2006); Ernst (2013a). ³⁹ See, especially, Peters (1999, 2015a); Vismann (2013); Krämer (2015); Siegert (2015a). Krämer and Ljungberg (2016). ⁴⁰ See, e.g., Serres (1982a, b; 1993); Virilio (1991); Debray (1996, 2000); Stiegler (1998–2011); Latour (2007, 2013). ⁴¹ See, especially, Barthes (1977); Derrida (1978, 1981); Heidegger (1982); Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 2004); and Foucault (1994, 2002). On Lacan, see Matviyenko and Roof (2018); on Freud, see Elsaesser (2009); on Nietzsche, see Fietz (1992); Ernst (2008); and Rickels (2009). ⁴² On Kittler’s Greeks in the larger context of German philhellenism, see especially Breger (2006). See also Winthrop-Young (2011a: 82–119; 2015); Powell (2012); Peters (2015b); Sale (2015); and Heilmann (2016).

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theory needs to begin by addressing some rather basic but essential questions for how we account for that critical interest. First, in view of the porousness and heterogeneity of media studies and the lack of an overarching theory or programme of cultural technology research,⁴³ how do we decide which thinkers to include and which to leave out? Second, which antiquity should we focus on? Which fields of knowledge, which authors, texts, artefacts, and debates have generated interest and why? Third, what is the appeal of premodern cultures and of questions of heritage, the canon, and aesthetics to a discipline most commonly associated with historical rupture, polemics against hermeneutics, and the rhetoric of the new? Fourth, why have the many traces of antiquity in media theory escaped critical attention thus far? And, finally, how can Greece and Rome continue to participate in the futures and pasts that media theory envisages for itself? Beginning to answer such questions requires systematic engagement with a large and heterogeneous body of theoretical work of the kind that this volume can only gesture towards. Let me try to unpack one of these questions, about the diverse traces of antiquity in media theory. Thematically, the role of Greco-Roman classics in media theory revolves around a number of different areas. Among them, I would single out (a) the etymological origins of the word medium and the semantic range and trajectory of related Latin and Greek terms, (b) writing and notation systems, (c) orality and literacy, (d) the history of theorizing perception, and (e) art as techne, skill, craft, or technique. Arguably it is to the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle that media theory has returned most persistently in search of fertile ground for thinking genealogically about its subject matter. The concept of inbetweenness crops up in numerous ways in early philosophical discussions around dichotomies such as those between thought (or reason) and its articulation, truth and representability, or nature and technicity. It is in Plato’s language of metaphysics (with its critique of writing and representation) and in Aristotle’s theory of perception in particular that we find the most theoretically informed ways of thinking about the concept of the ‘in-between’ in Greco-Roman thought (as Alloa and Haase show in this volume).

⁴³ Schröter (2016).

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   However, the engagement of media theory with Greece and Rome is not confined to Plato and Aristotle. Numerous other authors, texts, artefacts, concepts, and debates appear in media theory, from Greek mythology to Homer, tragedy, the Presocratics, Roman literature and philosophy, history of art, and early Christian theology. ‘What happens when waves are no longer oceanic matter (as in the Odyssey), but rather a matter of high-frequency technology?’⁴⁴ Or when ‘the technical siren as sound generator confronts its mythological object, the Homeric Sirens’?⁴⁵ Some of this can be dismissed as eclectic, idiosyncratic, lacking the rigour of specialized knowledge, or based on dubious or otherwise problematic grounds regarding ethnicity, gender, and religion. But as John Durham Peters argues in relation to Kittler’s work on ancient Greece, ‘retrograde politics and grandiose gestures’ are only part of a larger and more complex picture.⁴⁶ That larger picture poses hermeneutic challenges and calls for the development of skills for reading not only critically, but also creatively and profitably. Consider, for instance, the ‘flamboyant vaticism’⁴⁷ of media theorists such as McLuhan (‘the medium is the message’⁴⁸) and Kittler (‘media determine our situation’⁴⁹), with its mastery of the soundbite and resistance to easy systematization, and how deeply ingrained it is in classical rhetorical techniques of persuasion. Or the revisiting of philological skills displayed in Peters (‘media theorists think in the ablative case: “by means of which” ’⁵⁰), Mersch (who conceptualizes media through reference to the Greek prefixes meta- and dia-⁵¹), or Vismann (who undertakes a critique of subjectivity and sovereignty by drawing on the medium verb form in Greek⁵²). Such techniques do, of course, have a longer history in critical thinking (for example, aphorisms from Friedrich Nietzsche to Walter Benjamin and beyond⁵³), but their use is particularly apposite in a body of thought so intensely preoccupied with knowledge as

⁴⁴ ⁴⁷ ⁴⁸ ⁵⁰ ⁵¹ ⁵² ⁵³

Ernst (2013b: 139). ⁴⁵ Ernst (2014: 10). ⁴⁶ Peters (2015b: 39). Peters (2010: 6); see also Winthrop-Young (2011a: 122). Introduced in McLuhan (1964: 7). ⁴⁹ Kittler (1999: p. xxxix). Peters (2015a: 21); quoting from a letter by McLuhan to Walter Ong. Mersch (2016). Vismann (2013). See also her chapters in Kittler and Vismann (2001). See Benjamin (1968); Cadava (1997); Hamacher (2010).

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something transformative that revolves around techniques of concealing and events of revealing.⁵⁴

1.5. Media Theory in Classics Media theory is not the only critical approach to have transcended disciplinary boundaries in recent years. New materialism, posthumanism, cognitive studies, and the study of the senses have all made their presence dynamically felt in classical studies, as demonstrated by the emergence of relevant books, book series, and research projects.⁵⁵ There is no doubt that such approaches have numerous points of contact and cross-fertilization, not least in their shared commitment to theoretically inflected ways of studying Greece and Rome in the absence of a dominant theoretical paradigm to replace poststructuralism; but also in their shared preoccupation with the role that classics can play in broader discussions about the future of the humanities and its ability to engage with today’s urgent cultural questions. But, while they may complement each other, such approaches have also emerged from different directions and have different types of thematic and methodological focus. While a more systematic discussion of the directions that ‘theory after theory’ has taken in classical studies in recent years requires more space than can be devoted to it here, it is useful to bear in mind some obvious differences between such directions. For instance, the anchoring of media theory in the material conditions for perception and knowledge sets it apart from cognitive studies, whereas its anchoring in the technical specificity of embodied practices and the transmission of ‘culture’ sets it apart from much of new materialism and the study of the senses.⁵⁶ Similarly, for fields such as, say, biopolitics, ecology, and animal studies to be subjected to media-theoretical analysis, it is necessary to approach specific forms of life, environment, and species relations as the products of cultural– technical systems.⁵⁷

⁵⁴ On rhetoric in Kittler, see Powell (2012) and Winthrop-Young (2011a). On the broader issue of rhetoric and its relevance for thinking about the power of technology, see Bogost (2007: 1–64) and Hagen (2015). ⁵⁵ See, e.g., Bianchi, Brill, and Holmes (2019) or the ‘The Senses in Antiquity’ series by Routledge and the ‘Ancient Cultures, New Materialisms’ series by Edinburgh University Press. ⁵⁶ Parikka (2012c). ⁵⁷ Geoghegan (2013: 78).

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   It is of course obvious that the preoccupations of classical studies are never far away from discussions regarding the processes of canonization and dissemination of classical texts and artefacts. Issues such as orality and literacy, performance, memory, materiality, textual transmission, translation, archival practices, the history of the book, and more recently humanities computing are all implicated in the production, transmission, and reception of the Greco-Roman world that we now call ‘classical’. However, much of the relevant work has been undertaken in a historically and disciplinary insular manner. With a few exceptions,⁵⁸ there has been no systematic attempt to date to shift the focus away from issues of historical usage of individual media, towards more theoretical concerns that can link the media of the classical past with one another, with larger processes of cultural production and reception, and with contemporary debates around media, knowledge, and perception. Can the history of classical literature and art and the history of classical scholarship be mapped onto a history of media? What would the outcomes of such an exercise look like? ‘Our writing tools are also working on our thoughts,’ says Nietzsche in a remark often quoted in media-theoretical discussions.⁵⁹ To respond to an antiquity that is thought to have an enduring worth from the perspective of the historical moment that we inhabit, a techno-cultural understanding of that moment is required. Such an understanding should, among other things, consider profound changes in scholarly practices of reading, writing, and thinking that, as already mentioned, have not received much critical attention. For instance, while classical studies, like much of the rest of the humanities, continues to privilege close reading as the essence of its disciplinary identity,⁶⁰ it nevertheless

⁵⁸ I have found particularly stimulating Engell, Siegert, and Vogl (2003); Villers (2005); Gibson (2005, 2011, 2016); Haase (2006, 2007, 2008, 2009); Cuomo (2007); Osterkamp (2008); Butler (2011, 2015); Willis (2011); Roby (2016); Formisano and van der Eijk (2017); Starre (2017); Mayor (2018); Frampton (2019). For other media-theoretically informed publications in classical studies, a good starting point is the De Gruyter series ‘Transformationen der Antike’, which showcases work around the Collaborative Research Centre ‘Transformations of Antiquity’ and the ‘August Boeckh Centre of Antiquity’ at the Humboldt University of Berlin. ⁵⁹ Nietzsche (1981a: 172). For the English translation and broader implications of this phrase, see Lecznar, Chapter 11, this volume. ⁶⁰ On close reading as an essential feature of the humanities, see Jay (2014: 115–42), with earlier bibliography.

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relies on a whole range of other reading techniques associated with computer-assisted, screen-based operations that are missing from the vocabulary of who we are and what we do. We need to ask ourselves what shifts are underway today, as the coupling of human intuition and machine logic ‘leads to specificities quite different in their effect from those mobilized by print’.⁶¹ And how the disjunction between what we say we do and how we actually do it compares to other moments of profound epistemological rupture in the study of Greco-Roman antiquity in the past. We can argue with N. Katherine Hayles that digital media give us ‘the chance to see print with new eyes, and with it, the possibility of understanding how deeply literary theory and criticism have been imbued with assumptions specific to print’.⁶² As Matthew Kirschenbaum puts it, and as Lecznar illustrates in this volume with his discussion of typewriting and handwriting in the thought of Nietzsche and Heidegger, ‘the seemingly ineffable act of writing is always grounded in particular instruments and media, from quills to keyboards’.⁶³ If classical studies is to play a role in broader discussions about the future of the humanities and its ability to engage with the urgent cultural questions of today, it can also begin by making a stronger case for the role of art in epistemological debates. For example, we might emphasize the role of artistic knowledge in creating an environment that shapes society rather than merely serves it.⁶⁴ Art and aesthetic criticism provide a powerful case study for thinking about transmission not as a narrowly defined field of specialized knowledge about texts and artefacts, but more ambitiously as the long-term transposition, and endurance, of cultural meaning and value. To identify what is specific about art and aesthetics and why, according to the French philosopher Bruno Latour, they should be seen as a distinct domain of knowledge or, as he puts it, a distinct ‘mode of existence’,⁶⁵ we need to focus not on categorical distinctions between aesthetic theory, artistic practice, and their histories, but on how they interconnect. A media-theoretical and media-historical focus on cultural transmission makes it possible to enrich current debates around aesthetic criticism with the help of a ⁶¹ Hayles (2002: 42). ⁶² Hayles (2002: 33). ⁶³ Kirschenbaum (2016). See also Neef (2011). ⁶⁴ On the need to re-evaluate the notion of service as a cultural technique and on the media-theoretical potential of the role of the servant, see Krajewski (2018). ⁶⁵ Latour (2013 233–57).

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   renewed interest in the rich history of concepts such as realism, and in the historical construction of categorical distinctions between different art forms. It also calls for a renewed interest in artistic practices, not only in terms of their thematic preoccupation with what is otherwise inaccessible (from the heroic past to the world of the gods and the world of imagination), but also in terms of techne, in terms of the skills and tools that mediate between presence and absence, form and content, form and matter; between artistic objects, those that produce them, and those that perceive them. Whether techniques of transmission and perception should be seen as functions of cultural processes, or, more polemically, whether culture should be seen as a function of techniques of transmission and perception, the interplay between culture and non-human agents is something to which all contributions to this volume return. One way to bring into focus the implications of the study of media for the study of culture is by mapping the history of media onto a history of literature and art. Take, for instance, the history of archaic orality and how it can be related to media-historical change not only in antiquity, in relation to the Greek alphabet, embodied technologies of memory and performance, and the culture of the bookroll, but also in the world after the printing press, from so-called universal literacy around the time of the emergence of the Homeric Question (roughly corresponding to what Kittler identifies as ‘discourse network 1800’) to the new technologies of the phonograph and radio around the time of Milman Parry’s theory of oral-formulaic composition (Kittler’s ‘discourse network 1900’), and the ‘linked networks of potentials’ of the internet⁶⁶ and return of orality in social media around the time of Gregory Nagy’s ‘Homer Multitext Project’⁶⁷ and John Miles Foley’s ‘Pathways Project’ (what one might call Kittler’s ‘discourse network 2000’⁶⁸). Another history of Greco-Roman literature and art yet to be written has to do with all the intermediaries, mediators, and meddlers of classical narrative, who reveal an intense preoccupation with how communication can be informed and shaped not by proximity but by distance. Consider all the messengers and heralds, eyewitnesses and proxy-witnesses, prophets, witches, ghosts, souls, Muses, angels, choruses, slaves and other literary and theatrical parasites, or even the

⁶⁶ Foley (2012: 17).

⁶⁷ Nagy (2010).

⁶⁸ Liu (2004).

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poetic personas that claim to mediate between mortals and gods, or between audiences and the construction of a communal cultural memory. In Plato’s philosophical dialogues alone, the concept of mediation between readers and the truth of beings takes a dizzying number of different shapes: from Socrates as a midwife to Eros as mediator, heroes as intermediaries between gods and mortals, thymos as a psychic function of valuation that mediates between the body and the soul and between reason and desire, philosophical method as a road for accessing the truth, and language itself as mediator to the truth of beings.

1.6. This Volume To address some of the questions raised thus far, this volume brings together an international team of scholars with expertise in areas that range from classical literature to classical reception studies, art history, media theory, media history, film studies, philosophy, and cultural studies. Despite their differences in terms of disciplinary training and intellectual engagement, they all perform a constant back and forth between antiquity and modernity as well as between theory and practice, reflecting on the role of media and mediation in processes of knowledge storage, transmission, and perception, but also in the conceptualization of thinking itself. Each contribution engages with a different aspect of ‘classical’ Greece and Rome, revolving around issues of philosophy, cultural history, literature, aesthetics, and epistemology. And each of them provides a different definition of what constitutes mediality and how it operates, constructing different genealogies of the concept of the medium, and engaging with emergent fields within media studies that range from cultural techniques to media archaeology, diagrammatology, and intermediality.⁶⁹ From discourse analysis and cultural studies to techno-cultural engineering, information technologies, communication theory, comparative anthropology, phenomenology, and a critique of Western metaphysics and modernity, the contributions to this volume

⁶⁹ On cultural techniques, see Krämer (2003); Geoghegan (2013); Vismann (2013); Siegert (2015a); Winthrop-Young (2015b); Krajewski (2018); on media archaeology, see Zielinski (2006a, 2015); Huhtamo and Parikka (2011b); Parikka (2012b, d); on diagrammatology, see Pombo and Gerner (2010); Krämer (2014); Krämer and Ljungberg (2016); on intermediality, see Rajewsky (2002, 2005); Schröter (2010, 2011); Bruhn (2016). More bibliography on these fields can be found in the rest of the volume.

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   offer a whole host of perspectives on the significance of the encounter between media studies and classical antiquity, and on the directions this encounter might take in the future. In ‘Friedrich Kittler’s Alphabetic Realism’ (Chapter 2), Till Heilmann examines the role of the Greek alphabet in the media theory of the late Friedrich Kittler. Heilmann argues that the position of the Greek alphabet in the last phase of Kittler’s work challenges key assumptions around the broader tenets of Kittler’s theory and his central position within German media theory. In late Kittler, the Greek alphabet and its letters unify writing, the sounds of spoken language, musical notes, and mathematical numbers. As such, the alphabet becomes a self-effacing yet allpowerful channel for the transmission of all aspects of Greek culture, from poetry to music and mathematics and from the arts to science and the senses. For Kittler, the Greek alphabet becomes an exemplary medium at the centre of a logic to which all technological innovation returns, including the universal code of digital computing. It is less a symbolic system preoccupied with meaning and more an indexical medium that, like phonography and photography, records forms. By relating writing to spoken language, and by situating the Greek alphabet at the origins of a history for the realistic, accurate reproduction of sound, Kittler turns it into a system whose significance lies in its ability to transmit impressions from the outside world: not to construct reality or represent reality, but to present it, giving direct access to it. Verity Platt (Chapter 3: ‘The Seal of Polycrates: A Discourse on Discourse Channel Conditions’) argues for the centrality in Greek culture of seals and the act of impressing, discussing numerous examples among which Herodotus’ story of the seal of Polycrates occupies a central position. For Platt, seals and the act of impressing can be considered to be precursors of modern analogue technologies that operate by means of the stamp, imprint, or trace: printing, sound recording, photography, and film. Platt argues for the significance of seals and the act of impressing in Greek culture in two distinct but complementary ways. First, they are a widespread technology whose processing power helps perform a wide range of practices of transmission and communication, linking media as diverse as stone, metal, wax, clay, and plaster. Second, they foreground such practices and invite reflection on them, as is made evident by the role seals play in the mediation between material phenomena and abstract mental operations, most notably in the conceptualization

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of memory and the psyche, in models of sense perception, and in the aesthetics of ekphrasis. Taken together, Platt argues, these two approaches demonstrate how technologies of impressed images need to be placed alongside writing technologies and the Greek alphabet among the archetypal techniques of Greek culture. In Chapter 4 (‘Metaphysics and the Mathematical Diagram: Geometry between History and Philosophy’), Duncan Kennedy turns from seals to diagrams and from cultural techniques to the field of media theory known as diagrammatology. If two-dimensional inscribed surfaces are a tool for thinking that connects the hand, the eye, and the brain, the flattening-out they perform can point not only to powerful links but also to hierarchical separations between empirical description and abstract form, sight and insight, practice and theory. Are Greek mathematical diagrams universal, or historically specific? How far back in Greek culture are we prepared to situate their emergence? Should they be transmitted as conveying true knowledge, or as practical techniques? Kennedy argues that whereas, in Greek mathematics, the diagram has the power of demonstrative proof (associated with the skills and effects of epideictic persuasion), in Plato’s philosophical thought it acquires the power of apodeictic proof, giving access to the abstraction of geometrical objects and the metaphysical hierarchies between different realms of existence. Kennedy situates the diagram in between the sheer variety of cultural techniques and historical modes of thinking ‘practically’, on the one hand, and the applied metaphysics of scientific study, on the other hand, where thinking ‘theoretically’ is invested in scientific ‘objects’ and in the plotting of ‘firsts’ and ‘outcomes’. The tendency to entangle the temporal parameters of the stories they emplot with ontological claims is no greater for philosophy than it is for a history of mathematics or for media theory. Frank Haase (Chapter 5: ‘On the Beginnings of Media Theory in Hesiod and Plato’) argues that Greek poetry and philosophy are grounded in writing not only as a signifying and semantic practice but also as a computational practice to be linked to programming. Hesiod’s divinely inspired poetry and Plato’s philosophical dialogues may be profoundly different, but they nevertheless share a common preoccupation with accessing the truth. And they both feature a similar sequence of steps that make this access possible, a sequence based on creation or invention through self-referencing. In Hesiod, it is the poet that has a

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   mediating function between the world of gods and the world of humans. The production of poetry is founded on the memory and repeatability of signs that are associated not only with the divine but also with writing and reading. In Plato, it is thinking itself that occupies a mediating position between the world of the senses and the world of ideas. Language is constituted as a medium in the sense that it empowers the production of thinking by executing repetitive operations based on movement and interruption, deferral and supplement. Haase links these two moments in the history of thought with a third one, associated with Alan Turing’s Universal Discrete Machine, the prototype of the modern computer. The bold leap from Plato to Turing is made possible by similarities in their symbol-processing operations based on exchangeability and replaceability. Turing’s Machine processes symbols by working through an inscription on a computational tape. This involves the execution of sequential steps of movement and interruption, as well as of reading and writing/deleting, that are analogous to those in Plato. In ‘Metaxy: Aristotle on Mediacy’ (Chapter 6), Emmanuel Alloa shows that modern debates about the polyvalence of media have a history that must be traced back to Aristotle and his exploration of a range of relevant terms across different aspects of his work: the golden mean or middle way (mesotês) in ethics, the intermediate or middle term (meson) in logic, and the in between (metaxy) in sensory perception. Alloa argues that the frequency of the terms in question calls for a closer inspection of the correlations they open up across different aspects of Aristotle’s work. From ethics to logic and perception, Aristotle scrutinizes and problematizes the concept of mediacy in ways that revolve around the issues of commonality and difference. The capacity of media to take on the form of different things without taking on their matter shows how their operation involves both mediation and transformation. In other words, Alloa suggests, Aristotle’s preoccupation with appearance might be seen as taking precedence over his preoccupation with ontology. Karin Harrasser (Chapter 7: ‘The Fable of Arachne: Underweavings of Tactile Mediality’) explores the sense of touch and the challenges it poses to conceptual systems around sensory qualities and perception since Aristotle. Touch, in Aristotle, can be seen as being different from the other senses in that the medium and the organ of perception cannot be kept clearly separate. The skin is a threshold space of pleasure and pain, and as such is not subordinated to conceptual understanding as easily as

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other sensory media and organs. By separating inside and outside while also establishing links between them, the sense of touch serves as a medium of thought in ways that expose sensory perception as being socially constituted. Harrasser argues that, alongside the normative and essentializing history of the haptic, which is tied to human consciousness, we must account for another history around the experimental and multimodal promises of the tactile. Such a history links Aristotle to psycho-physiological investigations of the nineteenth century, gestalt theory, media theory, computer sciences, and contemporary media– ecological perspectives on prosthetic technology and on non-human types of agency. In Chapter 8 (‘The Shards of Zadar: A (Meta-)Archaeology of Cinema’), Ulrich Meurer focuses on the subdiscipline of media studies called media archaeology, exploring it from two separate perspectives. First, he discusses it in relation to the discipline of archaeology and to Michel Foucault’s concept of archéologie. Second, he situates its logic within a broader and more political context of contemporary investments in embodied rationality. The chapter revolves around a paradigmatic project at the threshold between art-based media research and fictitious cinema history. Meurer demonstrates how imagining a Greco-Roman film projector as the new founding myth of cinema exemplifies how media archaeology brings together the non-discursive materiality of artefacts, temporal incongruity, and the unpredictable surfacing of alternative pasts. This combination, he shows, turns towards a decidedly political critique of media historiography. It challenges the historical demarcations of scientific reason, countering dominant models of teleological progress in modern, industrialized societies. It also exposes how modern narratives of technical invention are organized around a clandestine nucleus of the unforeseen, unreasonable, and contingent. Patrick Crowley (Chapter 9: ‘Parrhasius’ Curtain, or, a Media Archaeology of a Metapainting’) examines one of the best-known cases of trompe l’oeil in the history of art, the legendary competition between the classical Greek painters Parrhasius and Zeuxis as recounted a few centuries later by Roman author Pliny the Elder. Crowley argues that to appreciate the power of trompe l’oeil pictures in Greco-Roman art and visual culture, we need to set aside ontological questions of what painting is, and Western assumptions about vision and representation. We must

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   focus instead on how issues of subject matter and form interact with broader questions: the culturally and ethically shifting criteria for what constitutes verisimilitude; the function of the field of the spectator’s vision and how it can be facilitated, disrupted, or exploited; and, finally, the role of the material support and display of artworks. Parrhasius’ curtain should be seen as the effect of a whole system of artistic techniques, technologies of vision, institutional frameworks, and social practices. Like Meurer, Crowley calls for a media–archaeological approach concerned with the epistemological question of how media constitute relations of power and knowledge. And, like Meurer, he critiques Western investments in historical continuity. Unlike Meurer, however, Crowley focuses on the similarities, rather than the differences, between such an approach and the system of heterogenous forces and relations of power that Michel Foucault calls a ‘dispositif ’. In ‘White Noise: Transmitting and Receiving Ancient Elegy’ (Chapter 10), Genevieve Liveley explores the ways in which the elegy of modern poets such as Anne Carson and Ted Hughes, and of Roman poets such as Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid, reflects on the medial properties and operations of elegy as a poetic genre. In their thematic and formalist preoccupation with the communication between the living and the dead, and also in their self-positioning within a tradition of classical elegy that is at once long, lacunose, and debatable, these poems offer intense reflections on the concept and workings of transmission. Drawing on Wolfgang Ernst’s media archaeology and on Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver’s model of (tele)communication, Liveley argues that elegy has always revolved around transmission and communication channels and apparatuses: from inarticulate cries of sorrow to songs of lament, stone inscriptions, handwritten poems on papyrus pages or little books, and poems performed or otherwise embodied. The reader needs to listen not only to the messages carried across time, but also to the noise of the channels through which those messages are transmitted. The less invested one is in the fixity and reproducibility of what constitutes the meaning of elegy, the more likely it is one will tune into elegy as a more complex and ongoing transmission event. The more tuned in the reader becomes, the more she or he operates as a device participating in its operations. To think of literary or artistic genres and traditions as transmission events is to revisit and repurpose

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familiar debates in genre criticism with the help of a media archaeology that invites us to analyse signs as signals. Adam Lecznar (Chapter 11: ‘Parmenides at his Typewriter: Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the Media of Philosophy’) examines the return to the Presocratics of Nietzsche and Heidegger, two modern philosophers who feature prominently in media theory because of their engagement with technology as a philosophical issue. ‘It could justifiably be asked what in the world [a disquisition on the typewriter] has to do with Parmenides,’ says Heidegger in his 1942–3 lecture course on the Presocratic philosopher. Lecznar answers the question by drawing attention to how, for both Heidegger and Nietzsche, conceptual metaphors and embodied cultural techniques can shape the conceptualization of philosophical insight and their understanding of the philosophical tradition. In the work of both, the Presocratics emerge as embodied writers of philosophy: potential interlocutors of flesh and blood in Nietzsche, and offering direct access to unmediated philosophical concerns and modes of expression in Heidegger. Lecznar argues that the hand of the philosopher links two cultural practices that can be taught and learned, handwriting and typewriting, and pushes Nietzsche and Heidegger in different directions in their consideration of how philosophy is constituted by the mediation of thought in writing. The path of the typewriter helps Nietzsche to achieve clarity and strength in his writing, just as the goddess that clasps the hand of the narrator in Parmenides helps him to think. In the work of Heidegger, on the other hand, it is through his encounter with the typewriter that he reflects on handwriting and its contribution to immediacy and presence in a philosophical tradition that stretches back to the Presocratics. In the final chapter, Maria Oikonomou (‘Manteia, Mediality, Migration’) focuses on the close interrelation of processes of mediation and movements of migration across the Greek world, considering the role of the oracles at Dodona and Delphi in the context of colonization, Odysseus’ travels in Homer, and the role of the crossroads and the arrival at Colonus in the case of Sophocles’ Oedipus. As in the age of global positioning systems and smartphones, the migratory movements of Greek culture are based on the collection, processing, and transmission of knowledge. The concepts of departure, direction, diversion, and arrival all revolve around decision-making processes that have profoundly

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   medial dimensions. To create a path across an undifferentiated terrain, people on the move need human, divine, or technological agents to help them identify critical juncture points and to distinguish and select between different ways forward. Mediation transforms unconnected and disparate physical spaces into a diagrammatic field of nodal points and switch mechanisms, but it also comes with risk, accidents, crisis, catastrophe, and responsibility. This is seen most clearly when we turn to the medial function of the migrant body itself, as in the case of Sophocles’ Oedipus. The body of the migrant can be viewed as an embodiment of decisions and bifurcations, as a field of possibilities around which new types of knowledge and new connections can be made and communicated. Taken together, these encounters between classical antiquity and media theory contribute to three broad questions as played out in the context of modern theories of media and ancient histories and theories of perception, epistemology, art, poetics, and aesthetics. The first question relates to how processes of cultural production and reception are conditioned by processes of cultural transmission. The second question concerns how the issues of thought and technology mutually define but are also in tension with each other; in other words, how judgements of value, material conditions, and technical and technological practices are all involved in the constructedness, facticity, and transformative or normative power of knowledge. The third and final question is about the implications for humanistic classics today of a cultural history of the subject that centres not only on humans, but also on cultural operations in relation to which human experiences and forms of knowledge become connected, archived, and monumentalized.

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2 Friedrich Kittler’s Alphabetic Realism Till A. Heilmann

2.1. Is Kittler Really a Media Materialist? What do media studies and classics have to tell each other? This chapter will try to answer the question from the standpoint of media studies by examining a momentous meeting point of the two disciplines: the studies on the Greek alphabet by the late media historian and philosopher Friedrich Kittler. My thesis is that Kittler’s analysis of ancient Greek literature and of the script in which it was written reveals an important facet of his media theory that has gone largely unnoticed by media scholars. I will argue that Kittler posits the Greek alphabet as the principal and exemplary medium of Western culture because of its representational qualities or, to be more precise, because of its alleged ‘direct’ relation to reality. Remarkably, Kittler’s emphasis on representation and reality is fundamentally at odds with some basic assumptions of the so-called German media theory, as it entails a non-mediatic ideal of media—that is, the notion that media should ‘disappear’ in the process of communication and thus provide a direct and undistorted access to their ‘content’. Therefore, Kittler’s late and surprising turn to classics should be understood not so much as a crossing of disciplinary boundaries but as an attempt to leave media studies behind altogether: an effort to conceptualize mediacy as immediacy by underplaying the significance of the medium in the act of mediation.

Till A. Heilmann, Friedrich Kittler’s Alphabetic Realism In: Classics and Media Theory. Edited by: Pantelis Michelakis, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198846024.003.0002

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  .  Friedrich Kittler’s historical and theoretical perspective on media, which are arguably the main subject of his oeuvre, is often called materialist.¹ Considering that Kittler either ignored or explicitly rejected materialist philosophies of the Marxist tradition in his own work,² this label seems somewhat problematic. Taken quite literally, however, the term ‘materialist’ correctly designates the one aspect of media culture in which Kittler’s work is particularly interested: the ‘materialities of communication’³—that is, the technological details of how specific forms of mediacy are physically implemented, from early scripts on clay tablets to digital computing in silicon chips.⁴ Probably the most important intellectual legacy that Kittler’s work has left to the so-called German media theory⁵ is the idea that distinct materialities of media systematically correlate with distinct historical and cultural modes of perception, knowledge, and communication. ‘Media’, as one of his most famous dictums goes, ‘determine our situation’.⁶ And in the broader (or more literal) sense of the term ‘materialist’, Kittler’s much discussed and maligned ‘media materialism’⁷ can rightly be said to ‘mirro[r] the materialist focus on the economic base’⁸ or to echo a Marxist ‘base-superstructure logic’.⁹ A materialist concept of media, as we expect to find it in Kittler’s writings, consequently emphasizes the ‘productive’ aspects of communication technologies—in other words, the power of media not only to convey messages but also to inflect or to shape the culture they are embedded in. This means that media materialism sees media less as passive containers or channels for the transport of pre-existing cultural content and more as active agents in the technological production of culture. ‘After Kittler, media can no longer merely be what we use to communicate and express ourselves but emerge as autonomous, agential and capable of enabling new modalities of thought and subjectivity.’¹⁰ Being one of the most prominent champions of media materialism, Kittler conceptualizes media, we may conclude, as constitutive forces of cultural realities. ¹ See Gane (2005: 25 et passim); Ernst (2015b: 54); Niekerk (2015: 146); Parikka (2015: 180); Sale and Salisbury (2015: p. xxxi). ² See Kittler (1995). ³ See Gumbrecht and Pfeiffer (1994). ⁴ See Kittler (1999: 1–19). ⁵ See Horn (2008). ⁶ Kittler (1999: p. xxxix). ⁷ Gane (2005: 25). ⁸ Winthrop-Young (2011a: 26). ⁹ Peters (2008: 12). ¹⁰ Ikoniadou (2015: 3).

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Or so it seems. For a closer look at Kittler’s writings shows a different and more complex picture. Particularly revealing in this regard are the texts from the last stage of his work, his remarkable turn away from the technical media of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries towards ancient Greek culture and the study of the Greek vocalic alphabet. Much of the recent research on and interpretation of the late Kittler has focused on his idea of the alphabet as a universal medium or the first technological implementation of a system for general ‘data processing’, which anticipated and prefigured modern digital computers.¹¹ This chapter, on the other hand, will argue that what is most striking about Kittler’s treatment of the Greek alphabet—at least from the perspective of media theory—is his unadulterated admiration for the script’s representational qualities in recording song and speech.

2.2. . . . or Is he not Rather a Realist? For Kittler, the alphabet is such an exceptional medium not only because of its versatile character but also, and even more so, because it— supposedly—encodes the sounds of the human voice more faithfully than does any other script.¹² What is more: by singling out the vocalic alphabet from other writings systems based on its purported representational excellence, Kittler implicitly sets a standard for all historically subsequent communication technologies or for media in general. Greek letters illustrate how a medium ideally works, how it should relate (to) the world, how it is supposed to mediate reality—namely, by representing what it represents as truthfully as possible. In hindsight, this rather conventional understanding of what a medium is (or what it should be, at least) is already visible in Kittler’s earlier texts, most clearly in his analyses of technologies such as photography, phonography, and cinematography.¹³ Correspondingly, the history of media that Kittler unfolds can be read as a story of technological innovation leading, after an exemplary initial flowering in ancient Greece, to ever more ‘faithful’ or ‘high-fidelity’ media—up to the point where digital technology allows us to simulate or generate realities that

¹¹ See Peters (2015b: 31); Winthrop-Young (2011a: 94). ¹² See Kittler (2006a, b, 2013a). ¹³ See Kittler (1999).

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  .  become indistinguishable from reality itself.¹⁴ Kittler’s grand cultural narrative thus reveals itself as a kind of technological translatio imperii from the Greek vocalic alphabet to the digital media of today. Such a reading of Kittler implies that his concept of media is not truly a materialist one—at least not in the Marxist tradition of dialectical or historical materialism. Rather, it seems fitting to describe Kittler’s understanding of media as realist. His much discussed insistence on hardware and ‘hard facts’ (‘everything has a date, an address, and a location’¹⁵), his attention to literary texts as data and to cultural forms as material phenomena, his fascination for great engineers and feats of engineering, his claims for historical and technological exactness—they all point to an epistemological and ontological position that is more positivist than historicist, more physicalist than structuralist, more realist than materialist. Therefore, I would like to argue that Kittler’s theory of media is grounded not in a ‘media materialism’¹⁶ but in a media realism. Characterizing Kittler as a media realist not only situates his work within a larger discursive shift in the humanities we might call the ‘rise of realism’.¹⁷ More importantly, it indicates that Kittler’s view of media is conceptually incompatible with German media theory—the very school of thinking he is often credited with having started. Certainly, the label ‘German media theory’ is as misleading overall as the term ‘materialist’ is when applied to Kittler. For it suggests a unified body of theory to which all or, at least, most prominent German scholars in the field subscribe. While this is evidently not the case,¹⁸ it is nevertheless possible to recognize some shared assumptions about media in the German academic debate—assumptions that boil down to one basic idea. Sybille Krämer has used the phrase ‘media generativism’ to denote this idea.¹⁹ In Krämer’s classification, media generativism constitutes one of two principal perspectives on media and communication, the other being media marginalism. Diametrically opposed, generativism and marginalism represent the twin hazards in thinking about mediacy that Krämer also calls the ‘Scylla and Charybdis’ of communication and media studies.

¹⁴ ¹⁶ ¹⁸ ¹⁹

See Kittler (1996, 1999, 2006a). ¹⁵ Kittler and Weinberger (2012: 377). Gane (2005: 25). ¹⁷ See DeLanda and Harman (2017). See Horn (2008: 8–9); Winthrop-Young (2017: 205–7). See Krämer (2015: 27).

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Whereas the marginalist perspective reduces media to ‘peripheral and negligible vehicles’ of information and communication that thus hardly merit a further investigation, the generativist perspective awards media the status of an epistemological a priori²⁰—an appreciation of the significance of media that, ironically, complicates their status as objects of study insofar as they are thought to be the very technological conditions of possibility for perception and knowledge. While in her own work she tries to reconcile the conflicting perspectives of generativism and marginalism, Krämer portrays media theory as adhering, by and large, to the ‘maxim of generativism’: ‘In the heterogeneous field of media theory a small common denominator is the idea that media not only relay their contents, but are also fundamentally generative.’²¹ In a way, this is simply a paraphrase of McLuhan’s verdict that ‘the medium is the message’.²² And in the eyes of many observers and participants, the so-called German media theory exemplifies this theoretical stance better than any other school in media studies does.²³ Hence, it would seem natural for Kittler—certainly the most prominent thinker in the field—to have a ‘generativist’ model of media as spelled out in some of his most widely read texts such as Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, Optical Media, and ‘There Is No Software’.²⁴ The truth is, however, more complicated. As Kittler’s turn to the study of ancient Greece and his praise of the Greek vocalic alphabet make clear, his ideal of medium was, at least in the end and to a great extent, a decidedly marginalist one.²⁵ And in the light of this surprising conceptual culmination of his oeuvre, some of Kittler’s earlier analyses can be reread as foreshadowing the rather evident media marginalism of his final years. For the late Kittler, ancient Greece sets the stage for an ‘unconcealment’ not only in the Heideggerean ontological sense—that is, as the way in which the world is established as ontic reality. It is also the (imaginary) place where his realist understanding of media finally emerges in full force and clarity.

²⁰ Krämer (2015: 23). ²¹ Krämer (2015: 27). ²² See McLuhan (1964: 7). ²³ See Horn (2008: 8–9); Parikka (2012d: 66–7); Geoghegan (2013: 67–8); Chang (2016: 563–5); Pias (2016). ²⁴ See Kittler (1992, 1999, 2010). ²⁵ This chapter is therefore a revision of my earlier argument for Kittler’s generativism; see Heilmann (2016).

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  . 

2.3. The Changing Concept of Media Let us review how Kittler’s concept of media evolved over the course of his academic career. Following Winthrop-Young, it is useful to distinguish three stages in Kittler’s work: a discursive, a technological, and an ontological one.²⁶ The first stage comprised his early work on literature in the Age of Goethe and ended in the middle of the 1980s with the publication of Discourse Networks 1800/1900. In the second stage, beginning with Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, Kittler set his focus on ‘technical media’ of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and on digital computers. The third and final stage began around 2000, when Kittler turned his attention away from our technological present to the, supposed, beginnings of Western culture in ancient Greece. Of course, these stages must not be understood as three consecutive segments defined by clean breaks with the later stage supplanting the preceding one. Instead, they are marked by gradual shifts in perspective, phasing into, and complementing each other. Kittler’s technological stage is also concerned with discourses, just as his ontological stage is informed by both the discursive and the technological frameworks of the previous two stages. Nevertheless, one can also discern significant changes in the way Kittler incorporates media into his analyses. Although media already play a central role in the first stage of Kittler’s work, the concept of media is not given a lot of consideration. In Discourse Networks 1800/1900, the seminal text of the stage, readers will not find a definition of the term. Rather than elaborating on the concept, Kittler makes only a short reference to Marshall McLuhan’s media theory in passing.²⁷ More than twenty years later, he would admit as much in an interview: ‘I only started working on the conceptual history [of media] very late. Initially, I simply took the concept from McLuhan’s Understanding Media.’²⁸ Accordingly, in Discourse Networks 1800/1900 phenomena such as the alphabet and the script along with writing, printing and books, poetry and literature, film and gramophone are all indiscriminately called media.²⁹ The crucial—and only— conceptual distinction that Kittler makes is the one between the ‘old’ ²⁶ ²⁷ ²⁸ ²⁹

See Winthrop-Young (2011a: 3); see also Heilmann (2016: 101–5). See Kittler (1990b: 265 n. 2). Kittler and Weinberger (2012: 383). See Kittler (1990b: 99, 112–16, 186–8, 199, 230, 370, et passim).

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media of writing around 1800 and ‘technical media’ like the gramophone around 1900. At this stage, the object of Kittler’s studies are still ‘primarily literary texts’.³⁰ In other words, what he is interested in are not media per se but the ‘network of technologies and institutions that allow a given culture to select, store, and process relevant data’³¹—media being just one part of the network and the relevant data in this case being literature. ABC books, for instance, become objects of Kittler’s analysis not because they are products of print technology but as elements in a heterogeneous discursive system that makes people speak, read, and write in a new way and thus help bring about ‘literature’ in the modern sense.³² Of particular interest to our discussion—and we will come back to this later—is the fact that, in the first stage, ‘language’ and ‘mother tongue’ are explicitly designated as media and listed among technologies such as printing and photography.³³ In the second stage, Kittler changes from literary criticism to media history. Now, technologies of communication and information gain centre stage, a move that is boldly announced in the very first sentence of Gramophone, Film, Typewriter: ‘Media’—and not discourse networks, we might add—‘determine our situation’.³⁴ At first glance, this shift seems to be a purely chronological one, concerning analyses of the twentieth century and of the present day only. ‘Discourse analysis cannot be applied to sound archives or towers of film rolls.’³⁵ But, in stark contrast to Foucault’s historical method and to his own approach in Discourse Networks 1800/1900, Kittler goes on to develop a historical model of media that is evolutionary and not genealogical. Instead of contrasting two discursive formations from two epochs (1800 and 1900), as he did in the first stage, he sets out to write the history of communication media ‘in general terms’ and as a ‘process of evolution’.³⁶ By implication, Kittler now also has to say what exactly he means by the word ‘medium’. He has to offer a definition. And he does so by stressing the ‘technical sense’ of the term—that is, by taking the concept from ‘the field of physics in general and telecommunications in ³⁰ Winthrop-Young (2011a: 3). ³¹ Kittler (1990b: 369). ³² See Kittler (1990b: 27–36). ³³ See Kittler (1990b: 38, 152). ³⁴ Kittler (1999: p. xxxix). ³⁵ Kittler (1999: 5). ³⁶ Kittler (1996: n.p.). To be fair: in the German version of the text, the terms ‘evolution’ and ‘evolutionary’ do not appear. The phrase there reads ‘Prozess der Ausdifferenzierung’, which, literally, translates as ‘process of differentiation’; see Kittler (1993: 172).

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  .  particular’.³⁷ Referring to Claude Shannon, Kittler conceptualizes media as distinct cases or technical implementations of a generalized mathematical diagram of communication.³⁸ Media—all media—are now studied in historical comparison as information systems ‘optimised in terms of the storage, processing and transmission of messages’.³⁹ And by adopting Shannon’s model with its underlying idea of ‘optimizing’ communication in the mathematical sense, Kittler tacitly turns the history of media into a teleological process of technological advancement. The evolution of communication technology takes the form of a progressive perfection of mediacy—until information technology reaches its ultimate form in the universal medium of digital computing: ‘All data streams flow into a state n of Turing’s universal machine.’⁴⁰ In the third and final stage of his work, Kittler widens the historical scope to the history of Western culture and civilization as a whole.⁴¹ The mathematical model of communication gets traded in for an ontological concept of technology, and, by consequence, media take on an even greater role. Informed mainly by Martin Heidegger’s writings on the subject of technology and his idea of a ‘history of being’ (Seinsgeschichte), Kittler tries to show how media relate that which exists to human beings.⁴² In other words, media are thought not only to ‘determine our situation’;⁴³ more than that, Kittler now addresses them as the particular technological modes in which reality ‘comes-to-presence’ (Heidegger’s anwesen)—that is, how it presents itself to humans throughout history. No longer is the actual purpose of media seen in the capacity of information systems to relay messages. Their true role is to ‘reveal’ to us the world we live in and make it present in historically changing ways. Following Heidegger and referring to ancient Greek philosophy, Kittler suggests that media—in the best case, at least—‘grant an unconcealed view of being or, in Aristotle’s words, they reveal the actively real

³⁷ Kittler (2010: 29, 32). The year of publication of Optical Media may mislead the reader. The German original (Kittler 2002a) is based on a lecture series from 1999 that Kittler had first given in 1990 at the University of Bochum. The ideas presented in this book are clearly from the second stage of his work. ³⁸ See Shannon (1948). Ironically, the term ‘medium’ only occurs once in Shannon’s text (1948: 381), where it is used to describe the physical conduit (‘a pair of wires, a coaxial cable, a band of radio frequencies, a beam of light, etc.’) of a communication system. ³⁹ Kittler (1996: n. p.). ⁴⁰ Kittler (1999: 19). ⁴¹ See Kittler (2006a). ⁴² See Kittler (2013b). ⁴³ Kittler (1999: p. xxxix).

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(ἐντελέχεια) of an unconcealed being (οὐσία)’.⁴⁴ Media, in short, disclose what really is.

2.4. How Kittler’s Media Marginalism Came About How can we map the changing concept of media, which I have briefly outlined, onto Krämer’s distinction between media marginalism and media generativism? In the first stage, Kittler clearly treats media as generative entities. In accordance with Foucault’s oft-cited line that discourses must be understood as ‘practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak’,⁴⁵ he conceptualizes media technologies as nodes within larger, heterogeneous networks generating the world of which they speak through discourse. Kittler’s Aufschreibesysteme, as David E. Wellberry remarks in his introduction to the English translation, ‘do not disguise a reality that is anterior to them and from which they would spring; they produce reality’.⁴⁶ Reality is a construct of discourse and, consequently, of media. In the second stage, we can see a significant change of perspective. With the analytic focus shifting from discourse networks and literature to media technologies and communication in general, the generative character of media is downplayed and their marginalist qualities for the transport of messages are emphasized. Instead of Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge, Shannon’s general diagram of communication now presents the model for Kittler’s media studies and leads him to analyse media such as the gramophone, film, and typewriter as ‘channels’ for information⁴⁷—and the channel, in Shannon’s words, is ‘merely the medium used to transmit the signal’.⁴⁸ Reality is not a construct of media anymore; it is represented by them only as their potential ‘content’. In the third stage, Kittler’s marginalist perspective largely remains. Admittedly, media are elevated to the status of prime ontological actors, first revelators of ‘being’, which seems to indicate a generative ⁴⁴ Kittler (2006b: 54). ⁴⁷ See Kittler (1996).

⁴⁵ Foucault (2002: 54). ⁴⁸ Shannon (1948: 381).

⁴⁶ Kittler (1990b: p. xxiii).

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  .  understanding of media. With Heidegger (and beyond him), Kittler reads media as τέχνη or technologies of ‘bringing-forth’ the world.⁴⁹ However, the way in which Kittler interprets mediality—that is, media’s modality of revealing or ‘unconcealing’ reality—strongly points to a realist or marginalist concept of mediacy (more on this shortly). Media, in the end, neither construct nor represent reality—they simply present or ‘presence’ it. Remarkably (and somewhat paradoxically), then, while media gain prominence in Kittler’s analyses throughout his career—from being just one kind of element in heterogeneous discourse networks in the first stage, to forming general communication systems in the second one, to becoming principal factors of existence in the third one—they actually lose relevance as mediating forces for that which they mediate: from having a part in generating discourses in the first stage, to being demoted to channels for signal transport in the second one, to becoming fundamental yet self-effacing mediators of being in the third one. This ambivalent change—the emergence of the realist or marginalist perspective on media—is most evident in Kittler’s view of the Latin alphabet and its Greek precursor. In the beginning, during his discursive stage of work, the alphabet interests Kittler not as a medium by itself but only as the instrument of distinct historical practices of reading and writing.⁵⁰ What really matters are the rules governing the production, distribution, and consumption of discourse through letters. Hence, the regulatory principle in the Discourse Network 1800 is not the set of consonants and vowels as such, the alphabet as a system, but rather modern literacy: the process of alphabetization and its ‘products’, alphabetized people. According to Kittler, it was new educational techniques proposed and implemented at the end of the eighteenth century that made modern German literature possible. Only novel ways of teaching and learning how to read and write naturalized and individualized alphabetic technology so that literary texts were made completely consumable by perfectly alphabetized bodies.⁵¹ ‘The revolution of the European alphabet’ around 1800, Kittler remarks, ‘was its oralization’.⁵² With the shift from discourse to technology in the second stage, the alphabet itself, as a medium or code regardless of particular practices, ⁴⁹ See Kittler (2009b, 2013b). ⁵¹ See Kittler (1990b: 34–5).

⁵⁰ See Kittler (1990b). ⁵² Kittler (1990b: 32).

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becomes the object of Kittler’s investigation. The Greek script (together with its later Latin and European adoption) is placed within the larger framework of a universal history of media so that it can be systematically evaluated in comparison to other communication technologies.⁵³ Whereas, in his first stage, Kittler grants the alphabet an exceptional status only by its being part of a distinct discursive formation around 1800, in the second stage, it is historically generalized to have been ‘old Europe’s only storage technology’ from ancient times up to the nineteenth century and to have created and sustained the ‘age-old monopoly of writing’.⁵⁴ Furthermore, its unique characteristic is seen in the fact that it is ‘entirely susceptible of orality’.⁵⁵ Because its symbols—unlike those of other writing systems—unambiguously represent all significant speech sounds, the alphabet acts as a perfect ‘channel’ for language. Finally, in the third stage, the Greek alphabet takes on an even greater historical and theoretical role in Kittler’s studies—arguably the greatest role possible. It is no longer being classified as just one medium among others; instead, it is judged to be the ‘one’ medium—the primary or Ur-medium, if you will. The alphabet is, Kittler declares, ‘the unique and datable founding event of our unique culture’.⁵⁶ As the supposed technological origin and foundation of Greek culture (and thereby, in Kittler’s eyes, of all Western culture), it serves as the initial spark for the process of media evolution and represents the recurring principle in all major technological innovations up to the digital computers of today: ‘Ever since, it has not ceased being called up again in ever new recursions.’⁵⁷ The notion of the alphabet’s temporary historical monopoly from the second stage has been replaced by the thesis of its perpetual technological prevalence.

2.5. Reality Is in the Letters Kittler extends his claim for the alphabet’s cultural primacy beyond just the historical dimension. Because Greek letters were used—through a recursive recoding of the symbols—to designate not only the sounds of spoken language but natural numbers and musical notes as well, Kittler deems the alphabet a universal medium, (re-)presenting or ‘presencing’ ⁵³ See Kittler (1996). ⁵⁶ Kittler (2006a: 127).

⁵⁴ Kittler (1999: 13, 18). ⁵⁷ Kittler (2006a: 127).

⁵⁵ Kittler (1996: n. p.).

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  .  everything that matters in early Greek culture. By mediating speech, poetry, song, music, and mathematics, it reveals to human eyes and ears what actually is. ‘[U]nconcealment [Unverborgenheit] or aletheia— this trinity of being-present, being-something, and omniscience —is not a matter of Platonic philosophy, but rather the bequest of the vocalic alphabet[.]’⁵⁸ Before Socrates, says Kittler, there was an ‘essential unity of writing, number, image and tone’.⁵⁹ Poetry, music and mathematics were not (yet) separate arts or epistemic domains but aspects or manifestation of one and the same common ground of existence and knowledge. The alphabet, therefore, operated as a kind of ontological machine mediating being. ‘The Greeks, and they alone, had with their alphabet a medium that made true the logos itself in its gathering or joining.’⁶⁰ Interpreting the alphabet as the universal driving force behind all technological and cultural change from ancient Greece to the modern day also gives media history a quite different structure from what it had previously in Kittler’s work. Instead of a linear model of progressive evolution towards the goal of a perfect information and communication system (that is, the digital computer), the late Kittler conceives of history as a cyclic process in which the same basic principle (that is, the alphabet) is taken up and transformed again and again in a looping or spiralling movement.⁶¹ Hence, everything that comes to be in history is, in a kernel, already present at the very start. Every technological and cultural step forward also means a return to the beginning. ‘Nothing Greek ever becomes wrong when something new reveals itself, only ever more profound and universal.’⁶² Kittler’s name for this structure of history is ‘recursion’.⁶³ However, according to Kittler, the glory that was early Greece soon faded as the original physicality or ‘presence’ of being, mediated through alphabetic letters, was obscured and suppressed by Socratic and Platonic concepts of non-physical ideas or Forms.⁶⁴ The decline of Greek and, in consequence, of Western culture as a whole was caused by the metaphysical ‘forgetting of being’ (Heidegger’s Seinsvergessenheit)—which

⁵⁸ Kittler (2013a: 260). ⁵⁹ Kittler (2006b: 52). ⁶⁰ Kittler (2006a: 292). ⁶¹ See Winthrop-Young (2015a). ⁶² Kittler (2009a: 244, my translation) (‘Nichts Griechisches wird falsch, wenn etwas Neues sich entbirgt, nur immer abgründiger und allgemeiner’). ⁶³ See Kittler (2009a: 244–6). ⁶⁴ See Kittler (2006b: 52).

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was really, in Kittler’s interpretation, the forgetting of the medium of being. Beginning with Socrates and Plato, philosophy systematically severed λόγος, logic, and ontology from their constitutive medium— that is, the alphabet—and became a matter of ‘abstract’ reasoning detached from the alphabetically ‘presenced’ physical reality of being. Against this philosophical neglect or repression Kittler insists: ‘Simply put, what is, is alphabetic. This, only this, metaphysics forgets.’⁶⁵ Thus, the structure of historical recursion on the alphabet also implies the promise of an eventual return to or a recovery of the initial presence of being that was lost in metaphysical thinking. And, indeed, Kittler sees the modern digital computer as a reimplementation of the alphabet’s primary capacity to mediate reality in a unique and universal way. ‘Just as in ancient Greece where one and the same alphabet stood at once for speech elements, natural numbers, and musical pitches, our binary system encompasses everything known about culture and nature, which was formerly encoded in letters, images, and sounds.’⁶⁶ From the technological uniformity of the digital code emerge texts, images, and sounds comprising the entirety of our culture.

2.6. The Alphabet: A ‘Pure’ Medium to ‘Sharpen our Senses’ Kittler’s idea that the Greek alphabet and its historical counterpart, the digital computer, serve as universal technologies capable of producing all possible cultural forms of expression shows strong generativist tendencies, of course, and it would be a mistake to ignore or deny this aspect of Kittler’s media theory.⁶⁷ Still, I want to argue that in the end Kittler’s concept of media is fundamentally indebted to a marginalist understanding of mediacy and that this marginalist (and realist) perspective is the dominant factor in Kittler’s thinking of media. This becomes evident when we consider the original purpose, the primary cause of the ‘one’ medium, the Greek alphabet. It was developed, Kittler contends in accordance with Barry Powell’s controversial thesis, to write down the

⁶⁵ Kittler (2009a: 157, my translation) (‘Kurz gesagt: was ist, ist alphabetisch. Das, nur das, vergisst Metaphysik’). ⁶⁶ Kittler (2004: 249). ⁶⁷ See also Heilmann (2016).

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  .  songs of Homer.⁶⁸ The decisive step in the evolution of the alphabet— that is, the addition of vowel signs to the Northern Syrian consonantal script—occurred ‘for the exclusive purpose of transmitting the oralmusical Iliad and Odyssey down to the present age’.⁶⁹ The alphabet was the first writing system devised to denote all significant sounds of (Greek) language so that—at least in Kittler’s account—anything one could say or sing could be ‘recorded’ completely and ‘played back’ exactly through vocalizing written texts. The historical origin and objective of the writing system are as clear and obvious to Kittler as the representations it enables: ‘There is the Iliad, there is the Odyssey. They have been present to us verbatim for ages. [ . . . ] The meaning of Being is that there is Being. Whoever hopes for more errs. Homeros sung It for us. [ . . . ] The singer sings, the rest of us, enchanted, listen. [ . . . ] He or she writes along with the singer. That is all there is to it.’⁷⁰ As Kittler ultimately comes to see the Greek alphabet not as one medium among others but as the medium, it no longer makes any sense for him to contrast it with media technologies from other epochs (as he did, in a way, in Discourse Networks 1800/1900). What he does instead is to judge the alphabet in the abstract and in direct competition with other systems of writing. In this theoretical comparison—which is more media rivalry than media history—the Greek alphabet is the undisputed winner. Echoing similar sentiments by Georg W. F. Hegel and Ignace J. Gelb,⁷¹ Kittler finds the alphabet to be the finest of all writing systems. And it is the finest system precisely because, as Kittler claims, it represents language more accurately than do others. What sets the alphabet apart from ‘competitors’ such as the Egyptian hieroglyphs, the Sumerian cuneiform, and the Hebrew abjad is the one-to-one correspondence of symbol and sound, the perfect (in Kittler’s mind) correlation of graphic character and spoken phoneme. Unlike Egyptian hieroglyphs or the Hebrew script, the ‘complete’ Greek alphabet allows one to read—that is, to pronounce correctly—written words and phrases even when one does not know the language but only the sound values of ⁶⁸ See Powell (1991). ⁶⁹ Kittler (2006b: 55). ⁷⁰ Kittler (2006a: 121, my translation) (‘Es gibt die Ilias, es gibt die Odyssee. Sie liegen uns im Wortlaut vor, seit Ewigkeiten. [ . . . ] Der Sinn von Sein liegt darin, dass es Sein gibt. Wer mehr hofft, täuscht sich. Homeros hat Es uns ersungen. [ . . . ] Der Sänger singt, wir anderen hören ihm bezaubert zu. [ . . . ] Einer oder Eine schreibt den Sänger mit. Das war es dann’). ⁷¹ See Hegel (2007: 197); Gelb (1963: 201).

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the letters. ‘[T]he Greeks created five vowels in order to record and collect the unwritten and blind [die schriftlos blinden] songs of Homer. In this sense, and no other, the Greek alphabet has remained our mother tongue: one does not have to understand it in order to read it—a unique event in the world. One need only discern [erhören] that singing presumes A, E, I, O, U, women, voices, and song—vowels [Selbstlaute], that is.’⁷² These two features distinguish the Greek script and are therefore of particular importance to Kittler: first, the fact that the alphabet represents language not at the level of meaning but at the level of meaningless yet distinctive sounds (so-called phonemes); and, second, that it does so exhaustively. The complete phonemic representation achieved by Greek letters guarantees that Greek language can be registered and rendered unambiguously. Kittler stresses this point by retelling the story of Belshazzar’s feast and the writing on the wall from the Book of Daniel as a tale of deception: the biblical prophet is able to fool Belshazzar not only because the king and his men cannot read Hebrew but because the Jewish consonantal letters allow Daniel to supply the lacking vowels as he chooses.⁷³ It is the ‘missing’ parts of the Hebrew script that enable Daniel’s trick: ‘Words in consonantal alphabets can be reinterpreted almost at will.’⁷⁴ While in Kittler’s mind non-alphabetic writing systems like the Hebrew abjad are ‘defective’ and can be used in deceitful ways, the alphabet is a whole and true medium. The crucial addition of vowels by the Greeks has made it ‘pure’.⁷⁵ The ‘loss’ or absence of meaning that characterizes alphabetic letters in contrast to other writing systems is really a gain according to Kittler. For the script’s meaningless symbols (meaningless in the linguistic sense, that is) operate as ‘neutral’ transmitters of semantically unfiltered, ‘direct’ sensual experience. ‘[We want t]o celebrate Homer as the glow of all senses that only light up in the Greek alphabet precisely because—for the first time in the history of writing—the script does not make any pictorial sense.’⁷⁶ As the primary medium of Western culture, the Greek writing ⁷² Kittler (2013a: 259). ⁷³ See Kittler (2006a: 107). ⁷⁴ Kittler (2006a: 107, my translation) (‘Worte in Konsonantenschriften sind fast beliebig umzudeuten’). ⁷⁵ Kittler (2006a: 109, my translation) (‘Das Alphabet wird rein’). ⁷⁶ Kittler (2009a: 12, my translation) (‘Homeros als das Glühen aller Sinne feiern, die nur im Griechenalphabet aufleuchten, grad weil es selbst—zum ersten Mal in aller Schriftgeschichte—ja keinen Bildsinn macht’).

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  .  system shows in exemplary fashion what media are—or what they should be. ‘[I]t is not the meaning of signs to make any sense, they are there to sharpen our senses rather than ensnare them in definitions. It is not the meaning of media to transmit meaning; rather, they are to pass on to the senses of others what would otherwise fade away in the present.’⁷⁷ Media relate or communicate to human senses impressions from the outside world. They are our gateways to reality.

2.7. The Perfect Telephone for Language It is curious enough that a theory of media (if Kittler’s work really merits this label) should judge some media to be better at mediating or communicating messages than others. But the truly remarkable thing about it is that this implies the existence of an unmediated central point of reference and measure for the quality of mediacy. And this is exactly what Kittler’s notion of writing systems, and his concept of media in general, does. For it is possible to contrast different ways of mediating and to rate the respective characteristics and capacities of various media only when you have something that does not change from one form of mediation to the next, when there is something that stays one and the same ‘outside of ’ media and can thus serve as the yardstick for comparing the ‘results’ of mediacy or communication. For Kittler, this fundamental ‘something’ is language—language not in a structuralist sense, as a system of signs, or as a Derridean play of signifiers; but language as spoken (or sung) words, language as an acoustic phenomenon, as a physical, sensual, corporal activity and experience. At least since McLuhan’s seminal Understanding Media,⁷⁸ media theory has applied an extensive idea of what constitutes media and has conceptualized and analysed an ever-growing field of research objects under the label ‘medium’. Not coincidentally, Kittler repeatedly quotes McLuhan’s proposition that the content of a medium is always another medium.⁷⁹ In the historical sequence of media, every new technology incorporates the logic of an older one so that the historian of media can

⁷⁷ Kittler (2006b: 57). ⁷⁸ See McLuhan (1964). ⁷⁹ See Kittler (1996: n. p.; 1999: 12); see also McLuhan (1964: 8).

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trace the evolution of media in reverse order ‘until at some point one returns back to the Babylonian tower of everyday languages’.⁸⁰ Unlike McLuhan,⁸¹ however, the late Kittler explicitly excludes (spoken) language from the evolutionary line of media as their non-technical point of origin: ‘Now, scripts and writing systems are media technologies, and I would go so far as to say that they are the very beginning of media technologies [ . . . ] And language is no medium, no technical medium at all. I think Heidegger’s beautiful saying about language, that language is the house of being, is true.’⁸² At the heart of Kittler’s final theoretical and historical framework we find a fundamental asymmetry: on the one hand, there is spoken language, our ‘mother tongue’; on the other hand, there are media. Media begin with writing systems, and it is their primary purpose to mediate language. In this regard, different media can be compared and evaluated by the quality of the communications or representations they enable. The objectively ‘best’ writing system—the Greek alphabet—is the one that represents the physical reality of spoken language most closely and faithfully without (semantically) adding anything to it or (phonemically) omitting anything from it. Already at the beginning of Western culture, according to Kittler, we can see the ideal medium, a ‘pure’ system for the ‘truthful’ representation of (linguistic) reality.⁸³ It is not hard to see how this idea is media marginalism at its best. The function of media, put in general terms, is to represent as closely and faithfully as possible that which they mediate. Ideally, a medium would act as a completely transparent window on the world; its mode of mediacy would therefore be immediacy.⁸⁴ The marginalist notion that media such as writing, phonography, and photography communicate the ‘real’ world—a pre-existing reality independent of technological mediacy—and relate it to us in text, sound, and picture is certainly not unusual for a common-sense understanding of media and for our everyday use of media technology. But it is very peculiar to find such an idea at the centre of an academic oeuvre that is often said to be the epitome of generativist German media theory. Yet, ironically, the conceptual nucleus of Kittler’s famous Medienwissenschaft ⁸⁰ Kittler (2010: 31). ⁸¹ See McLuhan (1964: 77–80). ⁸² Kittler and Khayyat (2012: 14); see also Kittler and Wegwerth (2006). ⁸³ See Kittler (2006a: 109). ⁸⁴ See Bolter and Grusin (1999).

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  .  is, of all things, a non-medium, spoken language, around which writing and all subsequent media technologies revolve. The structural divide between language and writing determines the whole of Kittler’s theory and history of media, as the relation of Greek tongue to Greek alphabet becomes the model for media and for mediacy in general. Remember that in Kittler’s grand narrative Greek letters are the recurring principle of media history, being ‘called up again in ever new recursions’⁸⁵ until they reach their final technological guise in the universal code of digital computing, thus ‘literally’ bringing the history of communication technologies to an end.⁸⁶ However odd it may seem within the context of (German) media theory, it should not come as too big a surprise that Kittler’s concept of media turns out to be marginalist. After all, one of Kittler’s favourite references throughout his career was Claude Shannon’s mathematical theory of communication. And this model of communication is not by chance one of optimized transmission: ‘The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point.’⁸⁷ The technical goal of communication is the successful reproduction of signals—that is, the perfect representation of an original information. Shannon’s remark that the physical means used for communication—wires, cables, radio waves etc.—are ‘merely the medium’⁸⁸ for the transmission of signals conversely says that media should serve as noise-free channels of information, distorting the signal as little as possible: the better the signalto-noise ratio, the clearer the message, the more useful the medium. Shannon worked as a mathematician and engineer at Bell Telephone Laboratories when he developed his theory of communication in the 1940s.⁸⁹ And while much of the professional background of his work was in wartime projects such as cryptography and fire-control systems, it is not hard to see how the idea of noise-free channels and optimized signal transport directly concerns Bell’s main business: the telephone. In fact, it is easy to imagine the famous communication diagram included in Shannon’s article and popularized in countless reproductions

⁸⁵ Kittler (2006a: 127, my translation) (‘Es hört seitdem nicht auf, in immer neuen Rekursionen wieder aufgerufen zu werden’). ⁸⁶ See Kittler (1996: n.p.). ⁸⁷ Shannon (1948: 379). ⁸⁸ Shannon (1948: 381). ⁸⁹ See Soni and Goodman (2017).

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representing two people who talk to each other over the phone.⁹⁰ Such a setting implies, of course, that the medium works best when it is least noticeable in itself, when there is no noise on the line and the phone transports only the speaker’s voice crisp and clear. A crucial point of Shannon’s theory, which Kittler keeps bringing up, is that the meaning of messages does not matter to the technical workings of the medium or, as Shannon puts it, ‘semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem’.⁹¹ To stay with the example: although telephony is specifically designed and engineered to carry speech, it cares only for the physical manifestation of language—that is, acoustic energy—not for its intellectual dimension. In short, the phone transmits sound, not words and concepts. And this is just how Kittler sees the Greek alphabet, his exemplary or Ur-medium: as a noise-free channel optimized for the transmission of the human voice through exact representation of speech sounds. For Kittler, the Greek alphabet is like a perfect telephone.

2.8. Kittler’s Realism and the ‘Reality’ of Greece Kittler’s media marginalism is most evident in the final stage of his work. But there are clear signs of it already in his earlier texts—the most obvious being, naturally, the repeated references to Shannon’s communication theory with its stated goal of achieving ‘fidelity of transmission’.⁹² As Moritz Hiller has shown, Kittler started reading and referencing Shannon right after he had finished Discourse Networks 1800/1900.⁹³ This is further evidence of the distinct shift in Kittler’s understanding of media and mediacy that occurred at the passage from the first to the second stage of his work. Even in Kittler’s famous Habilitationsschrift, however, one can discern traces of his later veneration for the alphabet’s representational qualities. For the defining characteristic of mediacy in the Discourse Network 1800 is that it turns writing into speech so ‘one seems to hear what has been read’.⁹⁴ Still, ⁹⁰ See Shannon (1948: 381). ⁹¹ Shannon (1948: 379). ⁹² Shannon (1948: 646). ⁹³ See Hiller (2015). In 2000, Kittler edited a volume with German translations of some of Shannon’s texts; see Shannon (2000). ⁹⁴ Kittler (1990b: 65).

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  .  in this stage of Kittler’s work, the alphabet’s hallucinatory powers are not yet seen as a virtue of the medium itself but as an effect of the novel ‘alphabetization technique’ around 1800.⁹⁵ With Gramophone, Film, Typewriter and his subsequent texts on the history of communication technologies, the media marginalism and implied realism in Kittler’s work becomes more pronounced. The stories Kittler tells of how acoustic and optical media came about and how they evolved over time are many things: tales of modern warfare, of popular music, of aesthetics, of technical norms, of mathematics, and of the slow emergence of digital coding and computing.⁹⁶ But they are also, taken together and read as a universal history of media, a grand narrative of ‘technological progression’⁹⁷—a tale of media’s gradual perfection from simpler forms of technical mediation to ever more complex machines and systems of mediacy capable of ever ‘better’ (that is, more realist) representations in acoustic and visual form. Thus, the technical reproduction of sound advances from Edison’s and Marconi’s early experiments with phonography and radio to the gramophone and medium-wave radio, to FM radio and vinyl records, to stereophony and high-fidelity equipment, and finally to digital formats like the compact disc. Similarly, the reproduction of images progresses from hand-painting to the camera obscura and laterna magica, to lithography, to Daguerre’s and Talbot’s photographic plates, to film and to Marey’s and Muybridge’s serial imagery, to cinematography, to television and video, and, at last, to computer graphics. Technically mediated sounds and images get ever ‘closer’ to the real world until, eventually, technology achieves an audio-visual realism that is phenomenologically on a par with physical reality itself.⁹⁸ Kittler was no Baudrillard who criticized the vanishing of reality behind its technological simulations.⁹⁹ He welcomed new media technologies and admired their aesthetic effects. He repeatedly expressed his appreciation of high-quality sound reproduction, of more pixels and colours on his computer screen, of sophisticated 3D rendering, and so on.¹⁰⁰ To Kittler, technology does not threaten unmediated reality or

⁹⁵ ⁹⁷ ⁹⁹ ¹⁰⁰

Kittler (1990b: 65). ⁹⁶ See Kittler (1996, 1998, 1999, 2010, 2013c, d). Winthrop-Young (2006: 83). ⁹⁸ See Kittler (2010: 207; 2013e: 49). See Baudrillard (1988). See Kittler (2001; 2013c: 159–60; Kittler and Banz (2012: 29–30).

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lessen ‘real’ experiences. On the contrary, it promises a better, more exact communication of the physical existence of things and thus a deeper understanding of the world.¹⁰¹ Ontologically and epistemologically, Kittler was undoubtedly a realist, someone who was, by his own words, ‘keenly interested in the reality of things’.¹⁰² As he once remarked in an interview against the constructivism of Niklas Luhmann: ‘I don’t think that I merely construct my world’¹⁰³—and, in Kittler’s theoretical framework, neither do media. They (re)present the real world, for better or for worse. Kittler’s realism took on a rather strange form at the end of his life and academic career. With the turn to ancient Greek culture, his interest in the ‘reality of things’ or the ‘realness’ of the world turned into the conviction that certain things must have been real, that they had really happened. The most obvious example is his suggestion that the Odyssey is to be read not as a piece of fiction but as a factual report. To Kittler, Odysseus is the name of a person who actually lived and really went on the journey described in Homer’s poem. Following Ernle Bradford’s course,¹⁰⁴ Kittler tried to retrace parts of Odysseus’ voyage through the Mediterranean: in 2004, he travelled to the Li Galli islands in the company of two female singers to re-create Odysseus’ encounter with the Sirens and to see—or better, to hear—how this famed meeting must have played out in real life. The acoustic ‘field investigation’ Kittler conducted with the help of the singers convinced him that Odysseus had, in fact, stepped ashore the island and gotten together with the Sirens (and only lied about if afterwards because he feared Penelope’s wrath): ‘After two thousand and eight hundred years, we finally put philology on an experimental basis rather than on textual wanking.’¹⁰⁵ Kittler’s Musik und Mathematik thus strives not only to be a study of ancient literature or of media but to present a factual account of major events in the history of Western culture. Making good on the promise given early on in his career that ‘everything has a date’,¹⁰⁶ Kittler presents his readers with a one-hundred-page-long chronology in the second part ¹⁰¹ See Kittler (2002b: 270–1). ¹⁰² Kittler and Armitage (2006: 18). ¹⁰³ Kittler and Weinberger (2012: 383). ¹⁰⁴ See Bradford (1964). ¹⁰⁵ Kittler (2005: 00:12:11–00:12:27, my translation) (‘Wir haben einfach nach zweitausendachthundert Jahren [ . . . ] endlich mal die Philologie auf eine experimentelle Basis gestellt statt immer auf eine Textwichserei’). ¹⁰⁶ Kittler and Weinberger (2012: 377).

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  .  of Musik und Mathematik that ranges from 30000  to 2008 . The list contains entries we might expect in a history of culture and media— for example, the destruction of the Library of Alexandria, the first printing of John Napier’s Rabdologiæ, or the release of the Sony Walkman.¹⁰⁷ But Kittler’s chronology does not stop at historically documented events. It also, strangely, shows dates for mythical incidents like the birth of Dionysus (1467 ), the wedding of Cadmus and Harmonia (1489 ), and the killing of Pentheus (1448 ).¹⁰⁸ Likewise, it recounts the life and deeds of Kittler’s lying hero Odysseus with remarkable exactness: 1250 Anticlea gives birth to Odysseus, whether from her husband Laertes or from her rogue Sisyphos [ . . . ] 1248 Priam rules over Troy with his 50 sons (from Hector to Paris) [ . . . ] 1220 Paris abducts the wife of Menelaos of Sparta: with Helen, the cause of war is given [ . . . ] 1218 the united Achaeans debark at the Scamander and attack Troy [ . . . ] 1209 hidden inside the wooden horse, Odysseus decides the war for Troy, bones and traces of fire remain [ . . . ] 1207 Odysseus listens to the two Sirens [ . . . ]¹⁰⁹

The Odyssey, Kittler’s book and timeline tell us, is real. And its unique medium, the Greek alphabet, conveys the song as it was really sung by the bard, sound for sound, almost three thousand years ago by acting as a noise-free phone line from the past, as a perfectly transparent channel for language. Surprisingly, the media marginalism that complements Kittler’s realism has, to my knowledge, never been broadly discussed within media studies. It seems as if German media theory prefers to ignore the fact that the controversial mastermind of the discipline saw mediacy exemplified—paradoxically—in an immediate mediation of a nonmedium. For the theoretical implications of this conceptual decision are profound: positing a non-medium (that is, spoken language) as the primary point of reference and then praising the paradigmatic Ur-medium (that is, the Greek alphabet) for the transparent transmission of said non-medium is not only incompatible with fundamental beliefs of generativist media theory. It is quite the opposite of media theory, a theory not of mediation but of immediacy, of immediate sensation and communication, of ‘direct’ contact with or access to ¹⁰⁷ See Kittler (2009a: 337, 352, 379). ¹⁰⁸ See Kittler (2009a: 295–6). ¹⁰⁹ Kittler (2009a: 298–300, my translation).

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reality. The closest anyone has come to explicitly addressing this is Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, who, in his excellent afterword to a collection of Kittler’s essays, mentions Kittler’s ‘consistent intellectual gesture of making what is real “ready-to-hand” and then concentrating on the “self-unconcealment” of what is ready-to-hand.’¹¹⁰ However, Gumbrecht quickly backtracks as he continues: ‘I believe that this recurring gesture concerns the preconditions under which what is real can become ready-to-hand and disclose itself, and not the forms of its “representation”.’¹¹¹ I hope I have been able to show how Kittler’s conception of the Greek alphabet tells a different story. It is the, allegedly, perfect representation of song and speech granted by the Ur-medium (thanks to the one-to-one correspondence of alphabetic letter and spoken sound) that lets the ‘material reality of language’,¹¹² the human voice, reveal or ‘unconceal’ itself. As this paradigmatic case demonstrates, Kittler’s analyses of media, which are conceptually based on his understanding of the relation of writing and language, concern precisely their representational qualities—qualities that are ultimately measured against the standard set by unmediated reality itself. Within the theoretical framework of Kittler’s media studies, representation by media aims at the ‘direct’ or undistorted presentation of reality, of making physical reality present to human senses or, in Heideggerean terms, of ‘presencing’ it. The promise of media, hence, is the faithful sensing of the world, a promise given first and kept best, in Kittler’s mind, by the ancient technology of alphabetic letters: ‘In the Greek alphabet our senses were present.’¹¹³ Accordingly, Kittler portrays Presocratic Greece as an ideal ‘realm of sensual culture’,¹¹⁴ a wonderful place of beautiful women (Sirens, nymphs, goddesses, and so on), sweet wine and honey, and enchanting song and music¹¹⁵—certainly more fantasy than historical reality. In the end, or at the conceptual beginning, Kittler’s history and theory of media give way to a desire for presence and immediate sensation, to the idea of a life lived and an existence experienced to the fullest, all backed by a curious alphabetic realism.

¹¹⁰ Gumbrecht (2014: 323). ¹¹² Kittler (1990b: 86). ¹¹⁴ Breger (2006: 130).

¹¹¹ Gumbrecht (2014: 323). ¹¹³ Kittler (2006b: 59). ¹¹⁵ See Kittler (2006a: 126–54 et passim).

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3 The Seal of Polycrates A Discourse on Discourse Channel Conditions Verity Platt

In his lectures on Optical Media, Friedrich Kittler sought to trace the history of image production, storage, and transmission through the lens of media technologies, from linear perspective to computer graphics. One of his opening observations is that ‘we knew nothing about our own senses until media provided models and metaphors’.¹ To illustrate, he points to Plato’s deployment of a wax tablet as a metaphor for ‘the immortal and self-storing soul’, alluding to the model of memory that Socrates presents in the Theaetetus, whereby sense perceptions are impressed into an ekmageion, or ‘imprint receiving device’ in the mind (191c–d). The Greek concept of mind (psychê) as a storage device for indexically recorded impressions becomes conceivable, Kittler implies, only through the medium of written philosophy itself. Platonic ontology is made possible by means of the very technology about which he expresses so much ambivalence; in Kittler’s words: ‘Under the guise of a metaphor that was not just a metaphor [ . . . ] the new media technology that gave rise to the soul was eventually seen as the vanishing point of this newly invented soul.’ But what was this ‘new media technology’? Kittler refers to writing as ‘the new medium of Attic democracy’, and to ‘the new Ionic vowel alphabet’, ‘the wax slate’, and the tabula rasa as the media that brought ¹ Kittler (2010: 34–5). Verity Platt, The Seal of Polycrates: A Discourse on Discourse Channel Conditions In: Classics and Media Theory. Edited by: Pantelis Michelakis, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198846024.003.0003

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   Platonic philosophy into being: ‘The only thing that can be known about the soul or the human’, he claims, ‘are the technical gadgets with which they have been historically measured at any given time’. The Greek alphabet would go on to comprise the fundamental medium through which Kittler theorizes the ‘Greek Miracle’ in his Musik und Mathematik, whereby its encoding of speech, number, and musical pitch is presented as a universal sign system that anticipates the digital processing capacities of Alan Turing’s computational theory.² But that is not the media technology on which I will focus here. Rather, I will look more closely at a technology that Kittler passes over in his gloss on Plato in Optical Media, but which arguably plays a more fundamental role in the Platonic theory of mind (and, consequently, the epistemological models espoused by Aristotle and the Stoics): the metaphor of the seal-ring, or daktylios. As Socrates suggests in the Theaetetus, and as later Greek philosophical schools would develop further, ‘whenever we wish to remember anything we see or hear or think of in our own minds, we hold [the ekmageion] under the perceptions and thoughts and imprint them upon it, just as we make impressions from seal rings’ (ὥσπερ δακτυλίων σημεῖα ἐνσημαινομένους).³ Kittler may have declared that ‘writing is where mediality begins’, but seals, I argue, play just as important a role in Greek models of mediation.⁴ As we shall see, sealing is fundamental to the toolbox of ‘cultural techniques’ (Kulturtechniken) through which Greek society recursively processed its own forms of media, for the act of impressing (entupôsis) reflexively drew attention to practices of transmission and communication.⁵

² Kittler (2009a). On the role of the Greek alphabet in theories of media, see Heilmann (2016) and Chapter 2, this volume. For a helpful discussion of Kittler’s Musik und Mathematik, see Winthrop-Young (2011a: 82–119; 2015a); on Kittler’s return to Greek culture in his late writings and the particular legacy of German Hellenophilia with which his work engages, see Breger (2006); and on Kittler’s interest in ‘media genealogy,’ see Siegert (2015b). ³ Theaetetus 191d. On this passage, see in particular Bostock (1988: 169–90), Burnyeat (1990: 90–105), and Ambuel (2015: 148–73), with Ackrill (1966), Angene (1978), Fine (1979), Benson (1992), Barton (1999), Woolf (2004), Long (2006), and Tschemplik (2008: 103–40). For a more thorough analysis of the seal-wax model in Greek philosophy of mind, see my discussion in Platt (forthcoming a). ⁴ Kittler (2012: 127). ⁵ For an overview of cultural techniques, see the papers gathered in both Krämer and Bredekamp (2003) and Theory, Culture & Society (2013), 30/6, together with Siegert

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This essay does not contest Kittler’s argument that Greek ontology is the outcome of specific media technologies; rather, it aims to supplement the technological apparatus on which he drew. While technologies of writing—on wax tablets, papyrus, and stone—are a crucial component of this story, they are deeply bound to the encoding and storage of language.⁶ Seals, though connected to written script in close and complex ways, are predominantly designed to transmit iconic images in the form of impressions, thereby relaying a wealth of sensory data that exceeds the capacities of lettered script. In this regard, they are arguably more important to the media archaeology of the visual, and thus to ancient Greek models of sense perception. As ‘indexical’ devices, seals are vital precursors to the later development of printing, sound recording, photography, and film, offering a prehistory of analogue technologies that operate by means of the stamp, imprint, or trace—particularly those that employ wax as a receptive medium.⁷ The use of the seal-impression as a metaphor for sense perception anticipates Henry Fox Talbot’s characterization of photography as ‘impressed by Nature’s hand’ in The Pencil of Nature (1844–6), or André Bazin’s claim that photography is akin to ‘the taking of an impression by the manipulation of light’—an ontology of the image that he compares to the moulding of wax death masks.⁸ In its capacity to act as a metaphor for memory, the seal anticipates Freud’s ‘mystic writing-pad’, which models mental storage and retrieval upon the concept of a wax ‘imprint-receiving device’ (or Platonic ekmageion) combined with a celluloid sheet.⁹ As an apparatus that operates as an

(2015a) and Winthrop-Young (2015b). On sealing as a cultural technique, see my discussion later in this chapter. ⁶ On writing as a cultural technique that is, nevertheless, ‘visual-iconographic’ as well as ‘phonographic’, see Krämer (2003). ⁷ The receptive capacities of the wax cylinder are fundamental to the role of the phonograph and gramophone in Kittler’s Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1999: 38–78). On the ‘archaeology, anachronism, and modernity’ of the impression, see Didi-Huberman (2008); on the long history of the imprint as a ‘direct, mechanical bodily technique preserved in a particular medium’, from the dactyloscopic fingerprint to contemporary performance art, see Hauser (2013); on mechanical reproduction as a form of ‘ontological relay,’ see Brain (2015: 7–10). ⁸ Fox Talbot (1844–66); Bazin (1960: 7). On the ontology of the seal-impression and early theories of the photographic image, see Platt (2006); on the media apparatus of the wax death mask and Roman concepts of the imago, see Crowley (2016). ⁹ Freud (1961). On Freud as a ‘media theorist’ concerned with the inscription, recording, storage, and retrieval of memory, see Derrida (1978: 196–224), on ‘Freud and the Scene of

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   interface for the transmission of data between different media (that is, ‘a surface lying between two portions of matter or space’), the seal also offers an influential model of intermediality—whether between the material world and the psychê, or between the different materials that enabled ancient practices of transmission, storage, and processing (from stone and metal to wax, clay, and plaster).¹⁰ Through their technical affordances and ontological complexity, seals not only determined and configured intellectual operations in antiquity: they also shaped Greek engagement with the world itself.¹¹

3.1. The Seal as Medium Engraved during the fifth century  on a cylindrical piece of sard, a seated youth plucks the strings of his triangular harp (Figure 3.1).¹² Discovered on the Greek island of Corfu, the stone was carved in intaglio, meaning that it could function as a seal (sphragis) when impressed into wax or clay. Like many engraved gems dating to the Classical period, in which stringed instruments are played by men or women, or appear by themselves (as the lyre in Figure 3.2), the sard presents itself as a vehicle of communication.¹³ Just as the youth’s fingers Writing’, Draaisma (2001: 7–10), Doane (2003: 33–68), and especially Elsaesser (2009), who also takes into account Freud’s great interest in archaeology. On Freud’s dependence upon the phonograph for his theory of psychoanalysis, see Kittler (1999: 83–94): as WinthropYoung (2015b: 456–7) comments: ‘Just as Plato’s Phaedrus condemns writing as insufficient for philosophical purposes only to have it reappear in metaphorical guise to illustrate the philosophically more-satisfactory inscription of the soul, Kittler’s Freud elides the fact that nineteenth-century storage and communication media precede and prepare the ground for psychoanalysis, only to then have them illustrate the dynamics of his talking cure.’ ¹⁰ OED s.v. ‘Interface’. On the media–theoretical significance of the interface, see Paulsen (2017). On intermediality (‘the crossing of borders between media’ (Rajewsky 2005: 46), see especially Rajewsky (2002, 2005), and Schröter (2010, 2011). ¹¹ For a parallel argument about the relationship between technology and the cultural imagination, see Littau (2011). ¹² British Museum, London, 563 (acquired 1868), engraved onto a sliced barrel bead and tentatively ascribed to the gem-cutter Dexamenos: see Walters and Smith (1926: no. 563) and Boardman (2001: no. 517). On the trigônos or trigônon, see Herbig (1929: 173–4), Maas and McIntosh Snyder (1989: 150–5), and West (1992: 70–5); note that Walters identifies the harp as a magadis. ¹³ Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, 1921.1236, a mottled jasper scaraboid: see Boardman (2001: no. 614). For further examples of Classical gems depicting stringed instruments, see Boardman (2001): no. 472 (a fifth-century- rock crystal scaraboid depicting a woman playing the trigônon, Boston MFA, LHG 67); no. 600 (a burnt fourth-century- scaraboid

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Figure 3.1. Sard intaglio (left) and plaster impression (right) of a seated youth plucking the strings of his harp, sliced barrel bead, fifth century , British Museum, London, 563 (acquired 1868). © Trustees of the British Museum

pluck the strings of his harp in order to transmit music to the ears of his listeners, so the seal-stone is manipulated by its owner so that its image might be reproduced in a pliable material, creating a typos, or impression. It is no accident, one might argue, that the artist with whose school this gem is associated signs himself as DEXAMENOS, ‘he who receives’ (from the Greek verb δέχομαι).¹⁴ As media of signification, seals are fundamentally concerned with acts of transmission and reception.¹⁵ To engrave a harp or lyre upon a seal is thus to draw attention to the seal’s own status as an instrument of communication. The image conveys not depicting a youth playing the trigonôn, Hermitage Museum inv. L.27), and no. 605 (a fourth-century- cornelian depicting a woman playing the kithara, British Museum 1153). As the extensive ‘lyre-player group’ of scaraboid seals imported throughout Greece from Cilicia during the eighth century  demonstrates, this iconography had a long history in the Mediterranean: see Boardman (1990) and Spier (1992: 50–1). ¹⁴ On the mid-fifth-century- gem-cutter Dexamenos, see Boardman (1969; 2001: 194–200), Neverov (1973), and Platt (2006: 236–7, 243–4). BM 563 is attributed to Dexamenos by Walters and Smith (1926: no. 563). ¹⁵ On the complex semiotics of seals, see Cassin (1960) on Mesopotamia, Platt (2006) on Greece and Rome, and, most importantly, the sophisticated analyses of Medieval seals found in the work of Brigitte Bedos-Rezak (see, e.g. 2000; 2001; 2008; 2011: 55–94).

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Figure 3.2. Plaster impression of a lyre, from a mottled jasper scaraboid intaglio, fifth century , Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, 1921.1236. © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford

only the skilled handiwork of the engraver, akin to the dexterity of the musician, but also the mediatory power of the object itself as a sign (sêma) of its owner’s authority, impressed by his own hand and possibly even worn as a finger ring (daktylios). Significantly, the Corfu gem and its impression depict a scene of active performance: just as the harpist’s fingers are perpetually poised on the strings, so the seal exists in a state of potential communication, always ready to be activated by those who stamp it and those who witness its impression. In this sense, the Corfu gem exemplifies Marshall McLuhan’s claim that ‘the content of a medium is always another medium’: as a sealdevice, it contains a visual image (or matrix), which itself contains a

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musical performance, with the potential to contain further media in the form of song.¹⁶ Nesting one transmissive process inside another, it acts as both a communicative object and an object that comments upon its own communicative power. As such, the seal exists within a category of phenomena that, in Kittler’s words, perform ‘a discourse on discourse channel conditions’.¹⁷ In depicting an act of sonic communication while broadcasting its own capacity to reproduce visual images, the seal declares its ability both to act upon the senses and to transmit important information: literally, to signify (from the Latin signare, ‘to set a mark upon’, ‘to stamp’, or ‘to seal’). Importantly, this process of signification is channelled between different media (from engraved stone to impressed wax or clay) and between different bodies (from the hand of the owner to the eyes of the impression’s viewers and, implicitly, from the instrument plucked by the musician to the ears of his listeners). When used to sign documents and seal letters, the engraved image accompanies written text, a pairing that dates back to the impressed clay tablets of Minoan Crete (and their Near Eastern equivalents), but that became increasingly prevalent as practices of documentation became more widespread from the fifth century .¹⁸ As devices for the authentification of lettered scripts, seals protect written texts from interference and the ‘noise’ of the communication process, legitimizing their content through their own signalling power. Thus, while bearing iconic representations, seals and ¹⁶ McLuhan (1964: 8). For a problematization of this model of media containment in relation to theories of intermediality, however, see Schröter (2011: 5), for whom the seal’s operations would be better described as ‘transmedial’ (cf. Rajewsky (2005) on the intermedial notion of ‘media transposition’). ¹⁷ Kittler (1982: 473); see also Kittler (1990b). For discussion, see Winthrop-Young (2006; 2011a: 28–51). ¹⁸ See Kenna (1962: 2): ‘The close relationship between [writing and sealing] and their invariable sequence has been noticed wherever seals and sealings have been found in any quantity.’ On the long history of seals, see Kittel (1970), Charpin (1985), Bautier (1990), and Collon and Betts (1997), with Kenna (1962, 1963, 1964), Palaima (1990), Krzyszkowska (2005), and Weingarten (2012) on Minoan seals and sealings. On seal usage in Greek culture, see Bonner (1908), Plantzos (1999: 18–32), and Boardman (2001: 235–8, 446–8), with Gibson and Biggs (1977) on seal-usage and royal bureaucracies in the ancient Near East. As Boardman (2001: 193) points out, we see a marked increase in the number of seal production centres in the Classical period, which suggests that their use was spreading. Despite the strong relationship between seals and texts, however, we should avoid drawing any straightforward relationship with levels of literacy (on which see Harris (1991) and Thomas (1992: 128–5)). As Bedos-Rezak (2011: 58) comments of Medieval sealing practices, broad regional and institutional variation suggests that ‘there is no systematic or even necessary relationship between seals and the growth of literacy’.

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   their functions are intimately tied to the symbolic systems of language. Moreover, seals could also transmit texts themselves, most often in the form of artists’ signatures.¹⁹ The term typos applies both to impressions made by intaglio-cut gems and to impressions formed by letters as they were inscribed into wax writing tablets—leading directly to our concept of ‘type’.²⁰ At the same time, the allusion to musical performance on the Corfu gem gestures towards a broader set of sensory relations. In such cases, the seal’s powers of transmission provide a model for sonic, as well as graphic, communication, while the figural aspects of its matrix convey formal qualities that extend beyond the symbolic encodings of text— whether expressed through the flexed muscles of the musician’s right arm as it crosses his softly-modelled chest, the sinuous curves of his himation as it settles around his hips, or the waves of his hair, which ripple and fan out as if released from the taut strings of his harp. In this sense, the seal acts as a signifier of meaning (encoding its message in the symbolic systems of iconography or text), while also reproducing aesthetic aspects that are grounded in the material and spatial features of the gem and its impression, and the embodied, affective responses of those that hold and behold it. This chapter argues that, together, the seal and its impression constituted antiquity’s ‘archetypal’ intermedial device. Sealing was a widespread form of technology that, in enacting processes of sending and receiving, served as a key conceptual model for transmission between different media. As such, it offered a highly fertile metaphor with which to probe relationships between texts, images, and objects, and between aesthetic artefacts and the senses. Furthermore, the technology of sealing made this conceptualization of intermedial relations possible in the first place: as an ‘archetype,’ it formed the ‘originary mould’ in which notions of transferal and reproduction were themselves conceived.²¹ In semiotic terms, the seal functions as an index: the impression it creates has what

¹⁹ For signatures on gems, see Richter (1956: pp. xxxi–xli), Vollenweider (1966), Guarducci (1974: 515–30), Zazoff (1983: 101–2, 132–41, 205–8), Zwierlein-Diehl (2005; 2007: 549–50), Platt (2006: 243–4), Osborne (2010: 242–3), Hurwit (2015: 33–8), and Squire (2013: 383–5), together with my discussion later in this chapter. ²⁰ Steiner (1994: 100–5). ²¹ On the idea that technology lays the groundwork for the development of abstract concepts (in ancient Greece, as in later Western culture), see Kittler (2010: 34–5).

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Charles Sanders Peirce described as an ‘existential relation’ to the object that it signifies, being ‘connected with it as a matter of fact’.²² Like footprints, death masks, and coins, seal-impressions form part of a special subcategory of index, whereby the abductive process that links the material trace to the object that produced it depends upon features of resemblance created by means of material contact.²³ In denoting this kind of indexical relationship between media, the Greek concept of typôsis thus offered a model of transmission that was inextricably bound to its material vehicles. Seals might carry ‘iconic’ forms upon their surfaces that operate at the level of visual representation (or mimêsis), like the image of the musician on the Corfu sard.²⁴ But the means by which they transmit such images—and from which they derive their functional efficacy and cultural authority—inheres in and between the media of stone, wax, and clay. Understood as media, seals and their impressions thus take us beyond representation to a materially embedded ontology of the image that has profound implications for our understanding of Greco-Roman aesthetics.

3.2. Polycrates and the (Meta)physics of Seals The most famous of ancient seal-stones is best known to us from a text contemporary with the Corfu sard: the account in Herodotus’ Histories 3.40.1–43.2 of the seal of Polycrates, who headed an aggressive thalassocracy as tyrant of Samos between 538 and 522 . Notably, the divinatory role that Polycrates’ seal (σϕρηγὶς) plays in his downfall is framed by a series of letters between the king and his Egyptian ally, Pharaoh Amasis II. Here, text and object both function as media of transmission that warn the tyrant of the vulnerability invited by his ‘great good fortune’, and draw attention to his failure to interpret correctly the messages relayed to him by vital systems of communication. ²² Quotes from Peirce (1955: 101; 1960–6: iv. 359) respectively. For discussion, see Parmentier (1994: 3–44) and Atkin (2005), with Bedos-Rezak (2011: 62–71) (on sealimpressions) and Paulsen (2013; 2017: 17–38) (who, in contrast to dominant narratives of photographic theory, argues that ‘the index is an inherently ephemeral, doubtful, and distant sign that hinges on a split temporality’ (2017: 19)). ²³ Didi-Huberman (2008). ²⁴ On the difference between ‘index’ and ‘icon’ in Peircean semiotics, see Peirce (1982–2009: ii. 56), with Short (2007: 215–23).

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   ‘Amasis addresses Polycrates as follows. It is pleasant to learn that a friend and ally is doing well. But I do not like these great successes of yours; for I know the gods, how jealous they are, and I desire somehow that both I and those for whom I care succeed in some affairs, fail in others, and thus pass life faring differently by turns, rather than succeed at everything. For from all I have heard I know of no man whom continual good fortune did not bring in the end to evil, and utter destruction. Therefore if you will be persuaded by me do this regarding your successes: consider what you hold most precious and what you will be sorriest to lose, and cast it away so that it shall never again be seen among men; then, if after this the successes that come to you are not mixed with mischances, strive to mend the matter as I have counselled you.’ Reading this, and perceiving that Amasis’ advice was good, Polycrates considered which of his treasures it would most grieve his soul (ψυχὴν) to lose, and came to this conclusion: he wore a seal (σϕρηγὶς) set in gold, an emerald, crafted by Theodorus son of Telecles of Samos; being resolved to cast this away, he embarked in a fifty-oared ship with its crew, and told them to put out to sea; and when he was far from the island, he took off the seal-ring in sight of all that were on the ship and cast it into the sea. This done, he sailed back and went to his house, where he grieved for the loss. But on the fifth or sixth day from this it happened that a fisherman, who had taken a fine and great fish, and desired to make a gift of it to Polycrates, brought it to the door and said that he wished to see Polycrates. This being granted, he gave the fish, saying: ‘O King, when I caught this fish, I thought best not to take it to market, although I am a man who lives by his hands (ἀποχειροβίοτος), but it seemed to me worthy of you and your greatness; and so I bring and offer it to you.’ Polycrates was pleased with what the fisherman said; ‘You have done very well,’ he answered, ‘and I give you double thanks, for your words and for the gift; and I invite you to dine with me’. Proud of this honour, the fisherman went home; but the servants, cutting up the fish, found in its belly Polycrates’ sealring (σϕρηγῖδα). As soon as they saw and seized it, they brought it with joy to Polycrates, and giving the ring to him told him how it had been found. Polycrates saw that this was a divine affair (θεῖον εἶναι τὸ πρῆγμα); he wrote a letter (βυβλίον) and sent it to Egypt, telling all that he had done, and what had happened to him. When Amasis had read Polycrates’ letter, he perceived that no man could save another from his destiny, and that Polycrates, being so continually fortunate that he even found what he cast away, must come to an evil end. So he sent a herald (κήρυκα) to Samos to renounce his friendship, determined that when some great and terrible mischance overtook Polycrates he himself might not have to sadden his heart for a friend.²⁵

²⁵ Translation by A. D. Godley (with some modifications), Loeb Classical Library, 1930. For commentary, see Asheri, Lloyd and Corcella (2007: 441–2).

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The Polycrates episode has been analysed from multiple angles: as an example of ‘folk tale’ within the Histories (and a parallel to the mythic cycle associated with the Cretan king Minos, head of another island thalassocracy); as evidence for the talismanic function of objects within the archaic Greek tradition, and the role of significatory systems within the Histories; as a meditation on the economy of human happiness enshrined within the Greek ethical system; and as a telling example of gift exchange gone awry, in which archaic systems of aristocratic reciprocity come into conflict with emerging systems of civic coinage.²⁶ But how should we approach it as a function of media? Here, we might look to the opening of an essay on ‘Media after Media’, in which the theorist Bernhard Siegert relates Kittler’s anecdote of a taxi ride shared between himself and Niklas Luhmann (the father of systems theory). As they discussed the contrast between social systems and electronic circuits, Luhmann directed Kittler to picture ancient Babylonia: ‘A messenger rides through the city gate!’ he exclaimed. ‘Some (like me) ask what kind of message he brings. Others (like you) ask what kind of horse he rides.’²⁷ What kind of horses, then, carry the sociocultural ‘messages’ that scholars have drawn from the Polycrates episode? First, of course, is the Ionic vowel alphabet in which Herodotus writes, and the storage capacities of papyrus that make the practice of extensive historical enquiry possible.²⁸ Yet Herodotus’ awareness of his own medium goes hand in hand, in the Polycrates episode, with his gesture towards a broader range of media vehicles; not just letters, but also heralds, ships, fishermen, fish, and even the sea itself accompany the sphrêgis as the prime medium that both signifies and constitutes ²⁶ On the episode as folk tale, see Immerwahr (1957: 314–20) and Van der Veen (1993); for a more historicizing take focused on Samian politics, see Mitchell (1975). On parallels with Minos, see Irwin (2007) and Munson (2012). On the talismanic or votive quality of the seal-ring (and Polycrates’ ‘ritual marriage’ with the sea), see Versnel (1977: 25–45) and Gernet (1981: 127–31); on its relationship to scapegoat rituals, see Ogden (1997: 119–27). On seals and signification in the Histories, see Hollmann (2011: 192–5). On the archaic ‘economy of human happiness’, see Wohl (2002: 239–42), and on the relationship between Polycrates’ seal and emerging systems of coinage, see Steiner (1994: 160–3) and (fundamental) Kurke (1999: 101–21). On the complex ontology of money and its relationship to the figure of Gyges (another tyrant in possession of a powerful ring), see Shell (1978: 11–5) (reprinted in German translation in the volume Medien der Antike (2003)). ²⁷ Siegert (2015b: 79). ²⁸ On the storage capacities of papyrus and its medial implications, see Platt (2018b). On orality and literacy in Herodotus’ Histories, see Thomas (1993) and Johnson (1995).

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   Polycrates’ power—and his downfall.²⁹ It is in this reprocessing of the media substrates of Archaic kingship that Herodotus’ text becomes itself a ‘discourse on discourse channel conditions’. I take this phrase from Kittler’s foundational work, Discourse Networks 1800/1900.³⁰ In his paper ‘Lullaby of Birdland’, Kittler had read Goethe’s 1780/1783 poem ‘Wanderer’s Nightsong’ as a linguistic event (a discourse) that comments upon the very rules and practices that gave rise to it (the discourse channel conditions of Romanticism, in which cultural practices—above all, the symbolic realm of language—are constructed as ‘natural’).³¹ In this way, to quote Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, the poem ‘foregrounds and performs the rules, codes, and cultural ruptures which allow it to affect its readers’.³² It thus exemplifies the ‘Discourse Network’ that would shape the 1800s—an ‘inscription system’ (Aufschreibesystem) that operates as a technological equivalent to Foucault’s epistemes.³³ By extension, Herodotus could be said to operate within Discourse Network 480 —as it looks back to the formation of its own systems of inscription or discourse in the sixth century . From a media–archaeological perspective, the power and significance afforded to Polycrates’ sphrêgis encapsulate the aesthetic, material, technological, and conceptual roles subsequently played by seals in the Greek cultural imagination.³⁴ Here, the material relationship between Polycrates’ seal and the epistolary texts that frame it is fundamental, not least because letters themselves would have been sealed, while the material vehicle for written correspondence elsewhere in the Histories is that of

²⁹ For a media–theoretical approach to the postal system’s influence on literary culture, see Siegert (1999); on the relationship between postal and heraldic forms of media, see Krämer (2015). On the confluence of epistolary and aqueous media systems in Schubert’s Winterreise, see Moseley (forthcoming). ³⁰ Kittler (1990b). ³¹ Kittler (1979). ³² Winthrop-Young (2011a: 32). ³³ On Kittler’s debt to Foucault’s The Order of Things, see David Wellbery’s foreword to Discourse Networks, 1800/1900, where he comments that ‘Kittler’s vaguely sketched Republic of Scholars correlates to Foucault’s Renaissance and classical epistemes, his “1800” to Foucault’s modern system, and his “1900” to Foucault’s roughly sketched postmodernism’ (Kittler 1990b: p. xix). ³⁴ On media archaeology, a materialist approach that seeks to uncover the role of specific technologies (as opposed to content) in shaping history and culture, see Huhtamo and Parikka (2011b), Ernst (2013a), and Parikka (2012b). For a parallel project within the field of Art History, focusing on the prehistory and ‘anachronicity’ of the impression, see DidiHuberman (2008).

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the wax writing tablet.³⁵ Both seals and writing tablets are designed to transmit impressed typoi between individuals, which must be decoded by their recipients. However, while both modes of transmission depend upon acts of impression (and their ability to record data), the nature of what they transmit is profoundly different: whereas written letters employ a symbolic system dependent upon the potential of the Greek alphabet to encode information discretely, seal matrices transmit iconic images. These may employ a binary ‘yes–no’ in their ability to indicate the presence (or absence) of a signature (and its power to ratify or authenticate). But they also incorporate aesthetic components that depend upon the ‘existential relation’ asserted by analogue impressions. In contrast to lettered script, seal-impressions are not freely fungible (that is, capable of being substituted for each other): indeed, their capacity to act as security devices to safeguard stored goods and authenticate documents depends upon the very uniqueness of their forms. When written text does act in this way, it is telling that we call it a ‘signature’. Such analogue specificity, in other words, distinguishes the tyrant’s seal from the technology of the written epistles that frame it (which, if we follow Kittler’s argument in Musik und Mathematik, depend upon the symbolic apparatus of the Greek alphabet³⁶). As Herodotus is at pains to point out, Polycrates’ seal is also a highly valued material object—a priceless emerald (smaragdos) set in gold, worked by the famed Samian artist Theodorus.³⁷ It thus embodies two forms of value: one that lies in its communicative potential, as a device that signifies the king’s authority, secures his wealth, and guarantees the authenticity of documents that issue from his court; and one that rests in its objecthood, as a finely crafted artefact wrought from exotic

³⁵ See, e.g., Histories 3.128 (where the seal of Darius is used to secure letters on scrolls) and 7.269 (the wax tablet letter of Demeratus, discussed later in the chapter). In the Polycrates episode, Herodotus’ reference to biblia seems to suggest papyrus scrolls, rather than writing tablets (deltoi), though both epistolary technologies were sealed in antiquity. On the role of letters in the Histories, see Rosenmeyer (2001: 45–60) (discussing the letters between Polycrates and Amasis on pp. 51–2). On the use of wax tablets for writing letters, see Penny Small (1997). ³⁶ Kittler (2009a). ³⁷ On Theodorus of Samos, see Squire (2011: 283–302, 367–70, 383–4). Herodotus also mentions Theodorus at 1.51.3, as creator of a silver bowl ‘of not average workmanship’ (οὐ [ . . . ] τὸ συντυχὸν [ . . . ] ἔργον) dedicated by Croesus at Delphi.

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   gemstone and precious metal, designed to be worn on the king’s body.³⁸ In recognizing the seal as ‘that which it would most grieve his soul to lose’ (ἐπ᾽ ᾧ ἂν μάλιστα τὴν ψυχὴν ἀσηθείη ἀπολομένῳ (3.41.1)), Polycrates thus performs a twofold act of disposal, casting away the most treasured of his material heirlooms while simultaneously repudiating the instrument that enacts and authenticates his royal power. Significantly, neither the communicative potential nor the material value of Polycrates’ ring rests explicitly in the ‘iconic’ detail of the seal. Herodotus tells us the name of the gem-cutter, Theodorus, but never tells us what was engraved into the emerald to form its device (though later Greek literature gives us an answer, discussed later in this chapter). It has even been suggested that the ring carried no image at all, based on Pliny’s later comment that emeralds tended not to be engraved as seals because their value lay predominantly in the beauty of the stones themselves.³⁹ Nevertheless, an examination of Herodotus’ use of the term sphrêgis elsewhere in the Histories suggests that its primary meaning is that of an object carved with an intaglio device, such as the ‘seal of Darius’ stamped onto his royal correspondence (3.128.2), or seals engraved (γλύϕουσι) by the sharp stone tools of the Ethiopians (7.69.1).⁴⁰ In Herodotus’ version of the Polycrates episode, it is not the seal’s depictive content that matters so much as the object’s particular combination of value, skilled workmanship, and indexical potential—that is, its materiality, facture, and instrumentality. In hurling his sphrêgis into the sea, ³⁸ On the notion of the seal as the ‘owner’s double’ and the ‘hereditary talisman’ of kingly authority, see Cassin (1960) (on Mesopotamian seals) and Kurke (1999: 107–8). ³⁹ As suggested by Kuttner (2005: 155), following Pliny, HN 37.8, where he states that Polycrates’ gem was uncarved (gemma [ . . . ] intacta inlibataque) and 37.62–4, where he comments that their soothing effects and brilliant transparency mean that ‘mankind has decreed that emeralds must be left in their natural state and has forbidden them to be engraved (quam ob rem decreto hominum iis parcitur scalpi vetitis)’. Such a comment is entirely in keeping with Pliny’s own ethics of matter, however: Pliny himself refers to emerald images of Alexander (HN 37.8), while Theophrastus lists emeralds among stones ‘that can reasonably be cut and used as seals’ (λόγον εἰς τὰ σϕραγίδια γλυπτών, de Lap. 8). Several emerald intaglios (as well as those in green serpentine, chrysoprase, peridot, plasma, and jasper) survive from the Archaic and Classical periods (see Boardman 2001: 374–7), while the choice of a translucent green stone (whether carved or not) is entirely fitting for a seal that would be consigned to the sea. ⁴⁰ See Asheri, Lloyd, and Corcella (2007: 442, 510). For personal ownership of a sphrêgis, see also Histories 1.195.2, which describes how each Babylonian owns both a seal and a staff (skêptron) carved with an image (episêmon)—a term also employed for seal devices. For the kingly use of seals, see also 2.121, where King Rhampsinitus seals his treasure chamber.

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Polycrates discards by his own hand the very device that, when worn on and manipulated by his hand, had both instantiated and signified his power and good-fortune.⁴¹ In his attempt to dematerialize the seal by consigning it to an inaccessible realm where it can no longer be activated, what he fails to take into account is that the sea itself is a milieu or environment that operates itself as a receptive medium.⁴² As the material substrate that supports and enables Polycrates’ thalassocracy, the sea transports the seal back to him, transmitting it via an intermediary who explicitly describes himself as ‘a man who lives by his hands’ (ἀποχειροβίοτος).⁴³ In this way, events reinforce the good fortune that Polycrates had sought to counterbalance by rejecting the prime guarantor of his own authority—thus paradoxically undermining it. Polycrates’ eventual fate is prefigured by a breakdown in the seal’s communicative function: he tries to signal his renunciation of great success through the rejection of a significatory device (followed by a letter declaring as such to Amasis), only for the device itself to be returned to him, in a short-circuiting of the mediatory process. In confirmation of this breakdown in communicative systems, Amasis’ response to Polycrates’ letter is to send a reply not by written correspondence, but by herald. Instead of a reciprocal exchange of epistles, the episode thus concludes in an oral announcement that is intended to be heard, but that forecloses any possibility of response. Here, the medium really is the message. As the media philosopher Sybille Krämer points out, the ‘heraldic’ function of media raises serious challenges for effective dialogical communication: that is, it inhibits precisely the kind of reciprocal exchange that Amasis is so keen to terminate.⁴⁴ Polycrates’ power to make instrumental use of the seal (in the signing and securing of royal letters) is effectively shut down, even while the ⁴¹ On the seal as a symbol of the self, which Polycrates seeks to alienate by introducing its lack, see Kurke (1999: 107) and Wohl (2002: 239–40). Cf. Van der Veen (1993: 448), who argues that the ring is returned to Polycrates because its loss has not truly made him suffer, with the implication that the tyrant should have renounced his power instead. ⁴² Meyrowitz (1993); Peters (2015a). ⁴³ On the sea as itself a medium (and the challenges that humans encounter when we seek to operate within and upon it), see Peters (2015a: 53–114). On the role of the sea in ancient Greek thought, especially the ‘vertical’ relationship it mediates between the mortal and immortal, see Beaulieu (2016). ⁴⁴ On the ways in which media themselves function as heralds, see Krämer (2015: esp. 75–86).

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   object’s insistent materiality and ‘at-handedness’ is reinforced by its uncanny return. What emerges is a critical split between material objects and symbolic systems of signification, a ‘cultural rupture’ akin to that described by Winthrop-Young.⁴⁵ This is reinforced by an episode later in book three that leads directly to Polycrates’ death, when Oroites, satrap of Sardis, lures him into a trap by displaying to an intermediary chests full of stones concealed by an upper layer of gold (3.123–5). In locating value in surface material over hidden meaning (and in trusting the judgement of his messenger), Polycrates finally meets his end—a fitting fate for a tyrant who, in trusting to archaic media systems and materials over emerging civic systems of (fungible) coinage and script, reveals himself to be hopelessly stuck in Discourse Network 600 .⁴⁶ Such an interpretation would chime with Leslie Kurke’s compelling suggestion that Polycrates condemns himself through an ‘obsessive series of corrupted or transgressive exchanges’ that mark his inability to adapt to the incipiently democratic institutions that form the fifthcentury- world of Herodotus.⁴⁷ But to draw this conclusion is to underestimate the enduring use of seals as a medium of transmission beyond the sixth century, and their influence on late Classical and Hellenistic philosophies of sense perception. These repeatedly draw upon the seal’s capacity to mediate between material phenomena and abstract mental operations. It is here, I suggest, that the intermedial operations of the seal play a crucial role. As a communicative instrument, Polycrates’ sphrêgis operates within two distinct systems. On the one hand, it is a symbol of kingly power, a reification of his royal status by virtue of its ability to act as a symbolic interface between the tyrant and the administrative networks (often involving the circulation of letters) that enact, relay, and extend his authority. On the other hand, the seal seems to act as a channel of communication between the human, material realm and a range of entities that reach beyond the mortal, the physical, and the textual.⁴⁸

⁴⁵ Winthrop-Young (2011a: 32). ⁴⁶ See Kurke (1999: 113–16) and Wohl (2002: 240–2). Oroites, of course, goes on to meet his own death when a series of letters bearing the seal of the Persian king Darius instruct Oroites’ scribes to order his own guards to murder him, thereby exploiting the administrative system through which written texts are transmitted between courts (3.128). ⁴⁷ Kurke (1999: 102). ⁴⁸ On these aspects of the tale, see Versnel (1977), Gernet (1981: 127–31), Van der Veen (1993), Kurke (1999: 107), and Harrison (2000: 45–7).

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The ‘metaphysical’ aspects of the gem are first signalled by the close bond that is asserted between the object and Polycrates’ soul (psychê): it is the treasure that it will most ‘grieve his soul to lose’ (τὴν ψυχὴν ἀσηθείη ἀπολομένῳ).⁴⁹ Here, the immediate implication is that the tyrant feels a strong affective bond to his seal-ring, based on its high-quality workmanship and great material value. But the broader significance of the sphrêgis, as an indexical instrument and symbolic guarantor of royal power, suggests that it also operates as an expression and even extension of Polycrates’ very personhood: its powers of self-reproduction afford the seal a ‘psychic’ ability to materialize the intangible forces in which Polycrates’ identity resides as one who is ‘Very Powerful’ (as his compound name suggests).⁵⁰ This connection between seal and psychê would go on to play an increasingly influential role in the Greek philosophy of mind, given the status of seals as treasured objects capable of mediating between abstract mental operations and the physical environment. Yet the seal’s metaphysics extend further still. Herodotus is keen to inform us that Polycrates’ emerald was cut and set in gold by the most famous of Samian craftsmen—the sculptor Theodorus, son of Telecles. Though he was a well-known historical figure (who features prominently in the history of Greek art), Theodorus’ name carries special significance in the context of Polycrates’ fate: as an object crafted by or as a ‘Gift from God’, the seal’s uncanny properties are demonstrated in its miraculous return from the depths of the sea, whence it seems to carry a message from the gods themselves, so alluding to the complex communicative system that exists between mortals and the divine.⁵¹ Indeed, its return in the body of a fish suggests a missive from the deep, ‘impressed’ into an animal form in a manner akin to the ‘signs’ read in the practice of haruspexy. It is tempting, too, to see added significance here in the name of Theodorus’ father, Telecles, ‘Fame from Afar’, which suggests not only the renown of the Samian sculptors’ workshop, but also the communicative power of ⁴⁹ On seals and the psychê in later Greek philosophy, see Platt (forthcoming a). ⁵⁰ On the significance of Polycrates’ name, see Looney (2016: 237–8). ⁵¹ On this point, see also Ogden (1997: 120) and Kurke (1999: 107 n. 15). Theodorus’ activities are known to us from several ancient texts, including Plato, Ion 533b, Posidippus AB 67, Diodorus Siculus 1.98, Vitruvius 7, praef., Pliny HN 7.198, 34.83, 35.146, 152, 36.95, Pausanias 3.12.10, 9.41.1, and Athenaeus, Legatio 17: for the literary sources, see DNO s.v. Theodoros: 1.190–2, nos 275–6. On the ‘Theodorean technê’ of the first-century-/ tabulae iliacae and their relationship to the Archaic sculptor Theodorus, see Squire (2011: 283–302, 367–70, 383–4).

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   the objects they produce, which can carry kleos across long distances and (through the replicative potential of the sphrêgis) between media. Given the name and patronymic of its maker, it is fitting that, in recovering his ring, Polycrates sees ‘that the matter is of the gods’ (τὸν δὲ ὡς ἐσῆλθε θεῖον εἶναι τὸ πρῆγμα), understanding it as a theion prêgma, a ‘divine affair.’ Here the choice of prêgma is telling, referring as it does to a ‘deed’ or ‘act’ (as the concrete of praxis), but also by extension to a material ‘thing’—to ‘matter’ as both a situation for concern and a physical substance.⁵² In its extraordinary return, the seal exhibits a dynamic integration of objecthood and agency that suggests supernatural power, as if its communicative potential had been hijacked by divine forces. Here, the sea plays a crucial role as both the source of Polycrates’ strength and an elusive realm of alterity—an ‘elemental medium’ with depths invisible to human eyes, in which mortals must defer to systems beyond their control.⁵³ By returning the king’s seal to him, the sea confirms its special relationship with Polycrates, yet rejects his offering: the message is conveyed not through the transmission of an impression (a typos), but through the return of the sphrêgis itself, so that the originary object becomes itself the message it is intended to transmit. Instead of sealing the letter, as it were, the ring is ‘posted’ to Polycrates within its fishy envelope. It is for this reason that the image Polycrates’ seal may have carried is irrelevant to Herodotus’ narrative, subordinated as it is to the operations and material presence of the object. The seal’s communicative agency is thus reasserted even while the relationship it normally maintains between medium and message is distorted, suggesting a lack of divine favour that is subsequently confirmed by the tyrant’s violent death. The Polycrates episode may seem like an ill-starred port from which to embark on a journey through Greek models of intermediality. In its ⁵² See LSJ s.v. πρᾶγμα. On the function of seals in sacred contexts (e.g. to secure written oracles sent to their home states via theôroi), see Ford (1985: 86–8) and Hubbard (2007: 205), both commenting on the role of the seal in Theognis’ famous sphrêgis elegy (discussed in relation to media transmission in Platt (forthcoming a)). Precious seal-stones were placed in the hands of cult statues, as in the Athenian Asklepieion: see Aleshire (1991: 41–6) and Petsalis-Diomidis (2016: 52). Cf. the metaphorical reference to sealing in Empedocles fr. 31B 115.1–2 DK, on ‘an ancient decree of the gods, sealed by broad oaths’ (θεῶν ψέϕισμα παλαιόν,|ἀίδιον, πλατέεσσι κατεσϕρηισμένον ὅρκοις), discussed by Pratt (1995: 178). On the media function of oracles, see Oikonomou, Chapter 12, this volume. ⁵³ On the sea as an ‘elemental medium’, see n. 37.

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examination of communicative systems gone awry, however, the tale indirectly reveals the normative operations of typôsis. Herodotus is an author supremely attuned not only to processes of signification and interpretation, but also to the powers invested in material objects.⁵⁴ His account of Polycrates’ sphrêgis demonstrates how the work that seals do in transmitting meaning is critical to the smooth functioning of symbolic systems, while establishing a clear relationship between the indexical production of seal-impressions and the communicative functions of written texts. Indeed, we find a fascinating analogy, in media terms, between the Polycrates episode and Herodotus’ later account of a letter smuggled out of Susa by the exiled Spartan king Demaratus, warning the Lacedaemonians of an impending attack by Xerxes (7.239.2–4).⁵⁵ Fearing detection by the Persians, Demaratus took a wax writing tablet, ‘scraped away the wax from it, and then wrote the king’s plan on the wood. Next he melted the wax back again over the writing, so that the bearer of this seemingly blank tablet might not be troubled by the waywardens’ (7.239.3).⁵⁶ The Lacedaemonians were confused by the blank letter they received, until Leonidas’ wife Gorgo advised them to ‘scrape the wax away so that they would find writing on the wood’, thereby revealing its message (7.239.4).⁵⁷ Just as the relationship between medium and message is inverted in the Polycrates episode (so that the seal itself becomes the received ‘impression’ to be decoded), so, in the case of Demaratus’ missive, the wax medium in which text is normally impressed serves instead to conceal a message incised into its wooden substrate. Krämer observes— echoing Aristotle—that, in order to function properly, media must be ‘diaphanous’, suppressing any assertion of their own material presence in

⁵⁴ See, e.g., Dewald (1993), Kurke (1999), Hollmann (2011), and Kirk (2014). On Herodotus’ particular sensitivity to perception through touch (rather than sight) and the materially engaged, haptic nature of perception in general in the Histories, see Purves (2013). ⁵⁵ See Steiner (1994: 150–1), who emphasizes how the Spartans, ‘with their notorious mistrust of writing’, here turn ‘the Persians’ familiarity with writing against themselves’ by exploiting their assumption that a blank tablet is devoid of meaning. ⁵⁶ δελτίον δίπτυχον λαβὼν τὸν κηρὸν αὐτοῦ ἐξέκνησε, καὶ ἔπειτα ἐν τῷ ξύλῳ τοῦ δελτίου ἔγραψε τὴν βασιλέος γνώμην, ποιήσας δὲ ταῦτα ὀπίσω ἐπέτηξε τὸν κηρὸν ἐπὶ τὰ γράμματα, ἵνα ϕερόμενον κεινὸν τὸ δελτίον μηδὲν πρῆγμα παρέχοι πρὸς τῶν ὁδοϕυλάκων. ⁵⁷ τὸν κηρὸν κνᾶν κελεύουσα, καὶ εὑρήσειν σϕέας γράμματα ἐν τῷ ξύλῳ.

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   order to convey their content effectively.⁵⁸ Wax can certainly have diaphanous and dematerializing properties, and these are crucial to certain intermedial operations.⁵⁹ In the case of Demaratus, however, it is the opacity of wax when applied as a surface to writing tablets that is exploited, operating as a form of concealment, rather than revelation.⁶⁰ Only when it is returned to a ‘transparent’ status by its own removal can the message the wax hides be properly received: in paradoxically reversing its own media operations, wax still manages to fulfil its transmissive function.

3.3. Sphragistic Recursions Herodotus’ propensity to use the stamped or written impression as a means of reflecting on processes of transmission, communication, and interpretation heralds a rich tradition of what we might call ‘metasphragistic’ discourse in ancient culture—from the self-stamping poetics of Theognis’ famous sphrêgis elegy to philosophical models of knowledge acquisition.⁶¹ As the Polycrates episode illustrates, seals offer a potent means of visualizing the transfer of form and meaning between different media, while also gesturing towards a metaphysics of media that incorporates both the psychic and the divine. The seal’s seemingly uncanny potential to relay content between different kinds of material—and, by extension, between different ontic categories—would prove to be of profound importance for later Greek thought. It would influence both models of sense perception that sought to clarify the relationship between the psychê and the phenomenal environment, and models of intermedial relations between texts and objects. In this way, Greek ⁵⁸ Krämer (2015: 30–4). See also Mersch (2002) and Jäger (2004). On the origins of ‘diaphanous media’ in Aristotle’s theory of sense perception and his concept of the metaxy, see Hoffmann (2002), Seitter (2002), Hagen (2008), Alloa (2012) (together with Alloa, Chapter 6, this volume), and Krämer (2016c: 205–7). ⁵⁹ Platt (forthcoming b). ⁶⁰ On the metamorphic qualities of wax and its capacity to present ‘a disconcerting multiplicity of properties’, see Didi-Huberman (1999: quotation, p. 64; 2008), Bloom (2003: pp. xii–xvi), Panzanelli (2008), Platt and Squire (2017), and Platt (forthcoming b). ⁶¹ On the seal’s relationship to orality, literacy, and textual transmission in Theognis’ sphrêgis elegy (in which he declares, ‘let a seal lie upon these verses for me as I communicate poetic wisdom’ (σοϕιζομένῳ μὲν ἐμοὶ σϕρηγὶς ἐπικείσθω τοῖσδ᾽ ἔπεσιν, lines 19–20)), see Ford (1985), Friis Johansen (1991, 1993, 1996), Steiner (1994: 89–91), Pratt (1995), Hubbard (2007), and Platt (forthcoming a).

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culture recursively reprocessed its own sphragistic operations, constructing the practice of sealing as a cultural technique that itself made possible the perception, memory, and knowledge of the real.⁶² According to Theophrastus, the process of entypôsis (or ‘impressing in wax’) was first invoked by Democritus as a means of explaining the mechanics of vision according to atomist physics: for ‘the air between (μεταξὺ) the organ of sight and the thing seen is impressed (τυποῦσθαι) because it is compressed by the thing seen and the seeing subject’.⁶³ Accordingly, when the effluences that continually stream off objects are exposed to light and push towards the eye, ‘the air is moulded (ἀπομάττεται) like wax that is squeezed and pressed’, taking on impressions of those objects that then enter the eye in the form of reflections (emphaseis) on the pupil; these are then transmitted from the eye to the rest of the body.⁶⁴ From its first appearance in Greek philosophy, the device of the impression is thus bound to models of perception that seek to explain how encounters with the stuff of the material world might be translated into mental content, and in particular to haptic models of sight (here, intromission) that construe encounters with visual objects as a form of touch.⁶⁵ While the epistemological value of the impression would shift according to the ontological investments of each particular philosophical school, Democritus’ yoking of the seal’s mechanics to notions of media transmission, sense perception, and knowledge acquisition would ⁶² On cultural techniques as ‘operative chains composed of actors and technological objects that produce cultural orders and constructs which are subsequently installed as the basis of these operations’, see Winthrop-Young (2015b: 458). ⁶³ Theophrastus, De sensibus 50 = DK 68A 135: ἀλλὰ τὸν ἀέρα τὸν μεταξὺ τῆς ὄψεως καὶ τοῦ ὁρωμένου τυποῦσθαι συστελλόμενον ὑπὸ τοῦ ὁρωμένου καὶ τοῦ ὁρῶντος. Translation from Rudolph (2016: 49). On Democritus’ model of vision, see von Fritz (1953), Guthrie (1965: 386–472), Burkert (1977), Rudolph (2011; 2016: 49–53), and Nightingale (2016: 55–6) (though note Burkert and Rudolph’s controversial argument, disputed by Nightingale, that Democritus also put forward a theory of visual rays extending from the eyes—a form of extramission that combined with effluences of atoms in order to produce an emphasis upon the pupil). As Long (2006: 229 n. 10) observes, the term τύπος was also employed in the fifth century  as an image for sensory input in Gorgias’ Helen, DK 82B11, 13, 15. ⁶⁴ Theophrastus, De sensibus 52 = DK 68A 135: ὁ ἀὴρ ἀπομάττεται καθάπερ κηρὸς ὠυούμενος καὶ πυκνούμενος. ⁶⁵ On the difference between ‘intromissionist’ and ‘extramissionist’ (or ‘emissionist’) models of sight in antiquity, see Lindberg (1976: 1–17), Rakoczy (1996: 19–37), Smith (1996: 21–3), Nightingale (2016), Rudolph (2016), and Squire (2016a: 16–17). On the application of haptic models of sense perception to all the senses, particularly by the Presocratics, see Purves (2017a), with Porter (2010: 416 (on Democritus) and Steiner Goldner (2017) (on Aristotle).

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   endure throughout antiquity, becoming a vital tool for epistemological self-positioning employed by Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics.⁶⁶ In particular, it played a vital role in the Stoic notion of phantasia, a ‘cognitive impression’ that, ‘imprinted seal-fashion (ἐναπεσϕραγισμένην) and stamped (ἐναπομεμαγμένην) upon the mind’, prompted the process of mental assent (sunkatathesis) and, ultimately, the acquisition of knowledge by means of sense perception.⁶⁷ The Stoic model of phantasia takes us into territory that is familiar to anyone concerned with the language of ancient ekphrasis, where the idea of a mental ‘presentation’ that can be conjured in words and transmitted to the mind’s eye of the reader or listener is crucial to the operations of literary enargeia (‘vividness’).⁶⁸ As a paradigmatic model of intermediality within antiquity, ekphrasis brings us back to the seal of Polycrates, which forms one of the Lithika (or ‘poems on stones’) comprising the opening section of Posidippus’ third-century- collection of so-called ‘ekphrastic epigrams’.⁶⁹ Epigram, especially in its ekphrastic form, is possibly the most intensely media conscious of Greek literary genres.⁷⁰ Posidippus plays in myriad ways with its epigraphic origins and transfer, in the context of Hellenistic book culture, to the medium of the papyrus roll.⁷¹ The Lithika parade the materiality of epigram through their vivid evocations of precious stone objects and the bodies that work and wear them.⁷² At the same time, they demonstrate an intense awareness of the ⁶⁶ On the use of the seal metaphor by Plato (Theaetetus 191c–196c), see n. 2; on Aristotle’s adaptation of it to suit his model of hylomorphism at On the Soul 424a19 (= 2.12), see Platt (2006, which includes further bibliography); on its use by the Stoics, see Ioppolo (1990), Long (2006), and Ierodiakonou (2007). ⁶⁷ Diogenes Laertius 7.45–46 (Life of Zeno) = SVF ii. 53. Cf. Sextus Empiricus, Against the Professors 7.236 = SVF 1. 58, and Philo, Quod deus sit immut. 42–3 = SVF ii. 458 (discussed by Ierodiakonou 2007: 51–2). ⁶⁸ See, from a vast bibliography, Goldhill (1994, 2007), Elsner (1995: 26–8), Dubel (1997), Manieri (1998), Serra (2007), Webb (2009: 107–30; 2016), and Platt (2011: 293–329). On the relationship between ekphrasis and phantasia (and its ethical implications) in Roman Stoicism, see Bartsch (2007). ⁶⁹ Posidippus AB 9: see Luppe (2002) and Elsner (2014: 165–6). ⁷⁰ On the self-conscious textuality of Hellenistic epigram and its relationship to inscribed objects, see especially Männlein-Robert (2007), Prioux (2007), and Bing (2009). On the problematic application of ‘ekphrasis’ to epideictic epigrams concerned with art objects, see Zanker (2004: 184–5), with a defence of the term in Squire (2010: 593 n. 15). ⁷¹ Griffiths (2006). ⁷² On the intense materiality of the Lithika, see especially Porter (2010: 483–7) and Elsner (2014), with relevant discussion in Hunter (2004), Schur (2004), Smith (2004), Gutzwiller (2005a: 302–3), Kuttner (2005), Petrain (2005), and Christensen (2011).

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textual vehicle that conveys such details to the reader. They are thus concerned with not only the verbal transmission of sensory data relating to vision and touch, but also the process of reflecting upon such verbal acts of transmission: that is, they conduct a ‘discourse on discourse channel conditions’. As an archetypal model of intermediality, the sealstone offers an appropriately lithic object of aisthêsis for Posidippus’ poems ‘on stones’; at the same time, it offers a paradigmatic means of recursively reflecting upon the intermedial operations of epigram. Fittingly, several engraved gems feature within the virtual collection that forms the Lithika,⁷³ and it is here, finally, that we discover what was supposedly engraved on Polycrates’ seal: ἡιρήσ]ω̣ σϕρη ̣γ[ῖδα], Π̣ ολύκρατες, ἀνδρὸς ἀοιδοῦ . . . ϕο]ρ̣μίζ[οντος σοῖς] π̣αρὰ π̣[οσσ]ὶ ̣ λύρην . . . . . ]εν κρ̣[ . . . . . . .]. αυγ ̣[.. ἔσ]χ̣ε δὲ σὴ χεὶρ __ . . . .]ε̣κρ̣[ 11 ]. ν[ . . . . .]ν κτέανον.⁷⁴ [You chose] the lyre for your seal, Polycrates, the lyre of the singer [who pl]ayed [at your] feet . . . .] rays; and your hand to[ok] . . . ] possession.

In Posidippus’ hands, the seal as paradigm of transmission communicates a message that turns out to be the medium of poetic song itself. Engraved within the medium of Polycrates’ royal sphrêgis, which is itself ‘impressed’ within the medium of inscribed epigram, we find an image of another kind of device—a musical instrument. This is the lyre of Polycrates’ court poet (identified by Herodotus as Anacreon (3.121.1)), perhaps engraved together with an image of the poet who played it. As a sphrêgis poem that reveals to the reader a typos of the author himself (as a poet in the royal court of the Ptolemies), the Polycrates epigram reprocesses Theognis’ sphragistic poetics within the context of ‘ekphrastic’ epigram, stamping the genre with Posidippus’ own literary imprimatur.⁷⁵

⁷³ These are AB 9 (the seal of Polycrates), 10 (an Achaemenid cylinder seal), 11 (an engraved shell), 13 (an intaglio featuring a lion), 14 (a chalcedony featuring Pegasus), and 15 (a ‘serpent-stone’ with a minutely incised chariot). ⁷⁴ AB 9, I 3–6. Text from F. Angiò, M. Cuypers, B. Acosta-Hughes, and E. Kosmetatou (eds), New Poems Attributed to Posidippus: A Text-In-Progress, version 13.0, January 2016 (© Center for Hellenic Studies). ⁷⁵ On AB 9 as itself a sphrêgis poem, see Elsner (2014: 165–6). On the genre of the selfidentifying sphrêgis poem in Hellenistic poetry more generally (which does not tend to refer

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   In this way, all the media operations of Posidippus’ own enterprise turn out to be nested in an iconic representation of sonic communication transmitted by a precious stone that is itself impressed upon the psychê of the reader through the inscribed typoi of written verse. We have come full circle to the Corfu gem with which we began (Figure 3.1), only to find that the analogical operations of the visual impression have themselves been digitized as a sequence of discrete letters, stored and circulated by means of the book. Whereas Herodotus’ version of Polycrates’ seal reflects upon Discourse Network 600 through the lens of Network 480, Posidippus reprocesses the Herodotean anecdote through the media technologies of Network 300, reappropriating sphragistic technology for the culture of court, library, and archive in Hellenistic Alexandria. That he imagines his own symbolic operations through the technology of the impressed image, however, simultaneously points to the indexical precision, epistemological value, and insistent materiality of the engraved gem, which continually repeats its uncanny return from the sea of ancient media.

to actual seals), see Klooster (2011). On the geo-politics of the Lithika and the role of the Ptolemaic court, see Bing (2005) and Kuttner (2005).

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4 Metaphysics and the Mathematical Diagram Geometry between History and Philosophy Duncan F. Kennedy

4.1. Introduction: Geometry between History and Philosophy The Roman writer Vitruvius prefaces the sixth book of his work On Architecture (a practice that makes extensive use of geometrical diagrams) with an anecdote about ‘the Socratic philosopher’ Aristippus.¹ Shipwrecked on the shore of Rhodes, he saw that geometric diagrams (geometrica schemata) had been drawn there, and exclaimed to his companions: ‘Let us be of good hope: I see the marks of human beings!’ (bene speremus! hominum enim vestigia video). Aristippus spoke of ‘human beings’, but the marks seem to have indicated to him a particular type of human being—one who made marks he recognized as geometric diagrams—and, as a ‘philosopher’, he himself was a particular type of human being who is likely to have been familiar with diagrams. The anecdote portrays a particular way of being in the world, one of the themes this chapter will explore. It is a reminder not only that one of ¹ The identity of this Aristippus is uncertain: either ‘Aristippus of Cyrene, a contemporary and associate of Socrates, and a man of luxurious habits, or his grandson, a founder of the Cyrenaic school of philosophy’ (Rowland and Howe 1999: 249); see further Lampe (2015: 16–18). Duncan F. Kennedy, Metaphysics and the Mathematical Diagram: Geometry between History and Philosophy In: Classics and Media Theory. Edited by: Pantelis Michelakis, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198846024.003.0004

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  .  the most familiar associations of geometry is the diagram, of triangles, squares, and so on,² but also that, through the allusion to Socrates, geometry has an honoured place in the writings of Plato.³ Crucially, it is involved in the development of a mode of thinking later ages would come to call ‘metaphysics’. Plato himself does not use this term, nor does Aristotle, for all that he wrote a series of texts that now go under the title Metaphysics.⁴ Nonetheless, a key theme in Plato’s writings is the question of what ‘really’ exists, a question that generates his ‘theory’ of Forms, to which geometry, it is argued in the Republic, acts as a pointer: the objects of geometrical thought, such as the triangle ‘in itself ’, are assigned a special ontological status, though diagrams themselves are systematically downplayed in his writings. What follows here is a discussion dense with detail and that interweaves many threads of argument, so first a brief overview of the main issues. I will start with aspects of the description of geometry in the Meno and the Republic that are often passed over in scholarly discussions, in particular the physical gestures and indexical language that Socrates uses in the Republic to ‘point to’ a hierarchical separation of realms of being, our world ‘here’ being associated with coming-into-being (genesis), while the Forms, the objects of full ontological investment (ousia), exist ‘over there’. Aristotle says that, for Plato, mathematical objects such as the square ‘in itself ’ occupy the space ‘in-between’. A key issue then broached is how thought becomes spatialized, as lines or even in diagrammatical form (see Section 4.2). I will then go on to consider two recent discussions, those of Reviel Netz and Sybille Krämer, which do not seek, as Socrates does, to look ‘through’ diagrams to geometrical objects, but focus on diagrams as enabling certain kinds of problemsolving and the spatialization of thought (see Section 4.3). Netz’s overtly historical approach militantly eschews ontological concerns, whereas Krämer’s so-called diagrammatology is comfortable in locating itself in a

² Greek mathematics embraces both geometry and arithmetic, and although diagrams are most closely associated with geometry, they can explore numerical relations as well, as we shall see. ³ Fowler (1987: 197–202) discusses the evidence for the famous inscription reputedly at the entrance to his Academy: ‘Let no-one unskilled in geometry enter’ (AGEŌMETRĒTOS MĒDEIS EISITŌ). ⁴ The term first appears in ancient commentaries on Aristotle. On the history and associations of the term see Kennedy (forthcoming b).

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philosophical mode of thinking, albeit one that distances itself from assumptions about what it is to be human that are associated with platonizing traditions. However, when pressed, Netz’s account is shot through with ontological assumptions about what geometry (geometry ‘proper’, if you will) ‘really’ is that cannot be easily disentangled from the platonizing reception of geometry he seeks to elide (see Section 4.4). Accounts of geometry are caught between the demands of history and philosophy; but does one view ‘history’ and ‘philosophy’ as ‘there all along’ or as emergent discourses or styles of thinking that are in tension with one another—not, or not yet, or even never, ‘truly’ distinct? The study of the emergence of geometry makes those tensions palpable. History, a discourse that takes the study of coming-into-being (genesis) as its driving impulse, arguably cannot do without ontological investments, as Netz’s exposition makes clear— just as philosophy’s concern with being (ousia) makes strong historical claims, as Krämer’s diagrammatology shows. With these concerns in mind, Section 4.5 will explore the issue of what Ian Hacking calls ‘historical ontologies’: just as you might not simply look through diagrams to the geometrical objects beyond, so the study of historical ontologies asks of you not to look through concepts like ‘history’ or ‘philosophy’ (as if they are just there), but to make their coming-into-being the focus of study. Still, historicizing ontologies wrestles with one impulse that would isolate moments you can point to and say that concepts such as ‘geometry’, ‘theory’, or ‘metaphysics’ are really there, and another that would see such concepts in terms of a perpetuity of coming-into-being. The sheer diversity of mathematical practices across cultures and time suggests their contingency, which leads Hacking to grapple with the question why there is philosophy of mathematics at all. His answer—Plato—will come as no surprise, but his arguments serve to emphasize the importance of taking the dynamics of reception into account when thinking not only about mathematics, but about philosophy as well. Of particular disciplinary relevance to the discussion that follows is the tradition that describes itself as ‘German media theory’, with its study of Kulturtechniken. This term resists easy translation. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young comments that it ‘encompasses drills, routines, skills, habituations, and techniques as well as tools, gadgets, artifacts, and technologies’.⁵ The latter (‘tools [ . . . ] and technologies’) are widely ⁵ Translator’s note in Siegert (2015a: p. xv).

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  .  seen as ‘things in-between’ (media) in the various branches of media studies, but it is distinctive of German media theory to bring a distinctively philosophical focus no less to the former (‘drills [ . . . ] and techniques’), and, taking these together, to see the question of what it is to be a human being in the world at any historical moment as one of mediation, and, indeed, to regard Kultur in this broad sense as the proper domain of ontology.⁶ The middle and what exactly occupies the ‘in-between’ are a contested area, as we shall see, and German media theory is heavily invested in metaphysical assumptions that are themselves part of the intellectual phenomena it seeks to explicate and historicize (see especially Section 4.4 and 4.5); a brief foray into comparative anthropology, which seeks to configure cultural techniques within different styles of argument will help to give some purchase on these investments (see Section 4.6). The role of the mathematical diagram and the skills associated with it can therefore act as a lens (an appropriately medial term!) for the issues this chapter addresses that lie at the intersection (of the ‘lines’) of theory and the history of ideas. But to set the argument going I offer my own reading of what Socrates says about geometry and geometrical diagrams in the Meno and the Republic.

4.2. Thinking through Diagrams with Socrates In one of the most famous scenes in Plato’s works, Socrates takes one of Meno’s slaves through a geometrical problem (Meno 81e–86b). Drawing a square⁷ with a side 2 feet long, a square that therefore has an area of 4 square feet, Socrates poses the question: how do you draw a square that is double the area? The slave initially suggests doubling the length of the ⁶ Cf. Kittler (2009b); Peters (2015a: 23–30); Siegert (2015a: 1–17). ⁷ Bluck (1961: 292): ‘We must imagine Socrates drawing a square in the sand.’ This is more or less taken for granted (cf. Scott (2006: 98): ‘Socrates starts the examination by drawing a square with two-foot sides in the sand’), and, though not made explicit, is plausible. In 83b, Socrates says ‘let us describe [anagrapsōmetha] the square’, the verb suggesting that the inscription is made in a way that is generally visible (cf. LSJ s.v. anagraphō). Meno is invited to observe what is going on, and we must bear in mind that the object of the demonstration is not to instruct the slave, but to make a point to Meno about the persistence of knowledge that serves to constitute one of the characterizing concerns of ‘philosophy’. Inscription in sand, if that is the case, suggests an ephemeral quality to the diagram, as well as a capacity for alteration and erasure.

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side, but the resulting alteration to the diagram gives a square four times the area. Through a succession of questions and answers related to alterations made to the diagram, the solution emerges: to get a square that is twice the area of the first, you draw a second square whose side is the diagonal of the first. Translators and commentators habitually have used lettered diagrams to illustrate the argument,⁸ as illustrated in Figure 4.1, a manuscript of the Meno that dates from the tenth century , and that probably represents a practice already long established. However, Socrates consistently uses deictic language. In Meno 82b, Socrates opens the conversation by asking the slave if he knows that a square figure is like this (toiouton); a square figure has these (tautas) four lines, and these (tautasi) drawn through the middle (that is, diagonals) are equal (82c). And so on through the argument. Presumably we are to imagine Socrates as pointing, the demonstrative words acting out the

Figure 4.1. Design drawings showing the problem of doubling the square in the scholia on Plato’s Meno 82b sqq. in Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Suppl. graec. 7, fo. 418r. Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna ⁸ This point is made by Giaquinto (1993: 86); cf., e.g., Bluck (1961: 294–305).

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  .  gestures on a verbal level: the eye is to follow the directions Socrates thus gives.⁹ In 83a, the slave is instructed to look (hora) at the diagram; in 84a, he is told, if he does not want to count out (that is, work out the length of a line arithmetically), to point out (deixon) which line it is; in 85a, he is told to look and consider (skopei): how large is this space (touti to khōrion)? Socrates goes through this process not for the sake of demonstrating how geometry works, though it is a simple and elegant example, and shows how the diagram facilitates the moves that are needed to proceed to the proof. Rather the point he makes, to Meno, is one about the human soul: even if an untutored slave can come to realize this, then, as Socrates puts it, learning is retrieving knowledge from within one’s self—remembering (anamnēsis); and, since the slave has never been tutored, this memory must not be associated with his experience in this life; rather he has been, forever, a being with knowledge. Not cognition, therefore, but recognition. For Socrates, geometrical proofs are, we might say, discovered, not invented: they are the ‘finding’ of something that has been, in some sense, ‘always there’, and our capacity to do so is innate. Although the diagram is the main prop in this scene in the Meno, it is thus not there simply for its own sake. In Republic 510d Socrates remarks that geometers make use of the visible forms [tois horōmenois eidesi] and talk about them, though they are not thinking of these [ou peri toutōn dianooumenoi] but of those things [all’ekeinōn peri] which these things resemble [hois tauta eoike], pursuing their argument for the sake of the square as such [tou tetragōnou autou heneka] and the diagonal as such [kai diametrou autēs], and not for the sake of the image of it which they draw.¹⁰

These things, the diagrams, are only a means to facilitate thinking about those things, the geometrical objects, they resemble. Socrates goes on to say that it is the same in all cases (kai talla houtōs), in a statement that needs some commentary: ‘the actual things they model and draw (auta men tauta, ha plattousi te kai graphousin), of which there are both shadows and images in water, these things they treat as images only ⁹ He may, of course, be drawing with his finger, as well as pointing out, actions that are hard to disaggregate. We shall return to consider this in Section 4.6. ¹⁰ Translations from Plato are my own.

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(toutois men hōs eikosin au khrōmenoi), while they are seeking to catch sight of those things (auta ekeina idein) that one cannot see other than by means of thought (ha ouk an allōs idoi tis ē tēi dianoiai)’. Paul Shorey explains this very compressed argument thus: ‘i.e. a bronze sphere would be the original of its imitative reflection in water, but it is in turn only the imperfect imitation of the mathematical idea of a sphere.’¹¹ Some further unpacking would be helpful, so as to draw out some issues that will be important in due course. A bronze sphere, which exists in our visual experience as a solid object in three dimensions, casts a shadow, or a reflection in water, that is in two dimensions—like a diagram of a sphere on a flat surface. Socrates seems to be arguing that the shadow, or the reflection in water or on a bright surface, is (for example) to Shorey’s bronze sphere what the bronze sphere is to the mathematical idea of the sphere, which Socrates alleges is what geometers are ‘seeking to catch sight of ’ in the only way possible, ‘by means of thought’. Socrates makes extensive use of demonstrative pronouns (tauta, ‘these things here’; ekeina, ‘those things’, cognate with the adverb ekei, ‘there’) to effect a distinction between the diagram (of a square, or a diagonal) and the idea (‘the square itself ’ and ‘the diagonal itself ’). This helps to establish a linguistic habit that will be crucial in bootstrapping his metaphysical schema both in this context and elsewhere, a separation of the sensual (in this case the diagram ‘here’) and the non-sensual (the form ‘there’, which is the object of thought). Geometry is recommended as part of the education of the guardians in the Republic, though not for its practical applications (for example, warfare), for which a small amount of geometry and calculation would suffice.¹² ‘We must consider’, Socrates goes on, ‘whether the substantial and more advanced part of it [to de polu autēs kai porrōterō proion] stretches at all towards that [ti pros ekeino teinei]—towards making it easier to see the form of the good [pros to poiein katidein rhaion tēn tou agathou idean]’. Socrates seems to be playing here on the language of geometry to make his point. The verb teinō is used of lines ‘stretching’

¹¹ Shorey (1935: 112). Earlier (Rep. 510a), Socrates had spoken of images as shadows, as reflections in water and on surfaces that are dense, smooth, and bright. ¹² In 526d, Socrates remarks that geometry is clearly useful in war: in setting up camps, occupying positions, and deploying troops, there would be a difference between someone versed in geometry (a geometrikos) and someone who was not.

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  .  and having an orientation or direction in relation to others—as, for example, in the term hypotenuse, the line that ‘stretches below’ (hupotenousa) the right angle of a right-angled triangle. Note again the deictic quality of the language, which Socrates maintains as he explains what he considers the most important function of advanced geometry. As he does so, he distinguishes between the language of bodily orientation and direction and mental orientation and direction: Everything, we say, stretches thither [teinei de . . . panta autose] that compels the soul to turn itself towards that place [hosa anagkazei psuchēn eis ekeinon ton topon metastrephesthai] in which dwells the most blessed part of what is (en hōi esti to eudaimonestaton tou ontos), which the soul needs to see from every direction [ho dei autēn panti tropōi idein].’

Physical seeing is directional and can observe only one aspect at a time—as when using a diagram. We have here not only a separation of the sensual and the non-sensual, but a separation, and hierarchy, of realms of existence (cf. tou ontos), the ‘most blessed’ part of which is the realm of the formal. His interlocutor agrees. ‘Then it is the case, is it not [oukoun], if it compels the soul to contemplate essence [ousian . . . theasasthai], it is suitable; if genesis [genesin], it is not’ (526e). By ‘genesis’, Socrates seems to mean ‘coming into being’ or ‘becoming’, processes that take place in time. If ousia denotes that other realm we point to, timeless and unchanging, in which geometrical forms exist, then genesis is the world of our experience here, the world in which, as geometers, like Socrates and the slave of Meno, we draw our diagrams and argue with the help of them. Socrates goes on (527a) to ridicule the way that ‘this knowledge’ (hautē hē epistēmē) is ‘completely at odds with¹³ the words spoken in it [tois en autēi logois legomenois] by those who practice it [upo tōn metakheirizomenōn]’; the sense of using the hands (kheira) is to the fore in this verb. He remarks that what they say is quite laughable, though they can’t help it, for they speak as if they were doing something, and as if all their words were for the sake of doing [hōs gar prattontes te kai praxeōs heneka]; all their talk is of ‘squaring’ and ‘applying’ and ‘adding’ and the like. But in fact their whole study is undertaken for the sake of knowing [gnōseōs heneka]. (527a) ¹³ The language suggests spatialization (pan tounantion echei): knowledge and language face off opposite each other.

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Socrates places activity (praxis) and knowing (gnōsis) in opposition to one another in such a way as to downgrade the process as against the result as the true purpose of geometry. This is a crucial move, and contributes to a systematic marginalization of both visual and written ‘media’ in Plato’s works.¹⁴ Socrates goes on to say that geometry is ‘the knowledge of that which always is [tou aei ontos gnōseōs], and not of a something which at some time comes into being and passes away [all’ou tou pote ti gignomenou kai apollumenou]’. His interlocutor readily agrees (527b): ‘geometry is the knowledge of that which eternally exists [tou gar aei ontos hē geōmetrikē gnōsis estin].’ As such, Socrates goes on to say, it tends to draw the soul to the truth, and would work to direct upwards (pros to anō) those aspects of philosophical thought (philosophou dianoias) that at present we wrongly turn downwards (katō). Physical posture once more articulates the argument Socrates puts forward. The characteristic gaze of one poring over a mathematical diagram, whether drawn in the sand by Socrates in the Meno or on graph paper, is downwards. The mode of thought Socrates describes as ‘philosophical’ by contrast looks ‘upwards’—away from the diagram. Geometry is construed by Socrates as a type of knowledge that is abstract (that is, ‘drawn away’—from the sensual) and timeless, a knowledge that, as suggested in the Meno by the argument of recollection, exists not simply ‘above’ (and beyond) but before its demonstration by means of diagrams. Geometry acts as a ‘pointer’ to the knowledge that is aspired to in the theory of the Forms in respect of concepts such as justice, beauty and, most importantly, the Good—though crucially it remains an aspiration, as we shall see.¹⁵

¹⁴ The term marginalization is chosen not only for its spatial connotations but to reflect this major theme in Derrida’s writings on Plato: Derrida (1982). ¹⁵ A prominent example of the way that geometry acts as an orientation towards ‘philosophical’ thinking is found in Gorgias (508a). Socrates slaps Callicles down: ‘You think that your own advantage is what you should exercise, because you neglect geometry [geōmetrias gar ameleis].’ Callicles has no idea of geometrical equality, and so no idea of fair shares or just deserts in social terms: ‘It has escaped your notice that the equality that is called geometrical [hē isotēs hē geōmetrikē] has great sway among both gods and men.’ By hē isotēs hē geōmetrikē Socrates means, as Dodds (1959: 339) explains, proportionate equality, ‘the equality of ratios in what is still called a geometrical progression’ (i.e. not numerical equality), and that, in the fourth century, proportionate equality was given a political application and was said to represent the true principle of distributive justice. Dodds cites Isocrates (Areop. 21), ‘who says that there are two kinds of equality, one of

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  .  Whatever geometrical education took place in the Academy will presumably have involved the use of diagrams;¹⁶ and it is possible that this may have extended to the use of geometrical diagrams to aid philosophical understanding. As Sybille Krämer has argued, Socrates’ use of the image of the divided line in the Republic (509d–511e)—which prompts his discussion at that point of what it is that geometers do—may give some sense of how this happened. As with the geometrical demonstration in the Meno, the argument is hard to follow without the presence of a visual aid, which commentators on the Republic have long since sought to provide. Of these visual aids, Krämer remarks that ‘practically every possible option has been exhausted’ and comments: Is it possible that the ‘simile of the line’, although preserved in textual form, is in fact connected to the diagrammatic practices of the Platonic Academy, in which it might have been drawn and discussed out loud? We cannot dismiss the possibility that the indeterminacy in Plato’s descriptions of diagrams is due to the fact that there were practices in place at the Academy which made it clear precisely how Plato’s descriptions were to be carried out graphically.¹⁷

The orientation of such diagrammatic visualizations is of interest: is the line to be presented horizontally or vertically? There is no definitive answer to this question, but it can prompt speculation. Thus, the diagram of a line that is oriented vertically would instantiate Socrates’ remarks in Rep. 527b that the diagram should direct the soul ‘upwards’ to look beyond it. Geometers, Socrates said in Rep. 510d, use their diagrams to model and draw (plattousi te kai graphousi) the objects of geometrical knowledge. This works to develop a distinction for Plato to which renewed attention has recently been drawn from different directions, from political theory by Danielle Allen, and from media theory by Krämer, the

which assigns tauton hapasi [the same to all], the other to prosēkon hekastois [that which is appropriate to each]’. ¹⁶ There is no direct evidence for this, but geometry is a key element of the education of the Guardians in book 7 of the Republic; see the discussion of Fowler (1987: 106–21). ¹⁷ Krämer (2016b: 165, 166). She also explains how the discussion of diairesis, the process of drawing distinctions, in Sophist 218e–221b may be associated with diagrammatic visualization: ‘definitions of concepts are literally described as paths through the logical geography of a perceptual field’ (Krämer (2016b: 163). She presents a figure of the diairesis of the concept ‘angler’ in the Sophist at Krämer (2016b: 174). On diaeresis in Plato, see Philip (1966).

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distinction between representation (mimēsis) of something in the world (an activity notoriously regarded in the Republic as flawed), on the one hand, and modelling on the other. What Socrates inscribes (graphō) in the Meno is not the representation of something square like a tabletop (and recall his remarks in Rep. 510d about ‘shadows’ and ‘reflections in water’, which are representations, and, moreover, happenstance and fleeting occurrences that can distort what causes them), but the modelling (plattō) of a hypothetical shape with four exactly equal sides, for that is precisely how they have been defined—however crudely Socrates draws the figure. Allen remarks: The word for ‘model’ or ‘mold’ becomes associated with Plato. No other fifth- or fourth-century Greek author uses plattein with this meaning anywhere nearly as frequently as he. Indeed, it is fair to say that he discovers the distinction between depicting a particular object and modeling a general idea, and therefore also the distinction between representation and visualization.¹⁸

Moreover, the image of the line, a diagrammatic modelling, is directly followed by the allegory of the cave (Rep. 514a–517a), which is a narrative modelling of how Socrates envisages the soul as, ideally, ‘seeing’ the Forms. The freed prisoner, compelled to stand up (anistasthai (515c)), to look upwards towards the light (pros to phōs anablepein (515c)), and make his ascent (anabaseōs (515e)) out of the cave, directs his vision upwards towards the sun, which acts as an image of the Form of the Good, and then returns below (katabas (516e)) to tell those who remain there what he saw on his journey up there (cf. anabas (517a)). At the conclusion of the narrative, Socrates remarks to Glaucon of the image: ‘you won’t disappoint my hopes if you connect the ascent upwards [tēn . . . anō anabasin] and the looking at the things above [thean tōn anō] with the soul’s way up [tēs psukhēs anodon] into the place of reasoning [ton noēton topon].’ As Krämer puts it: ‘The allegory of the cave [ . . . ] offers a spatial representation of rising through levels of knowledge which the simile of the line symbolizes as an ordering on a flat surface.’¹⁹ ¹⁸ Allen (2010: 44) (note ‘discovered’, which could suggest that the distinction was ‘there all along’, as against a construction by Plato). She gives comparative figures for the use of plattein in different Greek authors at Allen (2010: 179–80). ¹⁹ Krämer (2016b: 172); perhaps, with Allen’s discussion in mind, ‘visualization’ would make for a more sympathetic phrasing than ‘representation’ in this sentence.

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  .  If use was made of diagrammatic visualizations to contemplate geometrical objects, it will have been (to recall what Socrates said in Rep. 510d) towards the end of thinking of those things that were the object of full ontological investment, the Forms. However, knowledge of those remains an aspiration: as Socrates says in Cratylus 439c, ‘consider the thing I often dream about, my worthy Cratylus: should we say, or shouldn’t we, that there is a beautiful in itself or a good in itself, and in this manner each one of the things that are?’²⁰ The allegory of the cave models the aspiration to get ‘there’ and ‘see’ directly, and, as a whole, each one of the things that are, but, whether we like it or not, we find ourselves ‘here’, obliged to visualize and to argue through the dialectical method. Aristotle in the Metaphysics (1.6, 987b) remarks of Plato that, besides things that are apprehended by the senses [ta aisthēta] and the Forms [ta eidē], he says that there exists an in-between [metaxy], the objects of mathematics [ta mathēmatika tōn pragmatōn], which differ from the things that are apprehended by the senses by their being everlasting and motionless, and from the Forms in that there are many similar mathematical forms, whereas each Form is itself unique.

By mentioning an ‘in-between’, a metaxy, Aristotle spatializes Platonic ontology. If we were to model that diagrammatically, we would have the things that are apprehended by the senses at one end of the line, the Forms at the other, and in the middle geometrical figures and arithmetical numbers. Presumably diagrams, for all their usefulness, are subsumed into the things that are apprehended by the senses, there virtually to slip from view, philosophically obliterated as readily as a figure in the sand can be physically erased when it has served its purpose. But what if we train ourselves to think not through diagrams but with and about diagrams?

4.3. Thinking with and about Diagrams Our guides in this will be the classicist Reviel Netz, and the media philosopher Sybille Krämer. Media theory has been aptly characterized by John Durham Peters as an exploration of the ablative relation.²¹ ²⁰ On the role of dreams in bootstrapping a metaphysical separation of realms of existence in Plato, see Kennedy (forthcoming a). ²¹ Cf. Peters (2015a: 142).

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Diagrams, then, are treated as one of the ‘means’ by which thinking is facilitated and developed. Media theory takes what Aristotle calls ‘the inbetween’ and populates it, not with abstract mathematical objects, but with diagrams and the actions that are associated with them. Netz’s book, The Shaping of Deduction in Greek Mathematics, has the subtitle A Study in Cognitive History: there is no recognition in the process of cognition he tracks.²² As Bruno Latour commented in an admiring review of Netz’s book, what Netz does is ‘to transport us back in time to when there was no geometry, no apodeictic reasoning, no deduction, and to when each of those practices had to be devised from scratch without relying on any precedent’.²³ Here is Netz’s own description of how geometers came to develop the compelling modes of argument that so impressed Plato: I will argue that the two main tools for the shaping of deduction were the diagram, on the one hand, and the mathematical language on the other hand. Diagrams—in the specific way they are used in Greek mathematics—are the Greek mathematical way of tapping human visual cognitive resources. Greek mathematical language is a way of tapping human linguistic resources. These tools are then combined in specific ways. The tools, and their modes of combination, are the cognitive method. But note that there is nothing universal about the precise shape of such cognitive methods. They are not neural; they are a historical construct. They change slowly, and over relatively long periods they may seem to be constant. But they are still not a biological constant [ . . . ] They can only be studied as historical phenomena, valid for their period and place.²⁴

Rather than gesturing towards the conclusion that an ideal world of mathematical objects exists eternally, waiting patiently for a genius (or a slave, suitably prompted) within history to discover them, Netz sees geometrical thinking as a human construction, specifically a Greek invention, the product of a particular time and a particular place: from his point of view, it was, quite simply, not ‘there’ before. He sees the emergence of Greek mathematical thinking as intimately connected

²² Netz (1999). ²³ Latour (2008: 443) (we shall return in Section 4.6 to consider how geometry ‘from scratch’ can be conceived). Latour (2008: 441) proclaims Netz’s book to be, ‘without contest, the most important book of science studies to appear since Shapin and Schaffer’s Leviathan and the Air-Pump [1985]’. He suggests (Latour 2008: 442) that Netz ‘offers for the origin of formalism what Shapin and Schaffer have done for the origin of experimental science’. ²⁴ Netz (1999: 6–7); emphases added.

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  .  with the development of some very practical ‘tools’, as he refers to them, out of already existing visual and linguistic ‘resources’, the lettered diagram and a very restricted vocabulary. He notes that ‘the entire Archimedean corpus is made up of 851 words’,²⁵ and that, typically, a large corpus of mathematical writings will have ‘around 100–200 words used repetitively, responsible for 95 per cent or more of the corpus (most often the article, prepositions and the pseudo-word “letters”)’.²⁶ When Socrates went through the problem with the slave in the Meno, he probably did not have any need to use letters, since he could, in the presence of the slave, go through the actions of drawing lines and pointing them out as he went along. The process, as we have seen, is dynamic: lines ‘stretch’, and the eyes follow them ‘here’ and ‘there’ as the argument proceeds. However, when a figure is recorded, it appears static; the letters and the mathematical language serve to articulate the stages of the argument that are necessary to make the figure dynamic once more, by prompting readers to make the appropriate ‘moves’ (of the eyes and possibly also of the hands) as they proceed towards the proof. This development has been hailed as revolutionary by the emergent field of media theory known as ‘diagrammatology’.²⁷ This ambitiously examines how not only geometric diagrams, but written texts, graphs, maps, writing, ‘in short, whatever lets itself be projected onto the artificial form (or support of) a two-dimensional plane becomes manageable and controllable for human observers and readers’.²⁸ In the scene of geometric proof acted out in the Meno, the slave, we recall, had first suggested doubling the side of the original square, but drawing the resulting diagram makes his error evident: there is now a larger square that contains four squares of the same size, so this new larger square is four times the area of the original, not twice. The problem could not be solved numerically using whole numbers (a side measuring three would give too great an area), but it can be solved graphically. The diagonal of the original square divides that square into two equal triangles; sketch in the diagonals of the other three squares to form a fresh square that clearly

²⁵ Netz (1999: 107). ²⁶ Netz (1999: 161). ²⁷ For an overview, see Krämer (2016a). The collections of Pombo and Gerner (2010) and of Krämer and Ljungberg (2016) offer a variety of perspectives. Crucial also are Bender and Marrinan (2010) and Siegert (2015a). ²⁸ Krämer and Ljungberg (2016: 1–2).

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Figure 4.2. A graphic solution to how to double a square

contains four such equal triangles, as in Figure 4.2, and is thus manifestly twice the area of the first.²⁹ ‘Suddenly space lets lengths be seen that calculation no longer understands,’ as Michel Serres put it in his explication of the scene.³⁰ For Socrates, this shows that the slave is getting to work things out for himself, which is in a certain sense the case, but not necessarily with the conclusion Socrates draws from it. Of this scene, Krämer comments that ‘knowledge can be attained through the rational examination of one’s own experience. And yet the auto-acquisition of knowledge requires external support in the form of a diagram and dialogue. By this we mean that it is the drawing which makes our errors evident and allows us to arrive at the solution.’³¹ Moreover, she continues: in the epistemological debate between Socrates and Meno we begin to understand the difference between knowing how and knowing that, between procedural and declarative knowledge; between practical at-hand knowledge and theoretical, propositional knowledge. The character of procedural knowledge is such that it

²⁹ Manifestly: etymologically, ‘that which can be struck by the hand’. ³⁰ Serres (2017: 170). He presents the formal argument that demonstrates how the diagonal of the square with sides of length 2 is what would come to be called an irrational number. ³¹ Krämer (2016b: 168).

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  .  cannot be fully explained as a linguistically accessible entity and thus cannot be read or accessed as such.³²

Graphical figure and text—delivered orally, as Socrates does, or in written form—go together to produce what Krämer calls this ‘at-hand knowledge’, which ‘is acquired through experience and has its “seat” in the person who undertakes these experiences’.³³ Socrates’ characterization of geometers as metakheirizomenoi (cf. Rep. 526e) finds an echo in Krämer’s ‘at-hand knowledge’, but in a manner that is philosophically admiring rather than dismissive. Thus, not only do diagrams record at-hand knowledge; constructive engagement with them creates such knowledge. Geometrical diagrams construct graphical relations between points to which fingers can gesture in oral discourse; in written discourse, letters take on what Charles Sanders Peirce called this ‘indexical function’, taking over the function otherwise performed by the ‘index’ finger: ‘The index asserts nothing; it only says “There!”. It takes hold of our eyes, as it were, and directs them to a particular object, and there it stops.’³⁴ Krämer explains: ‘Relations are abstract; we normally don’t look at them. Yet diagrams make relations visible: non-visible, intelligible entities are graphically embodied.’³⁵ Thus she suggests that this development of spatiality for epistemic purposes has two aspects, of structure and movement, that constantly interact: a diagram is constructed as a space that synchronically inscribes places and relations between them, but a space that also enables its users to carry out actions in time upon it. These two aspects work together to create what she calls the ‘operative writing’³⁶ that characterizes not only geometrical figures but diagrams more generally: ‘Hand, eye, and brain work together on the surface of inscription [ . . . ] Formalization is the result of an act of “flattening out”.’³⁷ She is not inclined to underestimate the significance of the development of the two-dimensional inscribed surface as a tool for thinking: ‘Perhaps the invention of inscribable and ³² Krämer (2016b: 168–9), emphases in original. We shall revisit this formulation in Section 4.5. ³³ Krämer (2016b: 169). Cf. Krämer and Ljungberg (2016: 8): ‘A diagram does not explain itself. It needs an explanation in the form of a legend that explains its purpose.’ ³⁴ Peirce (1885: 181); see further Giardano (2016: 80–1), from whom I derived this reference to Peirce. ³⁵ Krämer (2016b: 175), emphases in original. ³⁶ Krämer (2014: 347). ³⁷ Krämer (2014: 350).

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transportable surfaces was for the mobility and creativity of the mind what the invention of the wheel was for the mobility and creativity of the body.’³⁸ As hand, eye, and brain work on the flattened surface, the unexpected can happen. Like the famous duck/rabbit figure, geometrical diagrams can have the capacity to be construed differently as the eye moves across them;³⁹ thus, in the diagram suggested by the Meno (cf. Figure 4.2), at one moment one sees it as squares, at another as triangles.⁴⁰ As Krämer and Ljungberg remark: ‘Often, the result is a flash-like insight. The visual arrangement of a figure shows something that is itself not contained and not even articulated in the constructive rules of the figure. Thus, an informative cognitively added surplus value emerges.’⁴¹ Krämer suggests that ‘a laboratory for thought is created’: Visualization allows us to carry out experiments with the non-visible, abstract and theoretical, and to acquire new knowledge about them. Operations in the visible sphere are also thought-acts. This requires an attitude towards perception that can be described as both a ‘seeing-with’ and a ‘seeing-through’. With and through the empirical description we see the abstract form. If ever the notion of the ‘mind’s eye’ is to make sense, then it must be here, in the act of using the visible to see the non-visible: in this way, in-sight becomes possible.⁴²

The vocabulary of ‘experiments’, ‘operations’, and ‘thought-acts’ restores to our attention activities, the ‘seeing-with’, that Socrates wanted to look beyond. Krämer dissolves the distinction between praxis and gnōsis Socrates had tried to construct. But other ‘philosophical’ and ‘theoretical’ distinctions come under scrutiny as well. In seeking to break down the distinction between the sensual and the non-sensual, Krämer briefly references the notion of the ‘extended mind’ put forward by Andy Clark and David Chalmers. They ask: ‘Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin?’⁴³ In his book Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment,

³⁸ Krämer (2014: 350). ³⁹ Cf. Giardano (2016: 91). ⁴⁰ In his discussion of the scene in the Meno, Giaquinto (1993: 90) emphasizes the importance of seeing as. In 82b, recall that Socrates’ first question to the slave is whether he knows that a square is like this. The slave must see the figure as a ‘square’ for the argument to continue and develop. ⁴¹ Krämer and Ljungberg (2016: 8). ⁴² Krämer (2016b: 175), emphases in original. ⁴³ Clark and Chalmers (1998: 7) = Clark (2011: 220).

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  .  Action, and Cognitive Extension, Clark argues for a revised sense of how we might understand ‘tools’ and ‘resources’, as, in a very strong sense, not external to the mind: ‘Could human minds be genuinely extended and augmented by cultural and technological tweaks, or is it [ . . . ] just the same old mind with a shiny new tool?’⁴⁴ He argues that the mind extends into the world, and gets entangled with a whole variety of things that have been traditionally regarded as ‘outside’—pens and paper (or inscription devices and surfaces), computers—but which he sees as forms of embodied, extended cognition that would not happen without them. There is not the space here to discuss Clark’s views in detail, but let us consider very briefly how his approach might affect the ways we think about some of the practices we examined in Section 4.2. For example, he suggests that gesture, rather than ‘being about the expression of fully formed thoughts, and thus mainly a prop for interagent communication (listeners appreciating meanings through other’s gestures)’, might ‘function as part of the actual process of thinking’. Experimental research, he argues, throws up some intriguing observations about gesture: We do it when talking on the phone. We do it when talking to ourselves. We do it in the dark when nobody can see. Gesturing increases with task difficulty. Gesturing increases when speakers must choose between options. Gesturing increases when reasoning about a problem rather than merely describing the problem or a known solution.⁴⁵

‘At-hand’ knowledge indeed! Gesture is not simply chaotic arm-waving, but is used to articulate and communicate intentional action, action that ‘stretches towards’ something. Gesture is thus closely associated with labelling. The act of labelling, through vocabulary, letters, or other marks, serves to organize the field of perception, both of physical space (those ‘mountains’ (so labelled), these ‘sheep’) and diagrammatic space (this ‘square’ (so labelled and thus seen as), that ‘diagonal’, the ‘angle’ ABC) in such a way as to allow for a selective attention and grouping that facilitates cognition. ⁴⁴ Clark (2011: 39), emphases in original. ⁴⁵ Clark (2011: 123); for his discussion of gestures, see pp. 123–7; and of labelling, pp. 44–52.

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It should be noted that, although Clark’s book draws extensively on experimental research, he is writing a very particular kind of work, not of neuroscience or psychology, but of philosophy, a book in which an overarching concern is thinking about what sort of thing a human being is. Not what Socrates thinks! In the hands of Socrates, the gestural and labelling functions of language lead to a strange and potent distribution, pointing not simply to ‘this’ realm of existence (labelled as the world of experience and the sensual), but ‘that’ other one beyond as well (labelled as the world of the Forms)—a separation, and a hierarchy, that has come to be labelled ‘metaphysical’. Clark’s arguments work to question confidence in any sharp distinction between body and soul, or latterly between body and mind, that has become so deeply embedded through platonizing and Cartesian traditions of thought. The evidence he draws upon is, as he scrupulously acknowledges, open to argument. The debate, you can surmise, has not concluded. Metaphysical assumptions and factual claims (‘this is how it is’), whether they be Plato’s or Clark’s, resist easy disaggregation; and this is no less the case with the metaphysical assumptions bound up in historical claims. The next section will begin to develop this theme.

4.4. Netz Squares up to Plato So for Netz and Krämer (though they treat the evidence they bring forward ostensibly from historical and philosophical viewpoints respectively), it was through the scrupulous development of these (embodied) technologies that Greek mathematicians found themselves able to track equivalences and transitive relations through successive stages of argument in a way not possible without them. Thus it is not beyond but in a very distinctive (and historically specific) textual-cum-visual discourse that Greek mathematics achieves its success in bringing together the finite and the universal. Netz explains: Greek geometric propositions are not about universal, infinite space. As is wellknown, lines and planes in Greek mathematics are always finite sections of the infinite line and plane which we project. They are, it is true, indefinitely extendable, yet they are finite. Each geometrical proposition sets up its own universe— which is its diagram.⁴⁶ ⁴⁶ Netz (1999: 32).

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  .  Each diagram is structured and finite but is demonstrably true (you can point to it and say ‘there’) for the specific ‘universe’ it ‘sets up’. The diagram and the steps of argumentation can be reproduced repeatedly: the proof can be demonstrated over and over again in the same form, and it will always be the same. It is evident that, where Socrates downplays praxis, Netz and Krämer both emphasize it. Netz deploys metaphors in keeping with his emphasis on mathematics as a practical skill: the proofs generated go into the ‘toolbox’, ready to be brought out to construct another demonstration.⁴⁷ But this toolbox, he asserts, is good for doing Greek mathematics and nothing else. He thus repudiates any move that makes geometry indicative of (that is, ‘pointing to’) ‘true knowledge’ more generally—what Socrates configures in his own way and labels as ‘gnōsis’. Netz emphasizes how austere and isolated Greek mathematicians were, a tiny circle of devotees focused inwards to the elaboration of the very specific, very specialized object of study they had fashioned.⁴⁸ Drawing and pointing in company may have been characteristic of pedagogical contexts of doing geometry, but the great and innovative mathematicians were, literally, few and far between, even in the heyday of Greek mathematics a century after Plato.⁴⁹ Netz’s specifically Greek mathematicians are doing something that is ‘valid for their period and place’, and he emphasizes the point in a footnote: ‘What I study is not “deduction” as such; what I study is a specific form, namely the way in which Greek mathematicians argued for their results.’⁵⁰ Of course, thanks to the diagrams and the particular uses of vocabulary they have developed, their techniques can then be transmitted across time and space. For Netz, these techniques are not a hard-wired feature of human brains, and so people who are not Greek mathematicians can nonetheless learn how to use them, and form thus generated can be maintained over time and space without deformation. They become transferable skills, skills that can be ‘carried across’ time and space: that ⁴⁷ Netz (1999: 216–35). ⁴⁸ Netz (1999: 277–92). ⁴⁹ Cf. Netz (1999: 284–6). As Netz (1999: 285) remarks, when Archimedes first approaches Dositheus (Conics 4.2.15), following the death of Conon, ‘he is as desperate as any veteran “lonely hearts” column correspondent’. Epistles incorporating diagrams and their accompanying text would have been a necessary mode of communication in many circumstances (cf. Netz 1999: 277), as well as preserving problems and their solutions. ⁵⁰ Netz (1999: 7 n. 5).

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the square on the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides can be demonstrated beyond the borders of Greece at any time and any place—so long as the networks of transmission that carry the techniques associated with the proof are not broken. For Netz, when Greek mathematicians were doing mathematics they were not doing philosophy: ‘Speaking of their diagrams, Greek mathematicians need not speak about their ontological principles [ . . . ] One went directly to diagrams, did the dirty work, and, when asked what the ontology behind it was, one mumbled something about the weather and went back to work.’⁵¹ Their diagrams and uses of language are central to the style of thinking they developed; understand how this came into being (its genesis), job done—no need to think about ousia. Netz might remark of his own work that he is studying the Greek mathematicians and nothing else. However, his own descriptions generate a modalization (as, for example, in his focus on praxis) that pits him head-to-head in a stand-off with Plato, which finally comes out into the open in the closing pages of his book. He remarks that the work of these isolated Greek mathematicians might have remained an obscure and esoteric interest had it not come to the notice of the Platonic–Aristotelian tradition.⁵² But this reception proved crucial to the later perception of mathematics: we all know the fate of a book which suddenly becomes a bestseller after being turned into a film—in the version ‘according to the film’. This process originated in south Italy in the late fifth century , but it was Plato who turned ‘Mathematics: The Movie’ into a compelling vision. This vision remained to haunt western culture, sending it back again and again to ‘The Book according to the Film’—the numerology associated with Pythagoreanism and Neoplatonism.⁵³

At a historical moment when the potentialities of epideictic persuasion are being explored within various contexts of public debate, the Greek mathematicians were developing a mode of apodeictic proof, which would, in its own terms, be binding, and could convince rather than just persuade.⁵⁴ Given his aversion to the argumentation of ‘the ⁵¹ Netz (1999: 57). ⁵² Netz (1999: 277–92, esp. 289–90). ⁵³ Netz (1999: 290). ⁵⁴ Netz (1999: 292–3). For the development of the distinction between epideixis and apodeixis, cf. Cassin (1995: 195–9). It is likely that the term ‘rhetoric’ was a coinage of Plato’s, as an antonym of the style of thinking he was coming to call ‘philosophy’; cf. Schiappa (1990).

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  .  sophists’,⁵⁵ Plato’s fascination with what the geometers were doing becomes understandable. However, the geometers convinced rather than persuaded by rigorously limiting themselves to the study of forms and eschewing all discussion of content. Latour glosses this in his review of Netz: Was the Platonic philosophy a real emulation of geometers’ practices that produced conviction around the collective inspection of lettered diagrams, sticking to the conclusions that forms, and only forms, could lead to? Of course not, since they did not use diagrams to begin with.⁵⁶ Philosophy did not carefully limit itself to forms, as geometers did [ . . . ] but instead claimed to be talking about contents: the Good Life, the proper way of searching for Truth, the Laws of the City, etc. It is as though Plato extracted no more than a style of conviction from geometry and added to it a totally unrelated content; it is as though the type of persuasion mathematicians obtained at great pains (because they limited themselves to forms) could nonetheless be reached, at almost no demonstrative cost, by philosophers with regards to what they saw as the only relevant content!⁵⁷

Recall the scene in the Meno once more. As well as referring to the diagram, the proof takes the form of a discussion, with Socrates taking the lead, and asking (often leading) questions, the slave responding with words of agreement or expressing aporia, in a manner familiar elsewhere in Plato’s Socratic dialogues—the dialectical method that is the preferred approach to thinking about the Forms. The difference is that, whereas the geometers’ argument moves along a sequence of steps to offer definitive closure to the problem posed, a proof of the problem about doubling the square, Socrates uses the solution to gesture towards a conclusion of his own, the debatable one that learning is recollection. The attempt of the dialectical method to define abstract concepts like justice may achieve some clarification through developing distinctions (perhaps even with the help of diagrammatic aids such as suggested by Krämer for the process of diairesis in the Sophist), but not closure in this very strong ‘geometrical’ sense.

⁵⁵ Cf. Cassin (1995: 9), who speaks of the notion of ‘the sophists’ as a coherent intellectual movement as ‘l’artefact platonicien, le produit des dialogues. L’essence de l’artefact est tout simplement de faire du sophiste l’alter ego négatif du philosophe: son mauvais autre.’ ‘Plato’, we might say of Netz, is son mauvais autre. ⁵⁶ Krämer’s suggestions discussed in Section 4.3 might now lead Latour to qualify this statement. ⁵⁷ Latour (2008: 445–6), emphasis added.

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A key distinction for Netz is that between epideixis and apodeixis, and towards the end of his book he concludes: ‘we may now say that the mathematical apodeixis is, partly, a development of the rhetorical epideixis.’⁵⁸ Once more, Latour glosses this carefully: ‘He does not say they are different from the start; he points out where and why they begin to diverge.’⁵⁹ The words are being distinguished from each other (here in terms of particular practices), but are they ever, finally, distinct? Mathematical proof, Netz suggests, has its own rhetorical effects, to which he devoted a subsequent book on the aesthetics of Hellenistic mathematics: ‘since mathematics is primarily a verbal, indeed textual activity,’ he says, we should ‘look for the kind of verbal art favored in the Hellenistic world’,⁶⁰ arguing, for example, that it displays a ‘narrative technique [ . . . ] based on suspense and surprise’.⁶¹ It constitutes a very particular, emergent, style of thinking, which Plato attempted to co-opt for the emergent style of thinking he was developing, which sees ousia as its aspiration and goal, and for which he appropriated the term ‘philosophy’. We should not assume that this term was there ‘from the start’. It predated Plato and came into common usage in the later fifth century  with the sense of the pursuit of wisdom. However, as Andrea Nightingale has argued, it is only with Plato that it comes to take on the distinctive meaning now so familiar that it is often simply taken for granted.⁶² She argues that the term theōria, used earlier of the traditional practice in which an individual travelled abroad to witness sacred spectacles on behalf of the state and report back what he had seen, is reconfigured as the rational ‘vision’ of metaphysical truths by Plato within, and as part of, the particular style of thinking he was developing. In the allegory of the cave, the prisoner who emerges from the cave, views the sun, and returns to report on what he has seen stands for the act of ‘philosophical’ theōria. In setting knowledge of ousia as its aspiration, Plato’s ‘philosophy’ downplays genesis. However, when Latour glosses Netz’s position on epideixis and apodeixis (‘he does not say they are different from the start; he points out where and why they begin to diverge’), he is framing

⁵⁸ Netz (1999: 293). ⁵⁹ Latour (2008: 449), emphases added. Latour thus proposes a kind of diairesis, but one that looks towards the historical and processual rather than, as in the Sophist, the philosophical and ontological. ⁶⁰ Netz (2009: p. x). ⁶¹ Netz (2009: p. xi). ⁶² Nightingale (2004).

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

 . 

his discourse around genesis, how the distinction came into being: such distinctions are viewed not as ‘there’, always and forever (as Latour puts it, ‘from the start’). Nightingale is similarly exploring ‘philosophy’ and ‘theory’ in terms of their genesis. There is a palpable tension between ‘philosophy’ and another style of thinking that was emergent at this time, ‘history’ (another term we should not assume was ‘there’ from the start). These are styles of thinking (divergent but not wholly distinct?) we inhabit—or, perhaps, which inhabit us, in that they can operate in ways that are not entirely within our notice or control. The reception of geometry within the philosophical tradition of which Netz wrote is a powerful one, and not so easy to put to one side as he invites us to believe. Consider a recent critical response to his work by Robert Hahn. Hahn disputes some of the historical claims Netz puts forward. Thus, where Netz argues that ‘our earliest evidence for the lettered diagram comes from outside mathematics proper [sic], namely from Aristotle’,⁶³ and speculates that lettered diagrams in Greece were unlikely before the middle of the fifth century , Hahn believes that archaeological evidence would push this back a century or more. He claims that the marvellous tunnel constructed by Eupalinos in the middle of the sixth century on the island of Samos, which was so admired by Herodotus (3.60), and the temple of Artemis at Ephesus from a century earlier, suggest that ‘thinking and reflecting on geometrical diagrams was probably widely acknowledged and practiced much earlier when architects/engineers sought to solve their problems, guide the workers producing the architectural elements, or explain their solutions to others’.⁶⁴ Hahn goes on to argue that ‘[Netz’s] case about the origins and early development of geometry focuses on geometrical diagrams, and specifically lettered diagrams, to identify the earliest episodes in Greek mathematics, but his approach defines away evidence that changes the story itself. Netz focuses on diagrams in a mathematically “pure” sense, not applied.’⁶⁵ The scare quotes around ‘pure’ indicate Hahn’s awareness that the (to us) familiar distinction between ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ mathematics is a relatively recent one.⁶⁶ For Hahn, then, although Netz tries

⁶³ Netz (1999: 61). ⁶⁴ Hahn (2017: 6). ⁶⁵ Hahn (2017: 5). ⁶⁶ Hacking (2014: 144–64) associates its emergence with the later eighteenth century, and especially Kant, though he sees the distinction drawn by Socrates in Republic between

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to see geometry outside the framework of platonizing thought, the story he tells is—ironically—caught in the gravitational pull of the platonizing assumptions of geometry viewed through the lens of ‘philosophy’: ‘Netz’s mathematician wants to know when the diagram has a reality all of its own,’ rather than, say, ‘as an architectural illustration of a building’. Hahn readily grants that ‘regarding the diagram as an object onto itself—like grasping a Platonic form—reflects a different, special kind of consciousness; it is the mathematical object per se within the disciplinary guidelines for the mathematician, and exists in a realm all its own’.⁶⁷ Netz chooses a moment of ‘origin’ when geometry ‘proper’, as he sees it, ‘really’ emerges: but blurred ontological investments and the temporal parameters for the (hi)story he emplots are inextricably entangled. Hahn emplots his temporal parameters differently. He includes the activities of architects and engineers, and thus pushes the emergence of geometry further back than Netz would, right back to the shadowy Thales of Miletus, a legendary figure to whom the ancient tradition attributed all sorts of innovations. Aristotle makes him the first natural philosopher, in that water was the archē, the first principle of all things. Thales was also said to have measured the height of the pyramids by the length of their shadow, which suggests some geometrical know-how.⁶⁸ Hahn posits that Thales ‘stands as the first Greek geometer for his explorations of spatial relations through diagrams’,⁶⁹ and seeks to bring these different achievements together in a way that I can only summarize all too briefly. If water was the first principle, how could it manifest itself so differently without changing? Hahn suggests that in its nascent state, geometry offered Thales a way to express structurally how a fundamental unity could appear so divergently without changing, merely altering its form, if only Thales could discover the fundamental geometrical figure. The discovery that it was the right triangle turned out to be the discovery of the ‘Pythagorean theorem’—the hypotenuse theorem—as metaphysics.⁷⁰

Hahn argues that it was Thales’ understanding of the right triangle thus as the building block of all things that, via Pythagoras and the the sort of geometry practised by soldiers and ‘advanced’ geometry as a significant element in the coming-into-being of the modern distinction. ⁶⁷ Hahn (2017: 5). ⁷⁰ Hahn (2017: 2).

⁶⁸ Cf. Hahn (2017: 18–24).

⁶⁹ Hahn (2017: 2).

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Pythagoreans, ends up in Plato’s Timaeus (54c–56d), where the divine demiurge creates the cosmos from the five regular convex polyhedra, which became known as the ‘Platonic solids’. I will leave it to others to assess the details of Hahn’s arguments. My interest here is styles of argument, specifically the way the narratives of both Netz and Hahn illustrate the challenges we run up against when we seek to look at the past through the concepts shaped by the very history we are trying to explain. Hahn’s title is The Metaphysics of the Pythagorean Theorem, but is there a point when a ‘nascent’ phenomenon is, finally, ‘really’ there? It could be argued that ‘metaphysics’ is nascent only in Plato and even Aristotle! Concepts have their histories, and it is open to argument when geometry (‘proper’) or ‘metaphysics’ (‘proper’) can be said to have emerged. That term ‘proper’ signals the ontological investment that a historical narrative makes. History can be seen as opposed to philosophy, as Netz seeks to square up to Plato—but only by overlooking or marginalizing the metaphysical investments that history itself makes. It is to this problem we now turn.

4.5. Historical Ontologies That conceptual terms have their histories is suggested in many recent scholarly approaches—for example, Reinhart Koselleck’s Begriffsgeschichte or ‘conceptual history’, which is described as ‘a methodology of historical studies that focuses on the invention and development of the fundamental concepts underlying and informing a distinctively historical manner of being in the world’.⁷¹ We could see Nightingale’s investigation of the emergence of ‘philosophy’ and of theōria as manifestations of conceptual history. Further purchase comes in what Lorraine Daston in science studies has called ‘applied metaphysics’, the study of the coming-into-being (and, sometimes, passing-away) of what she calls ‘objects’ of scientific study.⁷² She explicitly draws attention to Aristotle’s On Generation and Corruption (1.3, 317b34) in describing applied metaphysics as ‘a sublunary metaphysics of change, of the “perpetuity of ⁷¹ Koselleck (2002); the quotation comes from the book’s blurb. ⁷² Daston (2000); the examples her collection explores are ‘dreams, atoms, monsters, culture, centers of gravity, value, cytoplasmic particles, the self, tuberculosis’ (Daston 2000: 1); concepts, therefore, as well as objects.

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coming-to-be” ’. A separation of realms, characteristic of metaphysical styles of thinking, is invoked in familiar terms: ‘If pure metaphysics treats the ethereal of what is always and everywhere from a God’s-eye-viewpoint, then applied metaphysics studies the dynamic world of what emerges and disappears from the horizon of working scientists.’⁷³ This is, emphatically, not a rejection of metaphysics, but rather a determination to devise a mode or practice of studying metaphysics methodically from a particular viewpoint, ‘down here’. That amounts to studying metaphysical styles of thinking and the arguments they develop, and the historical manners of being in the world they generate. Ian Hacking’s preferred term for these modes of study is ‘historical ontology’. He remarks: ‘the comings, in comings into being, are historical.’⁷⁴ His approach is not to oppose genesis to ousia, as if autonomous. Rather, he seeks to explore how ontologies, understood as a series of historical developments, operate in human thinking. Insofar as there is an investment of belief in, or ontological commitment to, their existence, conceptual terms have the capacity to produce what he calls ‘the looping effects of human kinds’,⁷⁵ and become modalities of experience— Kosselleck’s historical manners of being in the world. One’s manner of being in the world was altered by the composition, dissemination, and reception of Plato’s writings, whether one goes with platonizing styles of thinking or resists them, as Netz seeks to do. In that sense, we have all become ‘theorists’ now, even if the subject positions or viewpoints we adopt proliferate bewilderingly as they are developed in emergent styles of thinking and their associated discourses. Moreover, the sorts of answers given to the question ‘what sort of thing is a human being?’ may be in terms of a (still and always) emergent phenomenon, moulded by historical ontologies, rather than an essence, there ‘all along’ or ‘from the start’ and waiting to be uncovered. If ‘history’, as it emerged as a distinctive discourse towards the end of the fifth century , finds its particular viewpoint in genesis, it nonetheless, arguably, cannot operate without ontological commitments, whether these be the historian’s or attributed to the historical actors she writes about. Insofar as certain

⁷³ Daston (2000: 1). ⁷⁴ Hacking (2002: 4–5); in his own work he has explored terms such as ‘trauma’, ‘child development’, ‘multiple personality disorder’, and ‘false memory syndrome’. ⁷⁵ Hacking (1994).

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conceptual terms or ontological schemata are thought to be, in some sense, ‘there’, there is a temptation to see the reach of such terms extending into the past. Perhaps we could not write history without succumbing to that temptation. We can dramatize a ‘historical’ manner of being in the world, with its investment in genesis, by considering responses to one of its characteristic questions: at what point is the emergent phenomenon there? Recall that, for Nightingale, ‘philosophy’ is really there only with the writings of Plato. Contrast how Aristotle in the Metaphysics (1.983b21–2), as he reviews early thinkers about ‘material causes’, makes Thales ‘the originator of this kind of philosophy’ (ho tēs toiautēs archēgos philosophias). Thales is alighted upon as seeking an archē, a starting-point, a first cause (‘water’), underlying the bewildering multiplicity of things we experience; but, in the history Aristotle writes of the discourse of material causes, Thales himself emerges as the archē—the point at which Aristotle feels able to say that the modes of thinking he is interested in (historically, in terms of their coming-into-being) are there. The first ancient history of mathematics—composed by Eudemus of Rhodes, a pupil of Aristotle’s—identified Thales as the first to introduce geometry to Greece, and similar strategies can be sensed here too. Ontological investments express themselves historically as the quest for moments of genesis, but we may doubt whether Thales would have understood himself in anything like this way. Could he even have imagined the possibility of ‘philosophy’ or ‘metaphysics’—or ‘history’—as Aristotle would have thought of them or as we would think of them now? And yet, historical analysis needs to posit a telos, a (view-)point towards which the activities of historical actors are directed, as Hahn’s focus on Thales’ geometry points him out and labels him as an archē in a narrative the telos of which is metaphysical thinking. One way historical analysis expresses ontological investment is to plot ‘firsts’ and ‘outcomes’; but Hahn’s use of the term nascent suggests not so much a moment when ‘metaphysics’ burst forth suddenly into being, as a long, slow (even painful) process of emergence. The notion that Lorraine Daston called ‘the perpetuity of coming-into-being’, if pressed, would mark as temporary and provisional not only any archē but any telos as well, when a phenomenon (for example, ‘metaphysics’, ‘geometry’) had, finally, come into being (or passed out of being). The development of geometry did not stop with the Greeks and can be viewed as a still-emergent phenomenon. Although geometers remained

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more or less content for two millennia with what became known as Euclidean space, by the middle of the nineteenth century speculation about a dimension beyond the familiar three was growing. This prompted Edwin Abbott’s satire Flatland (1884), in which an inhabitant of the eponymous two-dimensional world, who goes by the name A. Square, is visited by a Sphere. This leads A. Square to a realization of what three-dimensional space beyond his experience might be like. It prompts him also to wonder whether there is a fourth dimension beyond that, a notion that the Sphere indignantly rejects!⁷⁶ The geometrical distinction between extension in two and three dimensions, as we saw in Section 4.2, helped to facilitate a separation, and hierarchy, of realms of being in Plato. This generated also the persistent historical phenomenon that gets called ‘mathematical Platonism’, a belief in the existence of mathematical objects. Mathematical Platonism continues to be the working metaphysical assumption of some mathematicians. Witness Roger Penrose’s resounding statement that, ‘like Everest, the Mandelbrot set is just there’.⁷⁷ Where? There. Where? Just there! The gestures and pointing that are part of the manipulation of the mathematical diagram become a determined (or impatient) indexical injunction to ‘see’ what is (just) there beyond it. Penrose was responsible with Brandon Carter for devising what have become known as ‘Penrose diagrams’. Of these, Ian Hacking remarks: ‘With a lot of training, a very clever young person can learn to represent the causal properties of infinite dimensional space on a flat piece of paper or a whiteboard. And then to think productively about black holes and many things even more esoteric.’⁷⁸ Wow! Expressed thus, it is not hard to appreciate the manner of being in the world that gets called mathematical Platonism. However, by no means all mathematicians are platonists, and, insofar as they feel inclined or obliged to express metaphysical opinions, they are just as likely to be anti-platonists—sometimes militantly so (recall Netz). Thus Timothy Gowers wrote an article that asked ‘Does Mathematics Need a Philosophy?’⁷⁹ Considering the range of arguments from mathematical platonist to

⁷⁶ Abbott (2002). ⁷⁷ Penrose (1989: 95). He avers (Penrose 1989: 112): ‘There is something absolute and “God-given” about mathematical truth.’ ⁷⁸ Hacking (2014: 10–11). ⁷⁹ Gowers (2006).

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anti-platonist to couldn’t-care-less, Hacking is led to conclude that holding any of these positions seems to make little or no difference to how mathematicians practise their discipline, and prompts the puzzled question in the title of his book: Why Is There Philosophy of Mathematics At All? He is (following Netz) in little doubt about the answer: ‘Plato did not just kidnap mathematics; he abducted the whole of scholarship, so that everyone thought that theoretical mathematics was pretty much the whole of Greek mathematical practice’⁸⁰—in such a way as to occlude the panorama of everyday practical calculation carried out not only by the likes of Hahn’s architects but by a multitude of those whom philosophy has been happy to overlook, if not look down upon, ever since.⁸¹ To point the finger at Plato is only a partial answer to the question: why is there philosophy of mathematics at all? What was it that so motivated Plato? In trying to answer this, Hacking entertains some counterfactual thinking: did things have to happen in the way they did? ‘There was plenty of what we can recognize as mathematics in ancient Babylon, Egypt, China, and possibly in Mesoamerica’ he observes.⁸² The implied answer to such counterfactual speculation, yes or no, is perhaps less interesting than the arguments it generates, and in this case the thought experiment leads him to isolate one feature that he thinks particularly worthy of attention: ‘China, in ancient times, developed brilliant mathematics, but it chiefly worked on a system of approximations. Proof seems seldom to have reared its head in China, and was seldom esteemed in its own right.’⁸³ Hacking emphasizes that ‘one does not need proofs to think mathematically: it is a contingent historical fact that proof is the present (and was once the Euclidean) gold standard of mathematicians.’⁸⁴

⁸⁰ Hacking (2014: 138), emphasis in original. ⁸¹ Cf. Hacking (2014: 138–9), citing ‘the two cultures of mathematics in ancient Greece’ explored by Asper (2009). ⁸² Hacking (2014: 122). In passing, note the ontological commitment in recognizing as ‘mathematics’; perhaps history cannot function without investing its terms with a capacity to extend not only across time but across space as well. ⁸³ Hacking (2014: 137). Chinese and medieval Muslim interest in approximations has fed into modern Western mathematics (see Chemla 1994) and has prompted recent attempts to account retrospectively for the Greek use of approximations. Netz (2009: 42) remarks that ‘the rule in Hellenistic mathematics is to present approximations without comment’, and only in later Greek works is the topic more carefully discussed. ⁸⁴ Hacking (2014: 1).

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Hacking draws particular attention to ‘the experience of some demonstrative proofs, the experience of proving to one’s complete satisfaction some new and often unlikely fact’,⁸⁵ and adds: ‘Plato, as I read him, was bowled over by the experience of demonstrative proof.’⁸⁶ In refining the issue of demonstrative proof that so ‘bowled over’ Plato, Hacking enlists two later thinkers who offer a contrast between two ideal conceptions of proof: ‘There are proofs that, after some reflection and study, one totally understands, and can get in one’s mind “all at once”. That’s Descartes. There are proofs in which every step is meticulously laid out, and can be checked, line by line, in a mechanical way. That’s Leibniz.’⁸⁷ The proofs Hacking calls ‘cartesian’, though they impress ‘a certain kind of philosophical mind’, are rare,⁸⁸ but he mentions in passing the way Socrates concludes the demonstration in Meno 85c with comments to Meno about the slave’s experience: ‘And right now, these opinions have only just been stirred up within him, like a dream; but if someone asked him these same questions often [pollakis] and in different ways [pollakhēi], you know that he’ll end up understanding them as accurately as anyone.’ Proof in this Cartesian aspect is a style of thinking that requires practice (note that Socrates says ‘often’ and ‘in different ways’) if one is to grasp it, get it in one’s mind ‘all at once’. Demonstrative proof is, as Hacking put it, an experience, one capable even of bowling a susceptible mind over, and Netz’s exploration of the aesthetics of Hellenistic mathematics suggest that its practitioners were adept at marshalling the effects of their demonstrations.⁸⁹ Recall how Krämer spoke (see Section 4.3) of how ‘in the epistemological debate between Socrates and Meno we begin to understand the difference between knowing how and knowing that, between procedural and declarative knowledge; between practical

⁸⁵ Hacking (2014: 1), emphasis in original. ⁸⁶ Hacking (2014: 2). Note the caution of ‘as I read him’, which reflects his sense of his own readings as contingent and historically situated. ⁸⁷ Hacking (2014: 21); he continues: ‘I shall call these two ideals cartesian and leibnizian.’ In his book Hacking draws a considered distinction in the use of adjectives between that which can be directly attributed to Descartes and Leibniz, for which he uses u.c., and that which is developed by others in their style, for which he uses l.c. Note then how he goes on tentatively to extend the historical reach of these ‘ideals’ into the ancient Greek past: Socrates is already (but not yet, and certainly not consciously), as Hacking would put it, ‘cartesian’. On different ancient traditions of proof, see further the essays in Chemla (2012). ⁸⁸ Hacking (2014: 28). ⁸⁹ Netz (2009).

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at-hand knowledge and theoretical, propositional knowledge’.⁹⁰ Her distinction between ‘knowing that’ and ‘knowing how’ resonate respectively with Hacking’s Cartesian and Leibnizian ideals of proof. She also said that thinking with diagrams can lead to ‘flashes of insight’. Aha! Aha! Insight is the exclamatory title of a book the mathematician Martin Gardner wrote about this eureka moment (ēurēka ‘I’ve found it!’).⁹¹ Hacking sees his question as one of reception—though that is a term he himself never uses. Nonetheless, acknowledging processes of reception brings history back into philosophy (and philosophy back into history), and Hacking has a fine knack of bringing the tensions and frictions to our notice, as a brief example will illustrate. That the square on the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides has come to be acknowledged far beyond the confines of Greece, but how is one to speak of this? This has traditionally become known as ‘Pythagoras’ theorem’ (though Hahn argues that the credit belongs to Thales); but, if we bear in mind what Nightingale has written about theōria as a foundational term in the Platonic–Aristotelian tradition, the use of the term theorem seems to reflect the appropriation by ‘philosophy’ of geometrical proof.⁹² Hacking prefers to speak of ‘Pythagoras’ fact’—that is, something made or constructed by Pythagoras, the term fact signalling Hacking to be a resisting reader of the Platonic–Aristotelian tradition, albeit from within.⁹³ Historically minded philosopher that he is, Hacking is sensitive to how the language we use reflects the dynamics of its appropriation and reception in various contexts over time. Let us take this a bit further. In his life of Pythagoras, Diogenes Laertius (8.12) quotes an epigram⁹⁴ that he offered a sacrifice when he discovered it: ἡνίκα Πυθαγόρης τὸ περικλεὲς εὕρετο γράμμα, κεῖν᾽ ἐφ᾽ ὅτῳ κλεινὴν ἤγαγε βουθυσίην [ . . . ] When Pythagoras discovered the famous figure, for which he brought a glorious sacrifice of oxen [ . . . ]

⁹⁰ Krämer (2016b: 168–9), emphases in original. ⁹¹ Gardner (1978). ⁹² theōrēma, earlier used of a spectacle or festival (as in Plato, Laws 953a), comes to be used in Aristotle of an object of contemplation or theory. ⁹³ Hacking (2014: 13). ⁹⁴ Anth. Pal. 7.119. The syntax suggests this is a fragment from a longer epigram; see further the discussions of Netz (2009: 196-6) and Hahn (2017: 135).

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What he ‘discovered’ (heureto; or should we say ‘invented’ or ‘found out’?) is called a gramma, something drawn, a mode of description that recalls language geometers used of their figures. According to Netz: ‘The word diagramma is never used by mathematicians in the sense of “diagram”. When they want to emphasize that a proposition relies upon a diagram, they characterize it as done dia grammōn—“through lines”, in various contexts opposed to the only other option, di’arithmōn—“through numbers”.’⁹⁵ Nonetheless, diagramma is used (in the plural) of mathematical diagrams in Plato Phaedo 73b, which may be a reference to the scene in the Meno.⁹⁶ The shift from prepositional phrase (‘through lines’) to noun (‘diagram’) signals a change in viewpoint from process to product. Diagram, like theorem, has the characteristics of a philosopheme, a term that carries the traces of its usage within philosophical discourse.

4.6. Geometry ‘from Scratch’ Krämer’s diagrammatology, with its study of Kulturtechniken, is happy to operate within this ‘Greek’ and ‘philosophical’ tradition. In seeking out as she does the emergence of the distinction between ‘at-hand practical knowledge’ and ‘theoretical, propositional knowledge’ through the use of diagrams, she feels little need to look further back than Plato. Powerful though Platonism is in conditioning the way many think about mathematics, it does not wholly determine it, as we have seen in Section 4.5. The emergence of geometry before ‘theory’ lies largely beyond her purview, though she does devote a chapter to discussing the work of Tim Ingold, who does not self-identify with media theory but rather offers ‘a comparative anthropology of the line’.⁹⁷ This is another ‘-ology’, and so itself does not stand completely outside the theoretical, philosophical tradition, but, whereas Krämer’s focus is the philosopheme diagramma, Ingold’s is anthrōpos, the human being (no less a philosopheme, as we shall see). Both are interested in ‘cultural techniques’, and both attribute great importance to praxis, but the different conceptual, and accordingly temporal, parameters in which they inscribe them lead them to tell different sorts of story. To generalize too much, media theory ⁹⁵ Netz (1999: 36–7). ⁹⁶ Cf. Rowe (1993: 164). ⁹⁷ Ingold (2016), discussed in Krämer (2016a: 123–35).

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focuses on a unitary notion of culture, broadly Western culture, and from the perspective of what has brought ‘us’ to where ‘we’ are. Comparative anthropology looks at cultures plural, studying the distinctive practices of each, and emphasizing the sheer variety of historical manners of being human in the world. Notionally at least, though perhaps observed in the breach, it resists the imposition of Western cultural concepts and norms, not least those associated with archē and telos. But, although synchronic and anti-teleological in its emphasis, sometimes, as in Ingold, it uses comparison of cultures (plural) as the basis for a speculative history of being human (singular): if we recall the distinction we observed Aristotle making towards the end of Section 4.2 between things apprehended by the senses and the Forms, with each Form unique, the pull towards the singular marks anthrōpos as a philosopheme. Let us conclude by looking at how this addresses the concerns discussed in this chapter. ‘As walking, talking, gesticulating creatures, human beings generate lines wherever they go,’ Ingold writes⁹⁸—marks made or left by the hands and the feet as human beings go about their activities. Some of them are the by-product of primeval activities (for example, paths worn by the passage of feet); others are more deliberate. Ingold resolves lines into what he calls ‘threads’ and ‘traces’, and both are relevant to the emergence of geometrical practices. First, threads. Threads are not drawn on surfaces, but can form point-to-point connections, as when strings are stretched between pegs driven into the ground in the surveying and measuring of land (which provides the etymology for geometry).⁹⁹ If drawn taut, the thread can be assigned numerical values (for example, ⁹⁸ Ingold (2016: 1). We might recall Vitruvius’ Aristippus, who was heartened when he saw ‘the marks of human beings’ on the shore; but also appreciate how distinctive and culturally specific these marks, and their associated manner of being in the world, were. ⁹⁹ Cf. Ingold (2016: 163): ‘In Ancient Egypt such practices of land surveying and measurement were of particular importance, since every year the flooding of the Nile would bury or destroy boundary markers which then had to be reset in order to establish rights of ownership as well as to determine the rents and taxes based on them [ . . . ] The basic tool of surveying was a rope of one hundred cubits in length, marked off at intervals with knots.’ Herodotus (2.109) refers to this practice, and states ‘it seems to me that geōmetriē so devised passed from there to Greece’ (2.109.3). Contrast the comment of his commentators Asheri, Lloyd and Corcella (2007: 319: ‘this conviction that Greek geometry originated in Egypt was widespread (e.g. Diod. I 69,5; 81,3; 94, 3; Strabo XVII 1,3 (C788)) and quite unfounded. What is called Egyptian geometry is no more than a system of surveying techniques; geometry proper [sic], i.e. the systematic study of the mathematical

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by knots) so as to measure, and, as the Pythagoreans realized with the musical string, so as to calculate proportion.¹⁰⁰ Moreover, Ingold suggests that, though ‘there is no reason, intrinsic to the line itself, why it should be straight’, nonetheless ‘it seems as though the quality of straightness has somehow become fundamental to the recognition of lines as lines, not just in the specialized field of mathematics, but more widely’.¹⁰¹ It becomes an index of quantitative knowledge, but also shades into qualitative judgements of what constitutes ‘straight’ thinking and ‘rules’ of behaviour.¹⁰² Now, traces. A trace is ‘any enduring mark left in or on a solid surface by a continuous movement’.¹⁰³ Drawing on André Leroi-Gourhan’s classic Gesture and Speech, Ingold associates gestural movement with graphic inscription; he notes that ‘the morpheme graph originally meant “engrave, scratch, scrape”’.¹⁰⁴ From this perspective, ‘the line is the trace of a manual gesture’—whether with a finger, a stick, or an incising tool. Inscribed in the air, as it surely can be, a trace is, of course, evanescent: Ingold mentions the flourish of the Corporal’s stick in Tristram Shandy that Sterne depicted in the text as a squiggly line. He continues: ‘When, pen in hand, Sterne recreated the flourish on the page, his gesture left an enduring trace that we can still read.’¹⁰⁵ Inscription on a surface not only preserves the trace of the gestural movement, but serves to constitute the surface as a surface, a two-dimensional plane. Ingold then brings together lines as traces and lines as threads to form a regime of praxis, comprised of what he calls guidelines and plotlines, out of which geometrical thinking could develop. He asks us to consider that as a line moves, ‘it sweeps or rolls out the surface of a plane’, and can form a guideline;¹⁰⁶ then ‘imagine that the plane is marked out with points, and that the points are joined up to form a diagram’—those are

properties of forms, is entirely Greek in origin.’ But Herodotus was writing a generation and more before Plato. ¹⁰⁰ On Pythagorean mathematics, see Kahn (2001) and Hacking (2012). ¹⁰¹ Ingold (2016: 156), emphasis in original. ¹⁰² Cf. Ingold (2016: 157). ¹⁰³ Ingold (2016: 44). In discussing Ingold, Krämer (2016a: 123–35) substitutes the term(s) (Maß)stab for ‘traces’, which she translates as Spur; but in so doing she elides the distinction between line and straight line and the development of the notion of linearization to which Ingold, as we shall see in a moment, draws attention. ¹⁰⁴ Leroi-Gourhan (1993); Ingold (2016: 140). ¹⁰⁵ Ingold (2016: 74–5). ¹⁰⁶ Ingold (2016: 160); cf. p. 161: ‘Graph paper, with horizontal and vertical lines, establishes the page as a two-dimensional space.’ It is timely to recall at this point that the subtitle of Krämer (2016a) is Grundlinien einer Diagrammatologie

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plotlines. ‘This’, he continues, ‘is the relationship between our two manifestations of the straight line. One is intrinsic to the plane, as its constitutive element; the other is extrinsic, in that its erasure would still leave the plane intact.’ Lines may join a succession of points, as in the diagram of a triangle or square, but the points so linked as intersections can come to be seen as making up a line. The lines join points as the continuous trace of a manual gesture, but ‘it is precisely this fragmentation and compression—in the reduction of the flowing movement of the ductus to a succession of moments—that the process of linearization consists . . . ] Fully linearized, the line is no longer the trace of a gesture but a chain of point-to-point connections.’¹⁰⁷ Linearization is so common a means by which thinking is spatialized that it has come to be more or less taken for granted (cf. Section 4.2), but consider how it allows ‘moments’, ‘events’, or ‘ideas’ to be abstracted from time and space as one-dimensional ‘points’ that can then be related to one another.¹⁰⁸ Comparative anthropology, when it joins points past and present, resists taking any particular cultural outcome as given, as there from the start. The many lines it plots are not envisaged as converging on a single point, the here-and-now, which makes of that point a definitive telos. It thus asks us to marginalize a retrospective ‘point’ of view based on a particular outcome in favour of adopting the viewpoints of those engaged in cultural techniques we are interested in, so as to bring out how such cultural techniques can and do ramify in various directions that cannot necessarily be foreseen. Ingold himself is more interested in lines as writing than in lines as geometry, but, mutatis mutandis, what he says about writing is worth pondering in respect of how the line drawings of geometry were pressed into service by the temple architects and tunnel-builders of Ionian Greece: The inventors of the earliest scripts did not first conceive in the abstract, and then proceed to construct full-blown, purpose-built writing systems. They did not even imagine the possibility of writing as we would think of it now. All they did was to find expedient solutions to the very specific, local difficulties involved in such tasks as keeping accounts, recording proper names, registering ownership

¹⁰⁷ Ingold (2016: 155). ¹⁰⁸ On Aristotle’s modelling of points in a line and in time (which he calls ‘nows’), cf. Coope (2005: 9–13, 17–18).

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or divining fortunes. In each case the solution lay in pressing well-known and readily identifiable icons into service for the new purpose of standing for speech sounds.¹⁰⁹

Likewise, Greek architects and land-measurers were not seeking to establish a ‘metaphysical’ mode of thinking; but the application of existing cultural techniques to fresh problems and situations can lead to such remarkable and unforeseen extensions of mental activity.

¹⁰⁹ Ingold (2016: 146).

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5 On the Beginnings of Media Theory in Hesiod and Plato Frank Haase Translated by Kathrin L.G. Lüddecke

5.1. Preamble Despite the considerable debate about the ‘prehistory of philosophy’,¹ the significance of writing itself for the emergence of the process captured by the phrase ‘from mythos to logos’ has never been considered. But this should give pause for thought: until the Greek phonetic alphabet was invented around 800 , a culture of writing had existed for over 2,700 years in Mesopotamia. Its significance for administration and the economy is as undisputed as that of its achievements in literature, astronomy, and mathematics.² Yet over those millennia no cuneiform text contains any shred of evidence that, within this cuneiform world, any engagement had taken place with the significance and function of this system of writing itself.³ Even if a highly specialized class of scribes had held the monopoly on writing ever since its Sumerian invention⁴ around 3500 , and possibly precisely because of it, this script appears

This chapter offers a much abbreviated and updated version of Haase (2005). ¹ Burkert (2004: 55–78) offers an overview of the history of scholarship and current state of research. ² Dalley and Reyes (1998) offer a useful overview. ³ The texts Livingstone (1986) summarized, and on which he provided a commentary, focus on cosmological speculations around 600  and, tellingly, are of a time when the Greek phonetic alphabet had already been invented. ⁴ On the invention of Sumerian cuneiform script, see Glassner (2003). Frank Haase, On the Beginnings of Media Theory in Hesiod and Plato In: Classics and Media Theory. Edited by: Pantelis Michelakis, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198846024.003.0005

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to have enjoyed such status that its significance and function were taken to be self-evident and therefore not worth examining further. That makes it all the more remarkable, and at the same time surprising, that it took no more than 300 years from the invention of the Greek phonetic alphabet for writing and media themselves first, and explicitly, to become the subject of philosophical enquiry in Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus. In view of this, the question suggests itself whether a new way (or order) of thinking might not have been founded in the course of and with the invention of the Greek phonetic alphabet, originating in the combination—for the first time—of writing and voice. The following considerations support this. In contrast to cuneiform, as well as to Egyptian hieroglyphs, the Greek alphabet for the first time connected writing and voice in such a way that both these communicative universes were understood as directly related to each other. Greek phonetic notation professed to record speech itself. Yet such a radically new understanding of the role of writing had to go hand in hand with what could be termed a ‘revolution in the way of thinking’, since such a notion of writing had no precedents in the ancient East it could relate back to. In order to do justice to the importance of the invention of the Greek phonetic alphabet, the following fundamental issue has to be thought through to the end: each correlation created between letters and sounds is based on arbitrary associations. Such associations, however, can only ever exist between two sets of signifiers. How was the inventor of the phonetic alphabet to assign those scriptural marks, which were to be adapted from Phoenician, to a Greek speech that in itself possessed no distinct order? Without analysing their own way of speaking, the inventor of the Greek alphabet could not have adapted the Phoenician abecedarium. The most important task, therefore, was to transpose Greek speech into a system of signifiers. Such analytical as well as classificatory preparatory efforts required criteria by means of which the inventor of this phonetic notation was able to differentiate his or her own speech. Considering the nature of the task—to employ the Phoenician alphabet for recording Greek, these criteria could only come from the Phoenician abecedarium and its own inherent systematics. Since this alphabet, developed for a Semitic language, contained only consonants but no vowels, it was necessary as well as obvious that this difference would become the crucial

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criterion for analysing sounds and, at the same time, the measure for classifying phonemes.⁵ It is no surprise, therefore, that Plato thematizes this key point in his dialogue Philebus (18b), where he expressly declares vowels and consonants to be inventions of the divine inventor of letters, Theuth. Vowels and consonants owe the fact that they could be considered ‘inventions’ to the sign system Phoenician alphabet. This medium was the condition of the possibility that the object of enquiry, ‘Greek speech’, could be analysed and classified according to phonemes. To put it more precisely and theoretically: against the unspoken as much as necessary backdrop of the medium writing, the voice was semiotized for the first time. Only once he or she had analysed the sounds was the inventor able to institute correlations between the two inventories of signs: Phoenician letters and systematized Greek phonemes. The result was the Greek alphabet. In this arbitrary correlation of written and spoken signs, unwittingly, the so-called coding method was employed for the first time, but it was only after Plato’s philosophical endeavours that the ancient Greeks were to capture the theory behind it terminologically.⁶ It is this basic constellation from which Western metaphysical– philosophical endeavour originated. It founded a new way of thinking that is structured as follows: media (here: the medium Phoenician script) and their mediality become fundamental for semiotizing the world (here: the medium voice and the Greek flow of speech), whereby the latter (world) is transposed into a distinct semiotic system. It was only on the basis of this semio-technological structure that, in a further step, the forms of articulation voice and writing could be set into relation with each other. Based on these foundations, for the first time a world emerged that was based on signs, constituted medially, and claimed to represent reality itself.

⁵ Powell (1991: 42) mentions precisely this prerequisite but does not think through its consequences: ‘The adapter produced a full system of vowels notation by intention, perhaps assisted by inadvertence. He was a practical man with a good ear. He had sharply attuned his senses to finding distinctions in the vibrations of the vocal cords. Inasmuch as vowel sounds in nature extend across a continuum, his choice of five vowels was to some extent arbitrary. He could have chosen fewer or more signs once the idea of vocalization came to him [ . . . ]’. ⁶ Haase (2003, 2017).

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It is worth noting and considering that in this new order of things it becomes possible for the first time to define the contrast between voice and writing with these conceptual pairings: continuity of speech flow versus discontinuity of the written sign; the many of the individual articulations versus the one of its letterization; the dynamis of speaking versus the stasis of writing; the panta rhei of speech flow versus the letterideas of the sign system. The medial structure on which the invention of the phonetic alphabet rests quickly finds its expression in one of the first written poetic compositions of early Greek thought. Hesiod’s Theogony, in whose proem voice and writing are thematized by the Muses and the writer Hesiod himself, turns out to offer the first theory of the new, medially founded and based system. At its centre—designated as paradigmatic—stands the mediating function of the poet as a medium of the Muses. Yet the medial dimension of Hesiodic thought does not stop at legitimizing authorship but develops, with the system set out in and by his Theogony, a media(l) mythology that can be understood as the first media theory of phonetic notation. Western metaphysical thought is genuinely rooted in the invention of the Greek phonetic alphabet, which is why metaphysics and media are indivisibly connected with each other ab ovo.⁷ It is via the Presocratics that the concept of media that was initially bound up in phonetic notation was extended to number, measure, and weight. However, only with Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus would media themselves become the subject of philosophical debate for the first time. In doing this Plato does not stop at an instrumental notion of media, but he understands media themselves as inventions of thought and makes this invention of media the true topic of philosophical examination. Media are understood as productions of the medium thought, which is why Plato reaches the conclusion that the structural elements of media also underlie thought itself. The metaphysical quest for the structural foundations of media inventions is, for Plato, a quest for the thinking of thought. For him the answer to the question of the mediality of media lies in thinking, an answer that arises from understanding how thought, the logos, operates. For Plato this logos has the function of a program by which thought, which he also considers a medium, acts productively.

⁷ See Haase (2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2014) for more detail.

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5.2. Poetic Initiation or Dichterweihe Hesiod’s poetics is defined by the medium phonetic alphabet, the implicit backdrop to the expression of the mediating functions of the singer, of poetic composition, and of poetry. If we take into account the brief period for which this new cultural technology with which the art of the aoidoi was confronted had been operating, it is all the more remarkable, and therefore worth considering with how much acuity the poet Hesiod thought about the significance of this new medium. It was only once an alphabetic phonetic script had emerged that a contrast with the voice of the singer first became possible, and only once written texts had emerged could there be a contrast with the oral version of what was being recited. At the same time the function and significance of the aoidos himself became of interest to all those who were ‘only’ reading the texts and no longer able to participate in the recital themselves. The esteem that the singer could expect to receive from highranking participants at festive occasions was simultaneously also always an acknowledgement of his undisputed role as carrier of cultural memory, at the same time recognizing and giving recognition to both his singing and its truthfulness.⁸ Yet all this lost importance when this oral poetry started to be written down and textualized. Besides the recitals before an audience, now there was the scribe and later the poet as scribe who noted down his songs. At the same time, the new technology of writing down allowed the whole repertoire of songs to be collated, sifted, and organized. Using texts, individual songs could be structured and combined into one epos.⁹ The original function and legitimization of the aoidos as cultural memory became void of meaning with the Greek alphabet and the new practice of writing down his songs. Faced with this situation, the singer–poets were forced to provide the legitimization of their new authorship in their texts themselves. While in the Iliad the Muses are only invoked, the special relationship between Muse and aoidos is hinted at in the Odyssey, which characterizes the singer’s art as a gift by the Muses of special provenance (8.487–91). ⁸ On the oral poetic composition of the Greeks, see also Latacz (2003: 300 ff.). ⁹ It is in this sense that Powell (1991: 230) interprets Homer’s Iliad und Odyssey as a ‘joint venture’ between Homer and his scribe(s). He draws the logical and correct conclusion (Powell 1991: 189): ‘The moment of recording of the Iliad and Odyssey is also the moment of creation.’

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However, Hesiod is the first to elevate the Muses (plural!) into the actual originators of the aoidos’ ‘divine song’ through which the muses sing of themselves and Zeus. In this respect there is a great difference between Hesiod and Homer: here the poet who invokes the Muses; they will sing through him; the poet on his own is not able to do so. On the other hand the poet who is sure of himself; he has been anointed as poet by the Muses [ . . . ] He commences without asking for their support. It is sufficient for him to have received the divine gift from them.¹⁰

The poet’s initiation in the proem of the Theogony is Hesiod’s allegory of the new writer as script-setter (as the etymology of the German compound for ‘writer’, Schriftsteller, has it). The transformation from plain shepherd to poet takes place in three steps: first, the new aoidos breaks off the laurel branch,¹¹ as requested by the Muses, as a clear sign to all of his poetdom; next, they inspire him with the ‘divine song’ or the invisible ‘divine voice’ through which the truthful utterances of the Muses may speak and find their expression in words; finally, the Muses make it a condition of this divine song that it must sing of the Muses themselves at its beginning and end. This triadic poetic initiation describes the medial dimensions of the medium poet: 1. enthronement of the shepherd as poet: instrumental–functional level; 2. inspiration of the ‘divine voice’: technical–semiotic level; 3. centring of poiesis on the Muses: thematic level of production. The poet as medium responds to, and reflects, the new ‘writing-time’ of script-based poiesis. Being based on writing, however, means not only that the poet recites his song before a scribe or writes it down himself, but also that the poet at the same time addresses his song as text to his readers. Writer and reader, text and reading, are the unspoken backdrop against which the medium poet is defined. As a result, the triadic structure just given can be verified in relation to the media writer and reader too: ¹⁰ Kambylis (1965: 47). ¹¹ The question whether the Muses themselves gave the staff to the poet or whether he took it for himself has long been a point of controversy among scholars of Hesiod. While West (1978), Schirnding (2002), and others assume that the Muses had handed it to him; in my view—as well as that of Marg (1970)—the Muses operate solely in the auditory sphere, effecting actions in this way. The latter also means that the Dichterweihe does not have to be a report of an actual experience.

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1. the laurel staff of the poet is replaced by the writer’s stilus; 2. the ‘divine voice’ has been replaced by the technical–semiotic basis of writing: the alphabet; 3. in place of the song there is the text as product of the writer. And what about the medium reader? In his studies on the beginnings of reading in Greece,¹² Jesper Svenbro has concluded that ‘the reader serves as an instrument to what has been written’.¹³ The reader ‘is in the service of the written word which must become audible by means of being read out aloud in order to be realized’.¹⁴ Understood in this way, reading has a supplementary function vis-à-vis phonetic notation: ‘From the point of view of traditional oral culture writing is a procedure to produce speech rather than to represent it.’¹⁵ For in the end it is only such a reading that allows a re-cognition (anagignoskein) of meaning in the process: ‘From the perspective of reading the written word is considered to be incomplete and only becomes complete when the reading out aloud adds an acoustic dimension to it.’¹⁶ In this sense, Odysseus is a good listener who ‘revels’ in his own recognition during Demodocus’ song: ‘and Odysseus was glad at heart as he listened, and so too were the Phaeacians of the long oars, men famed for their ships.’¹⁷ Svenbro’s exposition is confirmed by what can be deduced from Hesiod’s medial structure of poet and poetic composition for the medium reader and reading: 1. the reader is an instrument of the scroll whose textuality remains dead unless it is revived by the reader’s voice; 2. in the process of reading, the reader gives the letters (sequences of letters) an individual voice through which they become audible sound (‘L/laut’); 3. precondition for this is an act or recognition in which the reader/ the listeners deduce(s) the meaning of what is being read (aloud) based on his/their own memory.

¹² Svenbro (2000). See also the third section ‘Textus’ in Scheid and Svenbro (1996) and Svenbro (2003). ¹³ Svenbro (2000: 16). ¹⁴ Svenbro (2000: 16). ¹⁵ Svenbro (2000: 16). ¹⁶ Svenbro (2000: 15). ¹⁷ Odyssey 8.367–8 (trans. A. T. Murray).

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MEDIAL STRUCTURE

Oral poetry Recording

Reading

FUNCTIONAL– INSTRUMENTAL

POET SCRIBE (laurel staff) (stilus)

READER (scroll)

TECHNICAL– SEMIOTIC

divine VOICE

ALPHABET (grammata)

Individual VOICE (stoicheia)

POETIC (in the sense of producing)

SONG

TEXT

MEANING (via recognition in the brain’s memory) (nous)

Figure 5.1. The conditions of production and reception of Hesiod’s poetry following a structure that results from writing

The ancient Greeks had many words for reading, as Svenbro shows. Three are significant in the context of this chapter: nemein, which in Doric usage means distribute but in Ionic distribute itself; legein, which really means say and among whose cognate verbs belongs epi-legesthai in the sense of read for oneself, say for oneself; and finally, anagignoskein, which literally means recognize.¹⁸ Whether poet, writer, reader—all three positions are indebted to the self-same medial structure that Hesiod presents in the poet’s initiation scene for the medium poet. The new conditions of poetic production and reception thus follow a structure that results from writing. Figure 5.1 illustrates that the media poet and reader are structured complementarily via the technical–semiotic dimension of voice and related to each other, so that the significance of writing in its foundational role is highlighted even more clearly. How fundamental a part the phonetic alphabet itself plays in the poet’s initiation is shown also by the written language material itself. Hesiod’s calling from shepherd to poet makes sense only in the context of writing. The ancient Greek words for shepherd, poet, poetic composition, and poetry are all virtual homonyms: ποιμήν/poimēn (shepherd), ποίημα/ poiēma (poem), ποίησις/poiēsis (poetic composition), and ποιητής/ ¹⁸ Svenbro (2000:11–12).

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poiētēs (poet). In this sense the act of poetic initiation can be seen as nothing more than an act of rearranging letters—a writerly act! At the same time the anagrammatic connection of shepherd with poetry shows that ‘divine inspiration’ has to be understood as the crucial act, whereas poetic composition (poiēsis) and literary production (poiēsis) are synonymous. It is a key indicator of the immense as well as central significance of the technical–semiotic structural element, and thus also of the importance of alphabet and individual (reader-)voice.

5.3. Muses and Media The medial structure on and by which Hesiod sees his poetdom founded and justified is a product of the Muses.¹⁹ The significance of the poet’s initiation appears to be self-evidently obvious: in the aoidos the Muses institute the only interface between the divine and human world, through which the divine is able to express itself in a way that is audible to human ears. It is because of this unique function that the singer enjoys an exclusive position that knows no comparison. Therefore, Hesiod speaks of the ‘divine singer’ (theios aoidos) and of ‘divine song’ (thespis aoidē), which is commonly read as the Muses having given the chosen one a ‘divine gift’ that marks him out from among all other human beings. Yet matters are not that easy! The special nature of the poet as interface between divine and human world comes into sharper focus if we look at its/his medial function compared to those of the art of prophecy and oracle. Whereas the latter are human institutions created to enable divine guidance and wisdom to be perceived, the medium poet is said to be solely and exclusively of divine origin. Human beings do not require the aoidos; rather, it is the Muses who need him as their medium, in order to be able first of all to praise themselves. Therefore, it is misrepresenting the facts to say the Muses had ‘gifted’²⁰ the shepherd in the poetic initiation with the divine voice. Those who speak of a gift overlook the fact that the Muses need a human being to function as a ¹⁹ Kittler (2006a) overlooks the function and significance of the Muses in his reading, and (strangely) the medial dimension escapes his attention because of his fixation with ‘music and mathematics’. ²⁰ Thus, e.g., Otto (1956).

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medium of the divine. It is pure self-interest that motivates the Muses to initiate a human being as poet and to equip him with the necessary means. The Muses instrumentalize (in the truest sense of the word) a human being as an aoidos for their purposes. In other words: the aoidos becomes, and is, ‘possessed’ by the Muses. It is with this in mind that, in his dialogue Ion, Plato understands poetic speech—without explicitly mentioning the ‘divine voice’, rather defining it in concrete terms by rhythmos and harmonia—as something produced by ‘divine lot’ (theia moira) and ‘divine power’ (theia dynamei). It has to be said of it that ‘these fine poems are not human or the work of men, but divine and the work of gods; and that the poets are merely the interpreters of the gods, according as each is possessed by one of the heavenly powers’.²¹ Walter F. Otto concludes from this: ‘Where there is song and speech, the Muse herself is in actual fact the one who speaks.’²² Consequently media and medial structure are not only of divine origin but at the same time conditions of the possibility that divine song may in fact be brought to earth. According to Hesiod, media are of divine nature, and they are brought to earth in the poet and the phonetic alphabet. But why do the Muses need to create an earthly medium for themselves that is charged ‘to sing of themselves at the beginning and the end of the song’? Who are these goddesses who are sufficiently powerful and empowered to institute such a structure? Which exclusive function do they perform for the divine? What role do they play within Zeus’ Olympic order? The world as ordered by Zeus is unable to praise its creator and his creation. This is the purpose for which Zeus begets the Muses. Their mother is Mnemosyne, the goddess Memory, who, according to Hesiod, is a Titan, daughter of the earth mother Gaia and of Uranos. The divine order is lacking. That created by Zeus does not speak for itself because it is not able to speak for itself. Its affirmation fails as it lacks a voice by means of which it could express itself ‘in words and sounds’. In other words: what is lacking is the function of self-reference—thus the diagnosis so far. It is difficult at this point to say why it is necessary to affirm the divine order, and what constitutes this necessity, since we have not yet shown

²¹ Plato, Ion 534e (trans. W. Lamb).

²² Otto (1956: 34).

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the basis on which, according to Hesiod’s thought, the essence of divinity is founded. Therefore it makes much more sense first to pursue the path indicated by the conception of the Muses itself. The origin of the Muses is an eloquent one when one considers that Zeus begets and testifies in Mnemosyne, the goddess Memory, and that this Titan is the Muses’ mother. In her mythological form, she personifies everything that the gods were lacking when contemplating their splendour: Mnemosyne is the ‘gathering of recollection, thinking back’²³ as Martin Heidegger so fittingly put it in his lecture ‘What is called thinking?’. The gods’ criticism was after all sparked by the pure gathering of creation, in the absence of the ability for these ‘great works’ to be recollected or to become thinkable. In this sense the ‘name of the Mother of the Muses, “Memory” does not mean just any thought of anything that can be thought. Memory is the gathering and convergence of thought upon what everywhere demands to be thought about first of all.’²⁴ To give this gathering a voice, that is what the gods ask of Zeus, and as a result he begets, and testifies, in Mnemosyne so that the gathering of thought becomes a recollecting song-thought or idea. The Muses are the products of this thought, or recollection, once articulated. It is Zeus who composes what should be thought of into a reminding idea, so that it might be articulated. The Muses, therefore, are not media. They are divine productions and thus simultaneously divine embodiments of their function—that is, personifications of divine externalization that finds its expression through them. That they were later styled patron goddesses of the arts and reduced to this function belongs to the story of the oblivion of media by Western philosophy. Yet, as productions, they are indebted to the medium and the medial structure of their articulation. The medium of their production is Mnemosyne, whose mediality is Zeus. As Zeus in Mnemosyne, so the divine voice (pro)creates in the poet, the phonetic script in the scribe, the reader in the scroll. What they each produce is called Muses, song, text, and meaning. Their media are Mnemosyne, poet, scribe, reader. The medial structure we have traced so far can thus be extended into the divine world and be completed with the medium divine thought with

²³ Heidegger (1968: 11).

²⁴ Heidegger (1968: 11).

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which the circle closes in on itself, back towards earthly-worldly thought in the re-recollecting unlocking of meaning of poetic texts. The Muses have the function to praise Zeus and his divine order and that means generally: to express themselves about creator and creation in divine words and sounds, but also in dancing motion: ‘the goddesses, both beginning and ending their song, sing of Zeus’, it is said in the proem of the Theogony.²⁵ Yet their song does not eliminate the fundamental defectiveness of the divine world of the father of the gods, Zeus. The Muses may praise his creations, yet at the same time they themselves are goddesses and creations of the father of the gods, so they themselves drop out of the eulogy, since they cannot praise themselves. This is the reason why the Muses, as personifications of divine externalization and expression, have to open themselves to the earthly and institute the poet as medium. They have to bring themselves to earth, so that their own eulogy can be delivered through the medium poet. What Zeus creates in the Muses, the Muses create for themselves in the poet, and the poets in the scribe. Consequently, the condition on which they make the aoidos’ poetic singing dependent is analogous to their own instruction: the aoidos has ‘to sing of [the Muses] themselves first and last’ (see Figure 5.2).²⁶ The Muses bring themselves to earth in the poet by inscribing a medial structure in him; earthly media are, according to Hesiod, of divine origin. But that means that, besides the poet, phonetic notation too contains a divine kernel and partakes of the divine. In view of the medial structure that poet, scribe, and reader obey and that connects them paradigmatically as well as syntagmatically to each other, it becomes clear that the circle to the divine closes itself in the reader (or rhapsode, whom Plato conceives of, compared to the poet, as ‘interpreter of interpreters’²⁷). Whether Zeus’ divine order, the aoidos’ divine voice, the phonetic alphabet, or the letter-text of a scroll—all of these have in common that they are sufficient in themselves yet can never externalize themselves unless they are expressed by others. It is the shortcoming of such systems that they remain mute and by themselves as long as there is no one who articulates them in divine and earthly sounds and words. In this fundamental point, no difference exists between divine order, divine attunement ²⁵ Theogony, 47–8 (trans. G. W. Most). ²⁷ Plato, Ion 535a.

²⁶ Theogony, 34 (trans. G. W. Most).

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MEDIAL STRUCTURE

Divine thought

Oral poetry

FUNCTIONAL– INSTRUMENTAL

MNEMOSYNE POET (mind, memory) (laurel staff) gathering of recollection, thinking back

TECHNICAL– SEMIOTIC

ZEUS

Recording

Reading

WRITER (stilus)

READER (scroll)

Divine ALPHABET VOICE (grammata)

SONG POETIC (in the MUSES sense of producing) (μουσόω: endow with song/sense) (noema) divinely recollecting song-thought or idea

TEXT

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Individual VOICE (stoicheia) MEANING (via recognition in the brain’s memory) (nous) earthlyworldly thoughts

Figure 5.2. The media structure that connects the poet, the writer, and the reader to the divine

of the poet, alphabet, and letter-text. In all cases the issue is the semiotic– technical dimension of media. In this sense, the medial structure that the Muses bring to earth in the medium poet, and that, finally, provides the basis for the scribe as well as for the reader, is realized in the divine in the sequence Mnemosyne–Zeus–Muses. Not only the creation or invention as such are expressed in Zeus and his divine order—analogous to the invention of the phonetic alphabet—but so is, at the same time, their mediality by which the being of things is constituted. This suggests a change of perspective that considers Zeus’ divine order from the order of the medium phonetic alphabet. Hesiod’s poetics is characterized by its aim to present the invention of phonetic writing— beyond the reflections of Wachter and Powell—with respect to the divine dimension inherent in it. Hesiod’s construct aims to prove that the medium phonetic alphabet partakes of the divine and contains a divine

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kernel. This appears to be necessary in order to develop an aetiological context for legitimizing poetic song in the face of writing, which proves that the new, script-based poetdom is of divine nature and truthful. It is thus legitimate to enquire to what extent the poetic–mythological construct of Olympus takes its cue from the invention of writing. Yet, before such a question can find its answer, the interface between divine and human world and its semio-technology must be investigated more closely—in practical terms that means: the significance of the ‘divine voice’ for the medium poet. Human beings are able to participate in the divine in full cognizance and knowingly only through the aoidos’ song. The divine voice is at the centre of the divine gift that the Muses give the shepherd and that enables him to sing what is truthful in the Muses’ name. Divine speech as such is inaudible. Only the implementation of the divine voice in the poet allows the inaudible to become perceptible for human ears. What the poet-medium is endowed with is, therefore, of such mo(o)dulation and attunement that it transforms human speech into the sounding-out of the divine itself. How is this divine voice, this transformation, to be understood? The Muses speak through the aoidos by lending him a voice that transforms the inaudible into the audible. This transformation has a technical as well as a semiotic aspect, which are inextricably linked. This is already clear from the Muses’ name, which references ‘the song and the strings of the musical instrument’.²⁸ According to Plutarch (Sympos. 9.14), the three Delphic Muses Neate, Mese, and Hypate already bore the names of the three strings of the early lyre. What is contained in the Muses is thus not only the voice as such but also, in very concrete terms, the materiality of its articulation. The semiotic aspect is based on the sounding-out—to be understood literally (as ‘e-nunciation’)—of the Muses’ song. The divine has to enunciate itself— that is, to be semiotized in the sound structure of human speech—in order to become audible. The translation of audē as ‘inner power’²⁹ that is innate

²⁸ Otto (1956: 25). ²⁹ Thus Kambylis (1965: 66). In Plato‘s dialogue Ion this so-called inner power finds its expression in the term for the divine (alla theia), which is homonymous with aletheia (unconcealment), by means of which the divine dimension in poetic utterance is touched upon.

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in the divine voice is only a faint approximation of what sets apart the bringing-to-earth of the divine and makes it special. Rather, in the term audē Hesiod understands the e-nunciation of the divine in the sense that the divine is endowed with human speech (audēeis), or human speech is endowed with the divine. The poet remains excluded from all this if he does not know the semio-technological foundation of the mo(o)dulation and attunement of this Muses’ voice that has taken hold of him. He is a medium without intellectually grasping its exclusivity. It is, therefore, the gift of the Muses to e-nunciate the inaudible into the audible. In other words: the divine is being e-nunciated in human language even though this sounding-out differs fundamentally from actual human speech. Without sounding-out, however, divine speech remains inaudible. Nothing else, albeit in reverse, occurs in the textualization of song. The audible becomes, through textualization, inaudible: the spoken becomes the written and is recorded as the written spoken. With the textualization of song, the divine speech is returned, in the earthly, to the inaudibility inherent in it, in order—finally—to become transposed again into the audible in the act of reading. The song of the Muses thus undergoes multiple transformations against the backdrop of the contrast of audible/inaudible: the inaudibility of the Muses’ song is transposed by means of the divine voice in the poet into the audible, transferred into the inaudible with the textualization by the scribe through the phonetic alphabet, in order—finally—to be e-nunciated again audibly by the reader. A sequence alternating between audibility and inaudibility thus exists between Muses, poet, scribe, and reader. In each case, a particular semiotization of its own occurs, as a condition of the possibility that the divine may not only be brought to earth but may also be made accessible to a wide public. In the first step, the divine song of the Muses is semiotized by means of the medium poet and his divine voice, through which the divine speech is e-nunciated; next, the singer’s song is textualized in the form of letters by means of the phonetic alphabet, in order to be transposed again when read into the articulations of individual sounds by means of the art of reading. In all three cases the mediality of the medium (voice, phonetic script, reading) itself is inaudible, since it is the condition of that possibility. As little as the aoidos knows of the attunement of his divine voice does the scribe understand the logic of the alphabet, or does the reader consider

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the literality of the letters he e-nunciates with his voice. The mediality of media always remains without echo. The same kind of inaudibility that is a precondition of their song in divine spheres also appears to appertain to the Muses. Appears, for that of which the Muses sing is precisely that dimension of inaudibility that allows and sustains their singing: Zeus. In other words, in their song the Muses constantly and exclusively sing of the fundamental enabling factor of their singing, meaning: they sing of their own mediality. Yet this description of the medial structure remains incomplete if we do not take into consideration that it operates on the basis of selfreference. The self-referentiality of the medial structure is expressed clearly by the Muses as a categorical instruction vis-à-vis the newly initiated poet when they say: the aoidos should ‘sing of [the Muses] themselves first and last’.³⁰ The way the Theogony is constructed obeys this condition of literary production imposed by the Muses from the very first sentence: ‘From the Heliconian Muses let us begin to sing.’ Formally, as well as in terms of content, the Muses’ dictate determines the proem’s construction as well as that of the Theogony itself as a whole. Its very first sentence already fulfils their condition and simultaneously sets that basic chord that is applied step by step in what follows (see Figure 5.3). The whole proem is marked by the self-referential diction of the Muses³¹ and issues into the history of the origins of the gods themselves, which indeed is also based on self-reference as operating factor. The entire divine world issues from the self-reference of the ur-mother Gaia. This alone goes to show that self-reference is not unique to the Muses but the genealogical as well as poetological principle of the Theogony. Self-reference is executed rigorously in the Theogony in operational as well as in formal and content terms.³²

³⁰ Theogony 34 (trans. G. W. Most). ³¹ Siegmann (1966) was the first to note and expound on this, even if he did not pay particular attention to the significance of self-reference as a basic operating principle of the Theogony. ³² Clay (2003), Ledbetter (2003), and Pucci (2009) overlook this fundamental fact, which leads to Ledbetter’s strange conclusion (2003: 60) ‘that Hesiod’s theory of poetry is noncognitive in that it does not hold, as the Homeric theory does, that poetry conveys knowledge to its audience’. In Hesiod the structure is the message.

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let us

begin to sing’

Depiction of the Muses’ world Poet’s initiation (lines 2–21) (lines 22–33)

Muses’ instruction (lines 33–5)

(lines 36–80)

(lines 107–15)

Judge’s initiation (lines 81–106)

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Figure 5.3. The Muses’ dictate determining the construction of the proem of Hesiod’s Theogony

Taking into consideration, moreover, that the Muses mark the interface between human and divine world, it becomes clear that the Muses’ demanding adherence to self-reference simultaneously formulates a fundamental principle that underlies the divine world itself. In initiating the poet, the Muses, therefore, do not just institute a medium to proclaim their song; they also reveal the productive principle from which the divine world originates. But this also means that the medial structure as it could be shown in the media poet, scribe, and reader also underlies the divine world itself. Such a conclusion shows once more that structurally the Muses hold the same position that in the case of the poet is occupied by singing, in that of the scribe by the text, and in that of the reader by meaning. Therefore, the Muses are products that are founded in mythological terms through the connection of Mnemosyne and Zeus. Understood this way, however, Mnemosyne embodies the functional–instrumental element of the structure, while Zeus stands for the technical–semiotic one. Against the backdrop of this significance of self-reference, the Muses’ instruction—which they issue to human beings by mediatizing the shepherds—is not just the divine song as such, but at the same time also the transmission of the divine principle of creation. In a special way, the Muses bridge divine and human world, the same as the poet himself is presented as the chosen one of the gods on earth. Literary poiesis is founded in divine self-reference and is imparted, ultimately, to each and every individual through scribe and reader. For reading, too, is an act of selfreference, since it is guided by the letters directing the voice towards the individual recognition in people’s memories. Letter-script directs voice, which enables re-recollection in the brain’s memory. Without writing,

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there is no individual reading-voice/reader-voice nor any re-recollection. The not-not-forgetting of the a–na–mnesis neatly summarizes the function of writing linguistically: it is only letters that first allow the double negation of forgetting and that enable a recollecting whose being is founded in the nature of the sign itself: the repeatability of signs. It follows that the structure of recollection itself is one based on writing yet references a notion of writing that is to be understood more broadly as the concretion in literalness. This is what constitutes the exclusivity of writing on earth. How is this connected to the self-reference demanded by the Muses? In order to be able to answer this, we have to consider the beginnings of the gods’ own origins and also first of all to clarify what self-reference means in the philosophical as well as the operational sense. In brief: how should we conceive of self-(pro)creation by means of self-reference? The divine world’s logic of creation is based on self-reference. Its origin is founded in Zeus, which initially appears paradoxical, since at this point in mythology Zeus has not yet been born. Such paradoxes are, as Walter Marg rightly observes in explaining another passage (l. 465), ‘Hesiod at his most authentic: Zeus has not yet been born but still everything unfolds according to his will, for he is the eternal god’.³³ If one understands Zeus as mediality of writing, then the paradox no longer exists, for this divine writing is a precondition of and underlies all truthful speaking by the Muses and the poet, and thus also underlies the truth of the gods’ origins—which will have to be discussed in more detail later. First emerges Chaos, the yawning void; shortly afterwards the earth mother Gē/Gaia—two ur-entities that emerge independently of each other; not to forget Eros, who, however, in contrast to Chaos and Gaia, is not a self-creator. It is a unique feature of Hesiod’s concept that three ur-entities that are independent of each other stand at the beginning and, in contrast to the later divine world, are precisely not generated through self-(pro)creation. It is, therefore, a misunderstanding to interpret Gaia as a self-(pro)creation of Chaos. Rather, it is the unique nature of these two primordial entities that they are subsequently able to let their worlds emerge out of themselves. Chaos gives birth to Nyx and Erebos; Gaia to Uranos, Pontos, and mountains, in order then to produce the first generation of the Greek pantheon from her connection with Uranos. ³³ Marg (1970: 214). Yet he overlooks the significance of these paradoxes for understanding the origins of how the gods themselves came into existence.

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It is, therefore, only with Gaia that the process of self-(pro)creation of the Greek pantheon in the narrower sense begins. The second generation of the gods, one of them the eventual father of the gods, Zeus, then stems from incestuous relations between the Titans. Zeus succeeds in becoming sole ruler and in reordering the world only after the end of the Titanomachy and having banished the Titans to Tartaros. How is the self-(pro)creation of the divine world by means of the operating factor self-reference, as introduced in the earth mother Gaia, to be understood? Gaia creates out of herself, but self-(pro)creation means that she sets herself into relation with herself and, in this way, produces something out of herself. That which she creates immediately out of herself by means of the self-reference is the self-relation itself as reference. In the self-reference Gaia generates her self-referentiality as that which is her other—in other words: the reference as that which is her other is that which produces the self-reference. Put with regard to the production out of herself, this means that it is the reference as such that is—in contrast to the (pure) self-reference—now posited as external reference. Uranos, Pontos, and mountains are the first productions of Gaia and at the same time that what is other in relation to herself. They are the ur-parts of Gaia, albeit that she herself remains in existence in herself. The first acts of self-(pro)creation are ur-partitions, where the hyphen as it were represents the act of self-reference and shows that the partition is a substantive as well as a logical one. However, initially Gaia enters into relation only with Uranos. Put in more abstract or philosophical terms, that means: the self-reference posited as reference—or one may say, the reference itself—now relates to, and connects with, its own self-referentiality. Or, put the other way round: the self-reference now generates itself through its reference. Yet there is the crucial difference that in this case it is the reference that creates itself in the self-referentiality and thus allows itself to be produced. What does this mean? The reference as relation to itself places itself to(wards) itself through its connecting with the self-reference. In this way the reference distinguishes itself and produces the difference. The difference is the reference that references, or relates to, itself. Such differences as such are the children of Gaia and Uranos: the twelve Titans, as well as the three Cyclopes and the three hundredhanded Giants—in total eighteen children.

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In the next step, the second generation of the divine world is created. Self-referentiality suggests that the children of the Titans will have to enter into incestuous relations, although there are three exceptions: Kreios, Iapetos, and Mnemosyne. How it is to be understood that differences as such connect themselves with each other, or initially remain by themselves, in order to connect themselves later with one of the incestuous productions, as happens exemplarily with Zeus and Mnemosyne? We have seen that the difference is defined as the self-referential reference. When references defined as differences refer or relate to themselves, then they define themselves in their respective distinctiveness. The definition of the differences in their respective distinctiveness is the creation of this self-referentiality. Those that are produced become carriers of the definition of what the differences have in common and what separates them. The children of the Titans are, therefore, carriers of distinctiveness. And Zeus is the most prominent carrier of such a selfreferentiality of difference. In summary, we can identify three steps in the process of self-(pro) creation from which the Olympic pantheon emerges: 1. in the first execution and realization of self-reference, the reference as such is created; 2. in the second step, the difference comes into existence as a result of the self-referential reference; 3. in the third step, the differences are defined in their respective distinctiveness and produce carriers of distinctiveness. Zeus is thus a carrier of distinctiveness who assembles other carriers on Olympus after the Titanomachy and then reorders the world. Olympos rests on carriers of distinctiveness and is in due course supplemented by Zeus’ progeny (ll. 886–929). Overall there are twenty-six gods whom Zeus creates with his divine women and lovers—in other words: twentysix divine characters—as many as the letters of the standard Greek alphabet.³⁴

³⁴ The chapter section ‘Zeus of the Sign’ (Sect. 7.13) in Woodard (2014: 266–88) could be expanded along these lines and developed further.

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5.4. The Medium Thought and its MediaInventions: Number, Measure, Sound, and Writing (Plato) At its core, Hesiod’s Theogony may be termed a mythology of media. Developing Parmenides’ approach, Plato in particular was the one who put an end to this media-mythology with his philosophical thought. Plato not only discarded the possibility of a medial interface between divine and human world but also vehemently rejected the prominent position of the poet–singer. This is expressed most clearly in the tenth book of his Republic, where he summarily banned poets and their poetry from his ideal state, since they were ‘imitators of images’, ‘a corruption of the minds of their audiences’.³⁵ Plato’s radical measure is a symbolic one, for the gesture of exiling corresponds with Plato’s doubts about Hesiod’s media mythology and thus about a pre-philosophical system at whose centre stands the medial connection between divine and human world. Even if Plato was still depicting the poet–singer’s divine inspiration as medial, in line with Hesiod, when speaking to the rhapsode Ion in his early dialogue of the same name— not by art do they utter these things, but by divine influence [ . . . ] but that it is God himself who speaks and addresses us through them [ . . . ] that these fine poems are not human or the work of men, but divine and the work of gods; and that the poets are merely the interpreters of the gods, according as each is possessed by one of the heavenly powers³⁶

—he first qualified this ecstatic–divine way of speaking by contrasting it with knowledge based on reason, only finally to question it entirely in the Republic. Plato’s aim and purpose were to demythologize philosophical thought. In this sense, he understood himself as an enlightenment figure who turns the ‘thinking spirit’ into the measure of metaphysical questioning and promotes a rationalization of the answers. In view of this, it is only logical that Plato replaces poets with the philosopher in his alternative to the Hesiodic media-mythology, the e-nunciation of the divine with cognition, the medium poet with

³⁵ Plato, Republic 600e, 595b (trans. C. Emlyn-Jones and W. Preddy). ³⁶ Plato, Ion 534c–e (trans. W.R.M. Lamb).

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the medium thought, and the medial interface between divine and human world with participation (methexis). At the same time, Plato discarded a division into divine and human world in favour of a doctrine of two worlds, which distinguishes according to a world of ideas and one of sensation, which are fundamentally separate. Only thought itself forms an intermediate realm that partakes of the world of ideas through participation. Yet these radical changes should not belie the fact that Plato remains attached to the medial structure and its structural elements inaugurated by Hesiod. Plato’s criticism of Hesiod is targeted solely at the selflegitimization of poetic song and its poietic production. It should not be overlooked that the Presocratics expanded the notion of media in the 300 years that lie between Plato and Hesiod to incorporate number, measure, and size;³⁷ it is in this context that Plato focused his philosophical enquiry on the significance of the medial productions themselves; he was interested in particular in what relation medium and mediality, medial production and medially produced, stand to each other. For this explains why poetry as an imitative art was the focus of his criticism, in so far as his understanding of media and mediality no longer allowed the art of poetry to be understood as a gift of the Muses. In actual fact his grappling with the medial structure’s three dimensions had led to a media theory that was no longer compatible with Hesiod’s statements. Plato’s media critique of Hesiod was based rather in his endeavour to rationalize medial structures, centring on the term ‘media’ itself and the significance of the semio-technological dimension. In the dialogue Phaedrus Plato discussed the instrumental–functional dimension of media in depth.³⁸ Socrates tells his interlocutor Phaedrus the myth of Theuth, the inventor of media, who had invented first of all number, then arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, board and dice games, and finally even writing. The demigod Theuth, as it were, personifies the intermediate realm between the world of ideas and that of the senses, since he has invented those media that in the end allow human beings to produce things measuredly and rationally. Between the ur-image of the world of ideas and the reflections of the world of the senses, there exists, therefore, a world of media that is essential for human beings to be able,

³⁷ Cf. Haase (2005: 89–95).

³⁸ Plato, Phaedrus 274c–278b.

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with their help, to produce reflections in the first place. Without number and measure no table can be joined, without writing no orality be recorded. Media are the conditions of the possibility of any and every measured production, and this is true not only of painting but also of the shadow images in the allegory of the cave. The existence of differences between media writes them into a hierarchical order that also structures the intermediate realm. In the Phaedrus the demigod Theuth discusses their advantages and disadvantages with King Thamos of Egypt, using writing as an example, while Socrates expands on and deepens these reflections with Phaedrus. Socrates reaches the conclusion that three structural elements are essential for the instrumental–functional dimension of media: self-reference, repetition, and the dialectic of being and not-being.³⁹ Yet Plato considers these conclusions reached through their conversation as no more than ‘points of access and of starting out’⁴⁰ in his examination of media. For the question of the semiotic–technological dimension of media remains unanswered, and this means likewise the questions about the origins and mediality of media. The latter is obvious, as the different values of media that are expressed in the degrees of representation strongly suggest the question of in what the difference between each medium is constituted and what might be the reason why they continually recede further from the ur-image in their degrees of representation. The fact that media are characterized as inventions is a clue given by Plato that helps develop our own thought further. Hesiod spoke of gifts of the Muse, Aeschylus declared media to be gifts of Prometheus in his Prometheus Bound. Plato, on the other hand, understands media as inventions and thus as productions of reflecting thought itself. This means nothing other than that thought itself is conceived of as a medium. What does inventing mean? The ancient Greek euriskein means 1. find, discover: a) devise, explore, invent; b) have insight, recognize; c) contrive, achieve, procure;—2. come across, but also understand, reveal, and in relation to the Latin invenire one may also say reflect (as one can only devise by reflecting). In this sense inventing is a revealing insight in the sense of cognition, a finding that procures for itself by means of reflecting/devising. ³⁹ Cf. Haase (2005: 95–111). ⁴⁰ Plato, Republic 511b (ἐπιβάσεις τε καὶ ὁρμάς).

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When the divine inventor Theuth has to invent out of himself, this means: his inventing is a finding that reveals itself as a result of his reflection/devising—or to put it more precisely: inventing is a finding that reveals the process of internal reflection, but it is also insightful cognition. This definition makes it clear that inventing as such is nothing but the revealing, insightful cognition of reflecting itself. In other words: Theuth’s first invention arises out of his reflecting on reflecting itself. In what follows we shall think of the inventing itself and shall demonstrate—reflecting—the action that constitutes the medium number in its key structural elements, in order finally to discover in what relation the media number and writing stand to each other factually and logically and what their mediality is based upon.

5.5. How the Medium Thought Operates Inventing is a finding that reveals, out of itself, reflection as well as recognizes it insightfully. The hold-onto-itself/halt as such. The thinking reflects. As such it is in the movement of reflecting, and this movement is of endless indeterminacy. In order to find a way out of the reflecting movement, the reflecting thought has to hold back from itself and relate to itself—that is, to place its reflecting to(wards) itself. Since it finds itself in the movement of reflecting, the ‘placing-to[wards]-itself ’ means first of all a hold-onto-itself or a self-interruption. ‘Wisdom (sophia)’, as Sokrates clarifies in Plato’s dialogue Cratylus about cognition, ‘means the holding onto movement’ (412b). The occurrence of the holding onto/halt as such itself is in the truest sense of the word an ‘own-currence’. Thought begins to make its reflecting its own as the reflection that it has decided upon by holding on/halting. The decision to hold on/halt causes a cision/rupt (‘Schied’)⁴¹ with which thought abstains from the movement of reflecting. Yet at the same time not only is the reflection out-ra(n)ged out of its motion of reflecting with this cision/rupt, but the reflecting itself is out-ra(n)ged. ⁴¹ Translator’s note. This new German coinage plays on a number of related words and thus meanings, including: scheiden (to part, separate) and Abschied (parting, i.e. farewell), as well as Entschiedenheit/entscheiden (decisiveness, resolution, and to decide).

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For reflecting becomes a thinking about its reflecting, by virtue of which it becomes inventing. Holding onto itself. In order for reflecting to be able to become a thinking about its reflecting, it first has to hold on/halt or interrupt itself, in order then to hold onto itself. While the hold/halt in itself out-ra(n)ged the reflecting out of its movement, it simultaneously—as cision/rupt—opens up the new movement of holding onto itself, so that in the thinking of reflecting that very same reflecting may be posited at all in the first place. Recollecting repetition. With the out-ra(n)ge, however, the reflecting has undergone a crucial change since it no longer is the reflecting that finds itself in the movement of reflecting. Thought is no longer able, in the holding onto/halting itself of its reflecting to(wards) itself, to hold onto that which had been that reflecting itself. Rather, it has to repeat its reflecting for itself. Yet, after the rupt/cision, this is possible only if it recollects the reflecting movement. But recollection does not mean the repetition of the reflecting movement itself. Recollection, or ‘reinternalization’, rather means the repetition of the internalizing of the reflecting movement. In the recollecting repetition, the reflecting thought is able to get, or repeat, only its internalizing of the reflecting movement. In the holding-onto/halting-itself recollection of the reflecting that repeats itself in thought, what is repeated becomes the reflected. Yet the reflected as repeated is not identical with the reflecting movement of reflecting. Through the holding-on/halt as such, the reflecting has withdrawn itself from itself, and only through thought holding-onto/halting itself and through the recollecting repetition has that reflected emerged that is not the reflecting itself, but the other of the reflecting. The reflected as object of thinking. In its movement so far, the finding that reveals the reflecting out of itself has only posited its own internalizing of reflecting as reflected as such, without having recognized it in its reflectedness itself. In a second movement, the inventing begins to posit its reflected as object and to reflect its constitutive process. The movement of reflecting has become the reflected. The reflected, however, is never the reflecting of the reflecting movement itself. Difference marks beginning and end of its constitutive process—a difference that is constitutive for thought and at the same time proves to be irreducible.

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The reflected is possible only if/when it decides itself in a dual manner from the actual reflecting. The presence of thinking, in which it can execute and realize itself, is founded on that rupt/cision. But is it thinking itself that places itself into this presence and empowers itself to think? How might it be able to resolve itself thinking to think, if its presence had not yet been resolved upon? It is not thinking that decides to hold-ontoitself/halt as such; rather the rupt/cision of the self-interrupting thinking to make a decision issues from thinking, which is thus empowered to the thinking execution and realization of itself. Deferral–supplement structure. What—and by which means—thought opens up in a foundational way withdraws itself in the act of rupt/cision and simultaneously defines the operational execution and realization of thought. With the decision for the holding-onto-itself/halt as such, a deferral–supplement structure becomes the defining factor in that it introduces temporality between the movement of reflecting and the reflected as such and creates the very space that enables constitutive thought itself. Between deferral (the self-withdrawing movement of reflecting) and supplement (the reflected as such, the thought as such) issues thought in that it executes the operations of the hold-onto-itself/ halt as such, holding onto itself, and the recollecting repetition, which find their expression in itself. Medium thought. Thought is subject to the legality of these operations and at the same time obeys in its thinking execution and realization, their regularity—both of which withdraw themselves from being at its disposal. The lack of disposability, which had already found its expression in the impossibility of thinking the reflecting movement itself, once more marks the irreducible as well as defining difference that thought is subject to and makes clear that thought has been empowered to execute and realize the constitutive act by means of operational processes. Thus thought itself proves to be a medium by means of which it produces the reflected for itself through itself. The operations of the hold-onto-itself/halt as such, holding onto itself, and the recollecting repetition may be operations of the medium thought but are defined by its mediality. It is only by means of the reflected, thus, that the medium thought is able to recognize the mediality that is its own defining factor and to define the key processes of its medial activity. The medium

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thought therefore is only ever able to recognize itself in retrospect by means of that which it had been empowered to constitute. Mediality of the medium thought. The deferral–supplement structure (the reflecting movement—the reflected/the thought as such) is founded on the mediality of the medium thought. Mediality empowers thought to thinking execution and realization by instructing the medium thought to execute those operations that define thought as a medium. In other words: thought experiences by means of the reflected that it (thought) is unable itself to think the reflecting movement by means of its own operations, but that which is reflected by it is always constituted medially. If not constituted medially, no entity exists that might be defined as reflected, nor thus any comprehension or cognition. The movement of reflecting itself, however, always remains the incomprehensible and the limitless. Yet this means that the movement of reflecting itself is always in the truest sense of the word thoughtless. It is only with the medial constitution of thought, once it has become the object of thought, that it becomes possible to reconstruct what defines the medium thought in its mediality and underlies the reflected. Yet here too that same relation repeats itself that had shown itself in the correlation between the movement of reflecting to the reflected as such. The reflected owes solely its beingness to the fact that the medium thought is constituted medially. Operations of the medium thought. If we reflect about the reflected as object of reflecting, the following structural elements emerge: difference, deferral–supplement structure, legality and regularity of the medium and its execution through thinking, as well as the relation of mediality and medium. The three defining operations of the medium thought are the foundations of the medial constitution of the reflected. They are: 1. the hold-onto-itself/halt as such; 2. the holding onto itself as self-reference; 3. the recollecting repetition of the internalization, or recollection, of the reflecting, which had previously been in the movement of reflecting. The reflected as such becomes its own other through self-reference and repetition. It is not its reflecting itself, and is at the same time the reflecting that has become the reflected according to the dialectic of

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being–not-being. The reflected as such stands in a relation of dissimilar similarity or self-similarity to the internalization, or recollection, of the movement of reflecting. The reflected as reflected as such—thought as such. Because of these relations, that which thought thinks as reflected may always be defined in two ways. The reflected can be posited as thought as such and therefore as its own. At the same time, however, the reflected is as reflected as such—because it is constituted medially—and is also the radically other for the medium thought. The beingness of the reflected as such, as well as of thought as such, is founded in the mediality of thought. By means of the reflected, thought is able to reflect its medial constitutionality and define this, while—by means of thought as such—it is able to focus on the discreteness of the reflected. In a third movement, the inventing commences to posit its reflected as object and to reflect it into two directions. The subsequent steps of invention may be outlined as follows: • In a first turn, thought reflects the reflected as such in relation to its being constituted medially. It recognizes that the reflected as such possesses the structure sign of and assign to. Out of the sign as such thought finally invents number as the sign as sign. • In a second turn, the reflected is defined as thought as such in its relation to reflecting itself. It becomes clear that thought as such possesses the structure of stand for and state of, which thought comprehends as its own and defines as expression as such. In the subsequent steps, thought will, from this, revealing and uncovering, discover sound and letter. Thought is the universal medium whose mediality is founded on the logos. According to the logos’ instruction—that is, its program—thought executes the operations of the hold-onto-itself/halt as such, of the holding onto itself, and of the recollecting repetition through which it produces entities that are always medially constituted entities. The universality of the medium thought finds its expression in the fact that all other media emerge from it, whereby the inventions of the media number, sound, and letter are products of the self-revealing reflecting by the medium thought (Figure 5.4).

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Reflecting

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Inventing as a finding that reveals, out of itself, reflecting as well as insightfully recognizes it

Movement 1 Hold-onto-itself/halt as such—holding onto itself—recollecting repetition Movement 2 Difference—deferral–supplement-structure—operations of thought—mediality and medium—the reflected as thought as such (its own) and as reflected as such (medially constituted) Movement 3 The reflected as such

Thought as such

Movement 4 Sign of and assign to

Stand for and state of

Movement 5 Sign as such

Externalization as such

Movement 6 Sign as such as sign = one as Externalization as such as such externalization = language Movement 7 One as such placed to(wards) Sound as such placed to(wards) itself: oneness and vowel– itself: oneness and number consonant (two) Movement 8 Number-oneness placed to (wards) itself: number-sign

Sound-oneness placed to(wards) itself: letters

Figure 5.4. Thought as a universal medium

5.6. Coda: Plato and Alan Turing Against this background it may be surprising but not irrelevant to comprehend the ruling and power of the logos as the program control of media. Yet it sounds even stranger to find oneself reminded, in this context, of Alan Turing’s ‘Universal Discrete Machine’ of 1937, which, as is well known, is the prototype of all computers. At the heart of Turing’s machine is the action table in which all ‘computational steps are standardized in the form of sequential schematic tables in such as manner as to be able to be executed also by a machine’.⁴² Each computational step ‘of such a machine proceeds, as soon as it has entered into its current state, as follows: ⁴² Krämer (1998b: 171).

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Turing machine Plato machine Movement

Movement

Halt

Hold-onto-itself/halt as such

Reading

Holding onto itself

Deletion/writing Recollecting repetition Movement

Movement

Halt

Hold-onto-itself/halt as such

etc. etc. etc.

etc. etc. etc.

Figure 5.5. Principal programming steps of Plato’s thought machine and Turing’s symbolic machine

• the machine reads the input-sign on the section of tape just below its reading head. Thus the current argument (state, input-sign) has been established; • it deletes the input-sign and replaces it with the output-sign determined by the current argument; • it then looks up one of the two neighbouring fields on the tape. Whether it turns left or right in doing so is also unambiguously determined by the current argument; • finally, it proceeds to the next state as determined by the argument, at which point the next move may commence.’⁴³ Therefore, the operations of a program-controlled Turing machine are: once the program has commenced, movement—halt—reading— deletion/writing—movement—halt, etc. etc., until it has reached its final state and comes to a halt. Comparing the operations with which the machine executes its computations with Plato’s thought-machine, the following correspondence becomes apparent: commencement of invention as the movement of reflecting—the hold-onto-itself/halt as such—holding onto itself—

⁴³ Wiener, Bonik and Hönicke (1998: 11).

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recollecting repetition—the movement of reflecting—the hold-ontoitself/halt as such etc. etc., until it has reached its ultimate state ‘inventions’ and comes to a halt. Figure 5.5 shows that the principal programming steps of the Plato machine and Turing’s symbolic machine are identical. Turing’s Universal Discrete Machine is a symbolic machine that, controlled by a program in a typographic medium, works through the inscription on a computational tape in order to compute. It fulfils in the symbolic the medial dimensions of the Plato machine, yet is not that machine itself, because Turing’s Universal Discrete Machine is the mathematical model of Plato’s metaphysics on the basis of processing symbols.

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6 Metaxy Aristotle on Mediacy Emmanuel Alloa Translated by Hayley Wood

Understanding media: such an intellectual project is more topical than ever. It is not certain, however, that the best way to understand how media work is to look at the so-called new media. What is needed is a comprehensive approach to media in general, which would encompass all forms of mediacy. Ancient Greek thinking harbours surprising insights into the logics of mediation, especially when it focuses on the various figures of elementary media. Among all the Greek authors, however, the most consistent attempt to systematize a reflection on media was arguably made by Aristotle. Aristotle is generally credited as being the founding father of Western ontology. The formulation ‘Being is said in many ways’ (to on legetai pollakhôs)¹ is often cited and is considered to lay the foundations for ontology as the science that explains the commonality of all these various ways of ‘being’. What has not been noted so far is that Aristotle’s enquiry into the plurivocity of Being sits alongside an enquiry into the plurivocity of media. ‘ “Intermediate” and “mean” can be said in different ways’ (pollakhôn legetai to metaxy kai to meson). This observation, which comes at the end of On the Heavens,² is reiterated in the Topics, where, ¹ Aristotle, Metaphysics, IV, 2; 1003a33; 1026a33–4; VIII, 1042b26 and 1043a and in many similar variations throughout the Metaphysics, the Nicomachean Ethics, and the Eudemian Ethics. ² Aristotle, On the Heavens, IV, 5; 312b2 ff., p. 510 (modified translation). Emmanuel Alloa, Metaxy: Aristotle on Mediacy In: Classics and Media Theory. Edited by: Pantelis Michelakis, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198846024.003.0006

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faced with an apparent synonymy between the middle point of a line, the middle point of a body, and the middle point of a number, Aristotle recalls that, ‘if having a middle is used in several ways, the way here intended requires to be defined’.³ Or, in other words, it must be determined whether this plurivocity (pollakhôn legetai) is merely a play on words—an effect of homonymy, so to speak—with no shared basis other than the name, or whether the word ‘mediacy’ in fact reflects a shared reality across the multiple areas in which it appears. The Corpus Aristotelicum is certainly characterized by a remarkable richness of declensions of this mediacy into mesotês, meson, and other metaxy. This has justifiably been seen as echoing a particular sensitivity to all phenomena of mutation and transition, of generation and decline, of metamorphosis and becoming, across all the areas it touches, from the description of nature and cosmology to epistemology and ethics. However—and this is the paradox—we currently have no cross-disciplinary, comprehensive study of the different figures of mediacy in Aristotle’s thinking. It is as if the observation of a plurivocity, the pollakhôn legetai to metaxy kai to meson, were interpreted as a sign of mere homonymy, as if it were selfevident that there cannot reasonably be, beyond a simple linguistic effect, any true commonality across a middle position in space, a middle term in the logic of the syllogism, or a tool as an instrumental mean. By questioning this assumption anew, this chapter ultimately indicates the following intuition: along with the problem of being and its plurivocity, Aristotelian thought raises the problem of mediacy. Not content merely to raise it, Aristotle also succeeds in articulating this question in a highly original manner, resulting in a true thought of mediacy whose significance has yet to be appreciated. As I have tried arguing elsewhere, there has been an ‘oblivion of the medium’ in Western epistemology, and specifically an oblivion of Greek theories of elementary media.⁴ At first glance, Aristotle might feature among those responsible for this oblivion, given that he is associated with establishing the principle of the ‘excluded middle’. In the last few years, however, some authors have argued that Aristotle should be considered to be a philosopher of the ‘included middle’, specifically in his conception

³ Aristotle, Topics, VI, 12; 149a35–37, p. 251.

⁴ Alloa (2018).

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of logos.⁵ What is more, Aristotle certainly makes one of the most radical contributions to an understanding of mediacy as potentiality, most notably in his account of the medium of sensorial perception, which oscillates between a state of transparency and a state of the actual adoption of a given form, and which hints at a crucial feature of mediacy: the capacity of taking a form without losing the capacity of taking other forms. Aristotle’s theory of sensorial capacity, as we shall see, points to a theory of plasticity. This plasticity of the sensible medium, as will be explored in this chapter, is different from other types of intermediaries that are deemed to disappear in the process of mediation. Initially, however, the aim is more modest, with the primary objective being to establish an initial classification of the various figures of mediation that reoccur throughout the philosopher’s body of work. Three main figures of mediacy can be singled out: the mesotês in ethics, the meson in logic, and the metaxy in Aristotle’s theory of perception.

6.1. Ethics: The Middle Way (mesotês) Among such figures of mediacy, the best-known figure of the mean is perhaps the one that we find in ethics, the so-called golden mean or middle way (mesotês). According to this idea, in ethics, it is recommended and desirable always to observe a middle way between two extremes, either of excess or of a lack of something. While, in 1946, scholars could state that ‘the bibliography on this subject is most restricted’,⁶ the situation is now quite the opposite, as there are numerous studies dedicated to the topic.⁷ Developed in the Nicomachean Ethics and revisited in the Eudemian Ethics, the doctrine of mesotês consists in adding a new dimension to the old ways of considering ethics. The best way of understanding the change introduced by Aristotle is to use a diagram. Rather than an axis that leaves no alternative between ‘Good’ (agathon) and ‘Bad’ (kakon), Aristotle considers a plurality of variables, extending the ethical space in two dimensions. What is ‘good’ is no longer, therefore, situated in opposition to what is ‘bad’, but is somewhere in between two opposing concepts. The virtue of courage, for example, is considered good insofar as it is situated between recklessness ⁵ See Aygün (2017). ⁶ Delabays (1946: 9). ⁷ For an overview of current research, cf. Hursthouse (2006).

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and cowardice, which are both equally bad. Between excess (hyperbolê) and lack (elleipsis), the ‘golden mean’, in short the mesotês, must be observed: to achieve ‘a mean between two vices’.⁸ This mediacy is topological, but not really arithmetical. Rather than a purely mathematical halfway, it must be situated with respect to the human perspective, as it is always relative ‘to us’ (pros hemas).⁹ Depending on the individual and the circumstances of action,¹⁰ the mesotês is sometimes closer to one vice than another. The curve must, therefore, be conceived of as mobile along the vertical axis; only in rare cases is it found to be symmetrical (see Figure 6.1). Yet, while some studies have reduced the problem of mediacy in Aristotle to the simple mediacy of virtues,¹¹ the work of historians of ancient medicine has shown that even the doctrine of mesotês must originally have resulted from a more general reflection on the condition of the physiological humours and, consequently, on physis itself. Despite such studies, which date back to the pioneering work by Werner Jaeger, T. J. Tracy, and Fritz Wehrli,¹² the problem of the plurivocity of mediation,

LACK

GOOD

BAD

MESOTÊS

EXCESS BAD

Figure 6.1. Aristotle’s doctrine of ‘the middle way’ (mesotês) extending ethical space in two directions by introducing a plurality of variables

⁸ Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, II, 6; 1107a1–8, trans. Roger Crisp, p. 35. Cf. also more generally II, 5 to 9. ⁹ Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, II, 6; 1106a30, trans. Roger Crisp, p. 35. ¹⁰ An exception is made for justice, which is opposed only to injustice and cannot therefore, according to Aristotle, be a mean term in the same way as the other virtues (Nicomachean Ethics, III, 5; 1133b30–3, p. 89). ¹¹ Cf. again, e.g., Van der Meulen (1951). ¹² Tracy (1969) has shown that the theory of the mean term in the work of Aristotle (as previously in Plato) was directly based on a particular conception of physis itself beholden

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already highlighted by Aristotle himself, has not as yet resulted in any comprehensive study of its formulations and figures within the Corpus Aristotelicum. With a view to a more complete understanding of figures of mediation in Aristotle, we will, therefore, leave aside the ethical mesotês, which is well known and has been amply discussed, and instead develop in greater detail two major figures of operative mediation: the logical intermediate, and the medium of perception. Reconstructing the role played by each of these figures in turn enables us to distinguish between two operations that are differentiated not only by their operative status, but also by the community of terms that they bring together.

6.2. Logic: The Middle Term of the Syllogism (meson) The intermediate has a specific function in the context of Aristotelian logic, in which it names the middle term (meson) of all relationships of opposition. Here, opposition should not be confused with contradiction, or anti-phasis, which is merely one modality for relationships between opposites (ta antikeimena), which may also be contrary (enantiôsis) or opposed on the basis of privation or relation. While Aristotelian logic is indeed based on the idea of disjunctive reasoning (to poteron) and therefore on the idea of opposition, such opposition cannot be reduced to contradiction. Only in a strictly contradictory relationship is there no third term between p and non-p (antiphaseôs mèn ouk esti metaxy), as contradiction excludes any passage from one to the other. How then to encompass—the question is raised in Metaphysics, Gamma 4—all processes of mutation, modification, and transformation?¹³ From an Aristotelian perspective, we recall that transformation (metabolê) may occur only between two opposites: thus the middle term may be between large and small, but not really between knowledge and knowable. Furthermore, to certain concepts in ancient medicine derived from Alcmaeon. Before Tracy, the link with ancient doctrines of meson had been proposed by Jaeger (1973) in his major study Paideia, but it was left to Wehrli (1951) to establish this explicitly. Jaeger (1957) took this up again in a specific article. For a discussion of their conclusions as well as those of Tracy, cf. more recently Hutchinson (1988). ¹³ This question is raised in Aristotle, Metaphysics, Γ 4 and developed in I, 7.

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middle terms must belong to the same kind as the terms of which they are the intermediates. As such, white may become black by passing through brown and grey, but there can be no passage from one kind to another— for example, from colour to shape (except incidentally, kata symbebêkos). Transformation thus always operates within the same kind and through middle terms that are themselves situated between the opposites. Natura non fecit saltus: for the lyre player to change in key, the highly tuned string must pass through intermediate tones to reach the lower notes. The idea of passage is also a determining one in the domain of logical argument. In Prior Analytics, Aristotle outlines the principle on which demonstrative science is based: syllogism. The syllogismos is what makes it possible to join together (syn-legein) that which is distinct and establish a link between that which is separate; it links two terms together by means of a third. ‘For what results necessarily is the conclusion, and the means by which this comes about are at the least three terms, and two relations [diastêmata] or propositions.’¹⁴ At first glance elliptical, this statement indicates that it is never possible to draw a conclusion from a single premise, and that ‘two posits are the first and fewest from which it is possible, if at all, actually to deduce something’.¹⁵ In other words: the proposition Socrates is a man would be only in the Kantian sense an analytic judgement, already contained in the terms, as there can be no gain in knowledge unless two theses are given, in order for ‘something other than what is stated [to follow]’,¹⁶ so that we can, therefore, speak, in the modern sense, of a synthetic judgement. Once there are two premises, a conclusion results ‘of necessity from their being so’.¹⁷ Following Gilles Gaston-Granger, the existence of three terms constitutes a mere corollary of the existence of two intervals, with the syllogism operating less on the terms than on the intervals between them: the diastêmata that also qualify the musical interval.¹⁸ Any syllogism—and by extension any demonstration (apodeixis), which always implicitly takes the form of a syllogism¹⁹—involves a relationship to distance. The middle term (to meson) thus first connects, through a double interval, two ¹⁴ ¹⁵ ¹⁶ ¹⁷ ¹⁸ ¹⁹

Aristotle, Prior Analytics, II, 2; 53b19, p. 86. Aristotle, Posterior Analytics, I, 3; 73a7, p. 118. Aristotle, Prior Analytics, I, 1; 24b18, p. 40. Aristotle, Prior Analytics, I, 1; 24b19, p. 40. Gaston-Granger (1976: 110). Aristotle, Prior Analytics, I, 4; 25b30, p. 41.

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‘external’ terms (ta akra), before receding to produce a direct interval between them. Hence the classic syllogism, consisting in the major (premise Pr1), the minor (premise Pr2), and the conclusion (C), of which the following example (itself post-Aristotelian) is an illustration: • Pr1 All men (m) are mortal (p) • Pr2 Socrates (s) is a man (m) • C Socrates (s) is mortal (p) Here, ‘being mortal’ is the predicate (p), and ‘Socrates’ the subject (s). Together, they form the external terms. To connect them, a middle term (m) is required, a role here filled by the ‘man’. But, after a relationship has been established between subject and predicate, the middle term recedes from the conclusion. The meson is thus revealed to be merely a provisional ‘means’ destined to disappear after fulfilling its role, akin to Wittgenstein’s ladder, which must be discarded after it has been climbed.²⁰ In other terms, the syllogistic medium is bound to establish im-mediacy, and to erase itself in the process. The idea of the negation of intermediates in pursuit of knowledge finds expression in an entirely different context when, at the end of the Posterior Analytics, Aristotle abandons the strict framework of the syllogism. This latter appears to remain external to the search for first causes, which cannot be subject to any demonstration, as the demonstration is in principle infinite (its premise is in turn a previously mediated conclusion). The ‘induction’ (epagogê) towards first causes, on the other hand, aims to establish what can only be ‘immediate’ (amesos) as not derived.²¹ Based on this short overview, we note that the intermediate consists at best in a means, and at worst in an obstacle to bringing two terms closer together. Ultimately, the aim always invariably remains immediacy. Whether it is a meson as an intermediate stage in a continuous movement (the musician who, when tuning, moves the string from one note to another), a meson as an operator bringing together two discontinuous elements as terms in a syllogism, or a meson as an externality preventing the induction to first causes—whether, in short, it is constitutive or contrary—the mediation is required to withdraw. Rather than an excluded ²⁰ Wittgenstein (1922: 6.54). ²¹ Aristotle, Posterior Analytics, I, 3; 71a15 (p. 114) and 72b20 (p. 117). Cf. also I, 9; 93b22 (p. 154).

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third, we should speak of an excluded mean in relation to Aristotelian logic. Or, more precisely still: of a middle term that, in receding, negates itself. While some scholars have even argued that the disappearance of the medium is the very defining feature of Aristotelian logic,²² this mechanism of self-negation and crossing-out is not the only one that can be detected. In fact, the Corpus Aristotelicum harbours another significant modality for mediacy, which is of a rather different type, and which can be extremely useful for describing alternative types of mediation. This other form of mediacy arises in the theory of sensory perception.

6.3. Aisthesis: Sensible Media The objective of Aristotle’s treatise On the Soul consists in demonstrating the unifying role played by the soul in the exercise of the faculties, and specifically the sensorial faculties. As with subsequent philosophies of perception, which faced similar problems, Aristotle finds himself confronted with the question of how to explain how sensible perception comes about. A key role is played by the five senses. While the senses are the instruments through which we understand the multiplicity of the sensible, they must be differentiated in terms of their operating mode. According to Aristotle, this difference is apparent even within the sensible. All sensible objects have common (koinon) features—such as number, size, shape, movement, and rest²³—that can be apprehended thanks to the interplay of all the senses. There are, however, also sensible qualities that are particular (idion) to each of the five senses, and can be apprehended only by them—that is, the visible or colour, which is available only to vision (opsis), the audible or sound available only to hearing, and the sapid or savour available only to taste, and so on.²⁴

²² The expression of ‘excluded mean principle’ has been introduced by Guy Bugault (1994: 240, 263–87) in his comprehensive comparative study of different types of logic, and it is used specifically to characterize Aristotelian logic as opposed to Indian logic. ²³ Thus, we say of a string quartet that it is a quartet because we both see and hear at the same time that four musicians are playing. In the cage that is separated from our gaze by a dividing wall, we feel and hear that the animal is pacing along the fence and that it must be of a particular size. ²⁴ Aristotle, On the Soul, II, 6; 418a13 ff., p. 665. Here we leave aside incidental perception (kata symbebêkos), which relates to saying that, when we perceive the whiteness of the son of Diares, we perceive as such only the whiteness of a body. Whether this body is

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In analogy to the syllogism, perception thus consists in connecting a sense organ with a sensible object. But, while the ‘external terms’ of the relationship have now been established, nothing has yet been said about how they are brought together. Aristotle may be in essence nearly in agreement with his predecessors on the identity of relata; it is on the nature of their relationship where they diverge. The majority of Presocratic philosophical treatises on nature that have been handed down to us primarily explain sensation through a theory of contact: whether Empedoclean effluvia emanating from things, or Democritean particles detaching from their surface, objects operate through direct contact with the sensory organs, acting in a way by themselves and immediately. In Sense and Sensibilia, Aristotle claims that the Presocratic natural philosophers use touch as the standard for all the other senses.²⁵ This leaves us with an initial version of a mechanistic theory of perception that, while managing to explain the unity of the senses, sacrifices the specificity of each one. Aristotle’s objection to such a theory is explicit: ‘they represent all objects of sense as objects of touch.’²⁶ Platonic dialectic would distance itself from this mechanist position, as, it would appear, did the young Aristotle during the time he spent at the Academy. According to the Philebus, the five senses can be divided into two categories: on the one hand, the immediate senses of touch and taste, considered to be impure because relating to need, and, on the other hand, smell, hearing, and sight, considered to be disinterested and therefore noble senses.²⁷ It is this latter group that, in opposition to the tactile model of the Presocratics, constitutes the Platonic ideal, this vision-theōria stepping back from the sensible and raising itself towards the contemplation of forms. In the Protrepticus, which may have been written while he was still at the Academy, Aristotle would express this convergence in explicit terms—‘The activity of reason is thinking, and thinking is visual perception of intelligible things, just as perception of visual things is the activity of sight’²⁸—and this contiguity of seeing and knowing is echoed in the famous beginning of the Metaphysics, the first that of the son of Diares and not that of Cleon or anyone else (cf. also III, 1; 425a25–7) is here incidental, as it is indirect. ²⁵ ²⁶ ²⁷ ²⁸

Aristotle, Sense and Sensibilia, IV, 442b1, p. 702. Aristotle, Sense and Sensibilia, IV, 442b1, p. 702. Philebus, 51a–52a, p. 57. Aristotle’s Protrepticus, ed. Düring, frag. 24., p. 57.

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book of which may date to the same period.²⁹ Did Aristotle embrace the intellectualism of Plato, in which a sense must be detached to be valid? This would make sight and touch the two poles around which the other senses are organized: like sight, hearing also requires disinterest and therefore finds itself, again in the first book of the Metaphysics, accepted as a source of knowledge enabling learning.³⁰ This epistemological criterium—the primacy of the distant over the immediate—would then take the form of a moral criterium that justifies the polarization of two types of senses: the two lower senses (touch and taste) bring man closer to animals as they are prone to debauchery, but it is not possible to have excessive pleasure in sight, hearing, or smell. According to the text, we cannot call intemperate those ‘who enjoy the smells of apples, roses or incense’,³¹ but consider to be depraved those who give into tasting or tactile debauchery, ‘pleasures [ . . . ] in which other animals share; this is why they seem slavish and brutish’.³² Aristotle takes pains, however, to specify that taste is only to be reproved when it is related to touch and is reduced to a sensation of contact.³³ Can we, therefore, speak of a denigration of touch in favour of sight? While some commentators have proposed this, research into the genesis of the philosopher’s ideas makes such a generalization impossible for his work as a whole. While a certain predominance of the intellectualist model is undeniable in the early works, long years of biological study appear to have corrected this picture. Following analyses of the phonatory and haptic faculties, of which traces can be found in Parts of Animals, Aristotle appears to have revised his deprecatory judgement of taste and touch. While they bring man closer to the animals, it is through the particular sensitivity of these senses that he distinguishes himself from them³⁴—proof, if it were needed, that Aristotle’s theory of sensation cannot be reduced either to mechanism or to intellectualism, ²⁹ Aristotle, Metaphysics, A, 1; 980a23–9. ³⁰ Aristotle, Metaphysics, A, 1; 980b. Cf. Sense and Sensibilia II, 437a12, p. 694. ³¹ Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, III, 1118a10, trans. Roger Crisp, p. 55. ³² Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, III, 1118a25–6, trans. Roger Crisp, p. 55. ³³ Perhaps the kind of contact sought by the legendary glutton Philoxenus, evoked in Eudemian Ethics (III, 2, 1; 231a17), who dreamed of having a neck as long as a crane’s. But taste is also evoked as a sense of culture, when it is used as a means of discrimination (cf. On the Soul, III, 13; 435b16–17, p. 692), for example, by the cupbearer. ³⁴ In Aristotle, On the Soul, the intelligence of a human being is even measured by the sensitivity of his flesh (421a22–3, p. 670)!

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and takes neither touch nor sight as its only model. Is there nevertheless something of a shared model for all perception? Aristotle himself raises this question in On the Soul, II, 11.

6.4. What does ‘through another’ Mean? ‘Does the perception of all objects of sense take place in the same way, or does it not, e.g. taste and touch requiring contact [haptomenon] (as they are commonly thought to do), while all other senses perceive over a distance [apothen]?’³⁵ Leaving aside for a moment the question of whether what is ‘commonly thought’ should be read as a position criticized or adopted by Aristotle himself, we must first question what is meant respectively by ‘contact’ and by ‘distance’. The sense of touch would appear to be defined by, and take its name from, the fact that it directly ‘touches’ objects. ‘All the other organs of sense, no doubt, perceive by contact, only the contact is mediate: touch alone perceives by immediate contact’ (435a17, p. 691). We must, therefore, distinguish between the sense—or the senses, if taste is also ‘a sort of touch’ (434b18, p. 691)—that operate by themselves (di’autês) and those that operate indirectly, through another (di’heterou). But what precisely is meant by ‘through another’? Should we see this as a return of the common sense, which is not, as we recall, strictly a sense proper but enables perception of what is not specific to a sense? This would set in motion the entire architecture of On the Soul. Shortly before this, Aristotle distinguishes between perception by contact and perception by distance. If perception by contact corresponds to perception by itself, to perceive ‘through another’ would simply highlight the necessary distance between the object of sensation and the organ of sensation. For the act of vision to occur, space is required between the viewer and the visible—an affirmation supported by one of those apodeictic phrases that are as startling as they are unanswerable: ‘The following makes the necessity of a medium clear. If what has colour is placed in immediate contact with the eye, it cannot be seen’ (419a12–14, p. 667).

³⁵ Aristotle, On the Soul, II, 11; 423b1–4, p. 673.

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Upon first glance, the idea of a necessary distance does not contradict what was affirmed by natural philosophers like Democritus; it is the nuance of the di’heterou that makes the difference. In addition, the Democritean space is—at least in the way Aristotle presents it to us— an empty space, exempt from ‘any other’, and pure perception is possible only on the condition that nothing interposes itself.³⁶ This point is contested in On the Soul: ‘Democritus misrepresents the facts when he expresses the opinion that if the interspace were empty one could distinctly see an ant on the vault of the sky’ (419a15–17, p. 667). The interval cannot be empty, but must include a certain density or ‘texture’ (plexis, 419b22).³⁷ The empty space is not only a pure ideality but even, Aristotle explains to us, ‘if there were nothing, so far from seeing with greater distinctness, we should see nothing at all’ (419a20 ff., p. 667). Just as Kant famously said that the dove cannot fly in pure air, which would oppose no resistance, vision is impossible without a certain resistance from the metaxy that indicates its capacity to be moved. In the case of vision, this metaxy is referred to by Aristotle as to diaphanês, the diaphanous. The notion itself is the answer to Aristotle’s query: the diaphanês is that ‘through which’ (dia) something appears and can be seen (phainestai). The prefix ‘dia’ refers both to a spatial ‘through’ and to an instrumental ‘through’. We ‘see through’ the diaphanous when it is in its potential and transparent state, but, when actualized, it is ‘thanks’ to it that something comes to be seen. Both transparent when it is potential and translucent when it is actual, the diaphanous is neither purely ideal nor simply material, ‘neither fire nor any kind whatsoever of body nor an efflux from any kind of body (if it were, it would again itself be a kind of body)’ (418b14–16, p. 666). In opposition to the reifying interpretation of the atomists, but also the Platonic doctrine³⁸ according to which a ray of fire is issued from the eye and coalesces with the like— that is, the visible³⁹—Aristotle insists first on the irreducible externality

³⁶ For a discussion of the possible meanings of the intermediate space in Democritus and likely overstatement in Aristotle’s reading, cf. Morel (1996: 177–245; 2002). ³⁷ Which Richard Bodéüs in the French edition (Flammarion) goes as far as translating by ‘resistance’ to the sensible medium. ³⁸ A doctrine also defended in On the Heavens and Meteorology. ³⁹ For a history of the so-called intromission and extramission theories, from antiquity to Kepler, cf. Lindberg (1976).

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of the sensible in relation to the sensor, and second on the heterogeneity required between organ and medium of sensation: ‘a sensible object must be there’ and must be both ‘individual’ (hekaston) and ‘external’ (exôten) to the perceiving being (417b26–8, p. 665). Furthermore, perception does not operate—as some natural philosophers affirmed—‘through the like’, but through a heterogeneity of organ and medium that ensures effective distance between perceiving and perceived.⁴⁰ Pointing to the Presocratic doctrine establishing a link between the five senses and the five elements, Aristotle contrasts the transparent medium of the air with the organ of sight, the eye, which is filled with water. As such, each sense is defined not only by an organ and a special object but also by a medium that characterizes it. The diaphanous is the title given to that ‘thing without name’ that constitutes the visual medium,⁴¹ while the auditory medium takes the name of diêches and the olfactory medium that of diosmôs (to use the labels proposed by Themistius and Theophrastus, as Aristotle did not name them).⁴²

6.5. Can Touch and Taste have a Medium? While our analysis demonstrates that Aristotle replaced what opinion called ‘sense of distance’ with ‘sense through medium’, the divide between the senses remains, however, unchanged and merely displaced. While the senses of smell, hearing, and sight operate ‘through external media’ (dia tôn exôthen (436b19, p. 694)), the two most ‘bodily’ senses (touch and taste) perceive immediately and ‘by themselves’ (autê (436b16)). Aristotle provides a powerful argument: all bodies have depth (bathos echei) and extend in three dimensions. If there is a metaxy between two bodies, it is impossible for them to be in contact with one another (423a23–4, p. 673). The senses of contact (touch and taste)

⁴⁰ Cf. Romeyer-Dherbey (1983: 162), which encapsulates in a single phrase its emphatic analysis of the heterogeneity of the medium: ‘The lesson of perceiving for Aristotle is that there is no possibility of auto-affection.’ ⁴¹ On the issue of the ‘anonymity’ of the diaphanês, we refer the reader to Vasiliu (1997) and more specifically to Vasiliu (2004). ⁴² For diechês: Themistius, In de anima, ed. Heinze, 62, 31. For diosmôs: according to Themistius’ epitomes, it was Theophrastus who invented this neologism. Diosmôs returns in the work of Alexander (In de sensu, 185, 9) and Philoponus (In de anima, ed. Hayduck, 601, 28).

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should therefore—eminent specialists have supported this reading⁴³—be strictly distinguished from the senses operating through the intervention of an intermediate. In other words: Aristotle appears to satisfy himself with presenting a restricted theory of mediacy. It would appear that Aristotle was initially resistant to the idea of a medium of touch or taste. In the first section of Parts of Animals, touch is defined solely by the organ of sense, which is flesh (sarx). A change appears to take place in the section focusing more specifically on the flesh of different animals, where a moment of indecision occurs in which flesh may be both the organ of touch and its medium, ‘comparable to the pupil with the whole transparent medium attached to it’.⁴⁴ Aristotle appears to realize that this assertion risks collapsing all previous distinctions made between organ and medium, and proceeds to what appears to be a true relocation of the organ of touch within the body: ‘the primary organ of this sense is not the flesh or analogous part, but lies internally.’⁴⁵ In On the Soul he draws on this notion again by more precisely locating the site of the internal organ near the heart, bringing it closer to common sense, which he also locates within the heart. As such, flesh is not ‘the ultimate sense-organ’ (to eschaton aisthêtêrion (426b15, p. 678)) but ‘the medium of touch’ (423b26, p. 674). Although some later Aristotelian commentaries have highlighted this point—most famously in the sixteenthcentury phrase by Suárez: caro non est organum, sed medium, flesh is not an organ but the medium of touch—Aristotle’s decisive move has not been acknowledged by the dominant accounts of this thinking. The idea of touch as mediated sensation, which Aristotle develops even further, in terms of artificial mediation,⁴⁶ is nonetheless radical, and its consequences remain to be revealed. Leaving aside for now the historical implications of this idea,⁴⁷ which require separate treatment, in this context, let it suffice to outline some theoretical consequences. ⁴³ Cf., e.g., Berti (1977: 380): ‘Aristotele mostra che certi sensi abbisognano di un mezzo interposto tra il sensorio e il sensibile, per esempio nel caso della vista e dell’udito, mentre altri non ne hanno bisogno.’ ⁴⁴ Aristotle, Parts of Animals, I, 8; 653b25–7, p. 1019. ⁴⁵ Aristotle, Parts of Animals, I, 10; 656b36, p. 1023. ⁴⁶ Aristotle even goes as far as conceiving the possibility of prolonging natural flesh with an external prosthesis: ‘For even under present conditions if the experiment is made of making a sort of membrane and stretching it tight over the flesh, as soon as this web is touched the sensation is reported in the same manner as before’ (423a2–3, p. 673). ⁴⁷ See Alloa (2015).

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If we do away with the distinction between mediate and immediate sensation, and all sensation turns out to be dependent on media, the medial structure of perception can now be described further. The condition of the medium, therefore, is that it can be altered depending on the form that it passes on to the organ. Or, in other words: the metaxy must let through the form, but inversely it is only through the medium that something can come about. Aristotle also explains that it is not enough for food to be placed on the tongue: the saliva must pass on taste. If too moist, it prevents sensation; if too dry, it prevents taste (422b5). Although the demonstration here is only brief (a brevity that perhaps led commentators such as Suárez to conclude that Aristotle made taste an immediate sense), it provides us with the beginnings of an explanation. We now understand why ‘[the] same, in spite of all appearances, applies also to touch and taste’ (419a30, p. 667). We can, therefore, reach the following conclusion: contrary to what is ‘commonly thought’ (423b2), there is almost no distinction between the senses of contact and senses of distance; for all senses, on the other hand, ‘it is indispensable that there be something in between’ (419a20, p. 667). We have, in short, moved from a restricted theory to a generalized theory of mediacy.⁴⁸

6.6. Media as Field Transformers In both the theory of syllogism and the theory of sensory perception, Aristotle seeks to consider relationships beyond distance. The role given to distance is, however, fundamentally different in the two types of figure. While the theory of the logical intermediate seeks to bring terms together, thus enabling the act of intellection (*inter-legere), Aristotle’s account of aisthesis differs from older mechanistic accounts in that perception involves a kind of spacing or gap that always remains. While the logical meson must belong to the same kind as the opposing terms, there is heterogeneity across the organ, object, and medium of perception. ⁴⁸ Here we follow Jean Clam in attempting to reconsider the metaxy as an elementary figure in a philosophical ‘mediology’ (cf. Clam 2006: ch. III., in particular 239–57). For another ‘mediological’ reading of Aristotle, we refer the reader to Emanuele Coccia’s excellent work on the Averroist reading of intellect as a medium of pure power (Coccia 2005: in particular 108–43). The price to pay for a theory of mediality conceived from ourselves is, however, losing externality (the exothen), which is a fundamental part of the sensory medium.

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Taking the concept of metaxy seriously thus allows us to transcend the rift that from the time of commentators such as Themistius and Philoponus up to the present day has divided interpretation of the meaning of affection (paskhein) that characterizes, in the work of Aristotle, all perception. Even today, the camp is divided between those who hold that affection constitutes a corporeal alteration of the sensory organs and those who consider it to be purely immaterial. While Richard Sorabji still remains the main reference for the first (physiological) position, authors such as Sarah Broadie but even more prominently Myles Burnyeat have defended the claim that Aristotle’s theory of aisthesis is a ‘physics of form alone, without material processes’.⁴⁹ Since then, the debate has raged over which camp is right.⁵⁰ As there is insufficient space here fully to expand the argument, I will provide a simple sketch. Without opposing the physiological and the functional reading, a ‘mediological’ approach might open up a third avenue for conceptualizing not only affection (paskhein) but cognitive processes more generally.⁵¹ Aristotle clearly specifies that air and water are both media that cannot be reduced either to the body or to immateriality; they receive the form of the sensible but transmit it, pass it on, and are in short literally transformers in that they modify a field so that the form may come through.⁵² The medium thus represents what binds the soul to things, meaning—in the well-known formula—that ‘the soul is in a way all existing things’ (On the Soul, 431b21, p. 686). Without the two ever coinciding—the modal form of the particule pôs (‘in a way’) ensures this—there is, therefore, clearly a koinônia, a community of the perceiving and the perceived, not despite, but thanks to, the metaxy. What kind of provisional conclusions can be drawn from this? Resolving the old quarrel between those arguing for perception between equals and perception between the different, Aristotle posits that, like logical antikeimena, the terms of the sensory relationship are neither identical

⁴⁹ Sorabji (1992); Broadie (1993); Burnyeat (1995: 431). ⁵⁰ A concise overview of both positions and link to the resulting broader discussion can be found in Everson (1997: 56–60). ⁵¹ Even Johansen, who dedicates a long section of his informed study to the metaxy (Johansen 1998: 116–47), eventually comes round to a Sorabjian position. ⁵² Cf. also the notion of metaschematisis, usually associated with the mobility of words within a sentence, and which Aristotle compares in On the Senses (VI, 446b8) to the transfer of form in the medium.

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nor entirely unrelated: if they were completely different, there would be no emotion (pathos), while, if they were perfectly identical, they could not be subject to alteration (alloiôsis). What we might call Aristotle’s proto-phenomenology must, therefore, meet a double requirement: to encompass a difference in co-belonging. The solution consists, one can surmise, in a ‘dynamization’ of the sensory space.⁵³ In a state of potentiality (dynamis), the medium of sensation marks the difference between sensing organ and sensed object; when actualized (energeia), it establishes a relationship of continuity (synechês (419b35, 420a3)), which, according to Physics, V 4, is a condition for the transmission of a movement.⁵⁴ As a third term, the medium constitutes both the common tissue and the basis of differentiation between the sensor and the sensed; the unity of the sensible world, the community of the sensing and the sensed, is never present a priori but exists only in actuality. The two figures of mediacy analysed here—the means of syllogism and the metaxy of perception—thus reflect two different uses of the common (to koinon). While, in the operation of syllogistic deduction, the mediating operation depends on the prior presence of the middle term, which is none other than the common term of the two premises, in the sphere of perception, the koinônia of the sensing and the sensible is only inversely an effect of the operation of the intermediate. In the former case, the common is posed as a pivot that gives way to something not contained in either premise, whereas, in the latter, it is itself the culmination of a process that brings together what, strictly speaking, in that it is not touching, has no ‘common point’.⁵⁵

6.7. Mediacy as the Capacity of Taking Form Last but not least, the logical meson is like the sensory metaxy in that it indicates less a topological mediacy than an operative mediacy. In order to understand this point, we need to return to Aristotle’s explanation of ⁵³ Hilt (2005: 220 ff.), Cf. also Alloa (2008: 85–8). ⁵⁴ The transparent—to take only the metaxy of sight—is thus colourless or transparent in potential, but takes on the colour of the visible when actual. ⁵⁵ A condition for all transmission of movement, the state of being continuous (synechês) is defined in Physics, VI, 1 231a23, p. 390 as not only things with touching extremities (this would also be the case for the ephexês or ‘succession’), but whose extremities (eschata) are ‘one’ and therefore common.

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what abstraction means. Every living being, according to On the Soul, assimilates its environment in order to sustain itself. The most basic form of assimilation is nutrition (threpsis), which consists in taking in sustenance. Interestingly, in order to explain the process of nutrition, Aristotle symmetrically opposes it to higher faculties of abstraction: while feeding on an object entails taking in the material stuff an object is made of, depriving it of its form, knowing an object proceeds in the exact opposite manner: the matter is left untouched, and only the form is assimilated. This is famously exemplified by the metaphor of the seal-ring: the soul is like a sealing wax that receives an imprint by the golden signet-ring, retaining its form, but not its matter (424a17–24). According to Aristotle, knowing something—whether perceptively or intellectually— means to abstract its form from its matter. Or, rather, to be capable of abstracting its form from ‘within’ its matter, and singling it out. There is a second aspect to this. In the case of the nutritive assimilation, there is a loss (phtora), since the form–matter arrangement of the object is lost forever. In knowledge, this arrangement is preserved. In Aristotle’s account, these two cases are described in terms of capacities (dynameis): once the sustenance has been consumed, it cannot be eaten any more, and loses its capacity of being edible. Other potentialities, however, maintain their capacity throughout actualization: the architect is capable of building houses and will remain capable of doing so even after he has built his first house. This second kind includes the potentiality of the sensory field. The soul, says Aristotle, is capable of sensibility even when no sensible object is actually given (for example, seeing in the dark, when ‘no thing’ is to be seen), and, even when a sensible object is actually perceived, the soul does not lose its capacity to take on the form of other objects. The remaining potentiality is thus characterized by its plasticity to take up any potential form. In sensory assimilation, the opposite happens: not only is the form of the object maintained (here by freeing it from its matter, aneu tês hulês), but so is the assimilating faculty of the soul itself. By assimilating the form of a specific sensory object, the sensitive soul does not lose the faculty of assimilating other objects. The soul does not become the sensible object: thanks to the metaxy, which is both a mediator and a transformer, it ‘is assimilated to’ (homoiotai) and becomes ‘similar in likeness’ (hoion) to the sensible (II, 5; 418a6, p. 665): homoiosis opens up the field of the psychê as a field of

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phenomenality. A relationship thus takes place in perception, but its modality also indicates that the assimilation is never integral or integrating, but more precisely: mediatized. It is because the metaxy has no participatory relation to a form (it is literally formless) that it constitutes a pure potentiality to take on any form. The potentiality of the visible, the transparent evoked in On the Soul, points in the direction of a true philosophy of mediacy, whose central axiom can be summarized in the following core premise: mediacy indicates the capacity to take on the form of something without being (it). For a moment, and as long as its capacity is actualized, the medium appears as if it were the being in question; it has its shape and its appearance, without (really) being it. The question of Appearance precedes Ontology. Beyond his foundational work on the question of Being, Aristotle deserves to be rediscovered as a philosopher of mediacy.

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7 The Fable of Arachne Underweavings of Tactile Mediality Karin Harrasser Translated by Aileen Derieg, revised by Pantelis Michelakis

7.1. Subtextilis Can subtlety be depicted? ‘Subtle’, that is, taken in the literal meaning subtextilis as something delicately woven or plaited (Latin texere) under something else? Diego Velázquez’s painting Las Hilanderas (Figure 7.1) is subtle in this sense, so subtle that for a long time art history did not even acknowledge the—hardly secret—message woven into his painting from 1664.¹ In the inventory of Pedro de Arce, presumably the first owner, it was still on the comprehensible surface. Here the picture is listed as Fábula de Aracne.² The title was lost over the course of time and with it an important paratext. This indicated one of several narrative strands in the painting, which was considered an early ‘workshop picture’ up until the first half of the twentieth century. In the foreground it shows five women busy producing yarn: spinning, taking up threads, winding. In a central position in the foreground there is a cat, whose attention is not—as one might expect—fixed on a ball of wool in its immediate proximity, to start playing with it. Instead, she casually stretches a paw towards a diffusely painted piece of wool. In the This is a revised version of a chapter originally published in German as Harrasser (2017). ¹ Hellwig (2015) traces how the mystery was solved, including the intermediate steps. ² The state of research is summarized in Portús Perez (2007: 337–8). Karin Harrasser, The Fable of Arachne: Underweavings of Tactile Mediality In: Classics and Media Theory. Edited by: Pantelis Michelakis, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198846024.003.0007

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Figure 7.1. Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez, Las hilanderas o La fábula de Aracne, 1655–60, oil on canvas, 220  289 cm, Madrid, Prado, Inventory Number: P01173. © Museo Nacional del Prado

background, elevated and separate in an alcove, a tapestry is recognizable, in front of which there are again five figures, three of them clearly women. They act in the space between the working scene in the foreground and the tapestry in the back. Two of the figures cannot be precisely categorized, in terms neither of gender nor of space. They seem to be standing in front of the tapestry, but in terms of colour (pastel-coloured shades of brown, red, grey, and blue), they are associated more with the very back picture space, in other words the tapestry itself. In addition to the tapestry, numerous further textile surfaces are also depicted. On the left side of the picture a woman holds back a red curtain. It could be a stage curtain, but one that specifically does not separate the theatrical scene on the podium from the foreground, but could instead cover the whole picture. The dresses of the women evince extremely different textures, which indicate the social status of the figures. The three women in the in-between space of the picture are elegantly dressed and recognizable as members of the upper class. The women in the foreground wear more simple clothing, but the surfaces, the folds, and the details of the lacing are quite meticulously executed.

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Most of the textiles are painted with a dynamic stroke, in a way that sets the viewer more at a distance, because it is only at a certain distance that they first become figurative. In relation to the sense of touch, this is significant, because the love of detail, with which Velázquez depicts the garments of the infantas and the king in other pictures, draws the viewer close to the painting. With Las Hilanderas, this kind of effect appears most clearly with the figure in the foreground on the right, who turns her back to us. Although textiles and thus the haptic element are such strong themes, the ideal viewer position is oriented to the central perspective. This central perspective places the viewer at an ideal distance to the picture, steering and hierarchizing the gaze, whereas the elaborate arrangement of surfaces elicits a probing look at the entire picture space equally. In this respect, Las Hilanderas resembles Las Meninas, which was also painted by Velázquez but somewhat earlier, specifically in 1656. It shows persons of the Spanish court at the time of Philip IV, arranged around the roughly 5-year-old daughter of the king, Margarita. It shows the eponymous ladies-in-waiting, a guard, two dwarves, and a dog. The painter is also depicted, working on a large canvas with his gaze directed towards the viewer. In Las Hilanderas it is not a painter who looks at the viewer, but rather an inconspicuous female figure in the back on the right-hand side. The ‘plasticity’³ of Las Hilanderas that Fritz Saxl so admired results not only from a sophisticated play with light, shadow, and line, but also from a play with the nearness and distance of the physical viewer. The picture develops a strong pull, but many details are first revealed when you change your position with respect to the painting, moving in front of it. The textile is present in all its phases of creation: as raw wool, as threads, as weaving, as a tactile image (the tapestry). The spider, Arachne, is associated with the sense of touch in numerous allegories from the Renaissance. Perhaps this is an echo of the Aristotelian conception of the sense of touch as creator of connections and mediator, which will be discussed later in the chapter. Yet the composition also opens up further dimensions of weaving and spinning, which are stimulating for considering the sense of touch from a perspective of the history of knowledge and of media theory. As was indeed demonstrated by Aby

³ Cf. Fritz Saxl’s lecture notes, printed in Hellwig (2015: 126, 128).

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Warburg in a journal entry from 1927 and Diego Angulo Íñiguez in a publication from 1947—although they were not aware of one another— the painting is a multiply nested, temporally complex depiction of Ovid’s Arachne fable, a fable dealing with art and craft, with inner-worldliness and belief in the gods.⁴ Ovid tells of the competition between Pallas Athena, the inventor and protectress of weaving art, and Arachne, a simple mortal. Not only was Arachne’s work so immaculate that Pallas Athena turned her into a spider out of jealousy, but Arachne was even audacious enough to create a scene depicting the amorality of the gods: the abduction of Europa by Zeus. In Velázquez’s painting, obviously multiple episodes of the tale can be seen. In the foreground, Pallas Athena, disguised as an old woman (although her youthful leg reveals that she is a goddess), and Arachne are depicted during the contest. The background picture is formed by Arachne’s woven picture (which, as we shall see, depicts the abduction of Europa). A theatrical performance of the fable takes place in the middle section. What is shown is the gesture, with which the helmed Athena curses Arachne. But how do the other three women on the ‘stage’ relate to the events? Why is a viola da gamba there? Who is the woman on the far right looking directly at the viewer? Because of these three figures, Las Hilanderas has been interpreted as a contest of the arts: the viola da gamba and the nesting of painted picture, textile picture, and theatrical tableau suggest this. In addition, there is a narrative in the picture, a weaving with words: the young woman pulling the curtain aside is listening attentively to the older woman. It is also conceivable that this is a very early picture exploring the physiology of the senses: the blurring spokes of the spinning wheel in the foreground as well as the coarse manner of painting, which first forms a whole at a more distanced view, are experimental and quite probably related to representational debates of the time (specifically: Dutch tractates on the theory of the senses).⁵ Beyond this, it is also plausible that a real correlation for the picture exists: as aposentador real (lord steward), Velázquez was responsible for the inspection of the Real Fábrica de Tapices in the Calle Santa Isabel and presumably observed scenes similar to that depicted in the foreground more than once. Taken all together, where does this lead us? Which role ⁴ Warburg’s journal entry is quoted in Hellwig (2015: 9). Cf. Angulo Íñiguez (1947). ⁵ Bexte (2012: 48).

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did tactility play for Diego Velázquez? How did he position himself—as a painter!—in the contest of the arts, and does this positioning have something to do with the ongoing fascination that emanates from the painting? First, the radical inner-worldliness of the depicted interweaving of relationships is conspicuous. Even the choice of motif, Arachne triumphing over the goddess, is a decision against transcendence. Secondly, Velázquez presents us with ‘multiplicities’,⁶ both at the level of the figures and at the level of perception: shades of light and dark and a tendency to monochromatic differentiation that is ‘tamed’ by the construction of a closed space. Light does fall into this space, so there must be an outside, maybe even an above, but what is illuminated here is radically worldly: the back of a woman winding a thread, the texture of the floor and wall of what looks like a stage. With the use of Titian’s The Rape of Europa (1560–2) as the subject of the tapestry, Velázquez also signals an understanding of artistic creativity as one that is aware of its own historicity. It appears to me that everything in the painting points more to what the arts have in common than to a contest among them. It is less about the assertion of the superiority of one of the genres of art (or one of the senses) above all others than it is about the subtle interweaving of the arts with one another: music (the viola da gamba) is visually woven into the ‘stage’, the haptic into the optical by the play of shadows; the (painted) picture emerges from what is woven and tied, art remains devoted to crafts, and the narrative wanders through the picture space. In reference to the painting, Saxl says that the mode of painting establishes relationships between what is heterogeneous, and it is probably the manifold relationships that still make the painting so ‘captivating’ today.⁷ One of the most conspicuous features of the painting, though, has— as far as I can tell—hardly been commented on: it shows a total of ten women, two putti, and a cat. Men are completely absent. In contrast to Las Meninas, here it is not the painter, the artist/creator dominating the composition, who looks directly at the viewer. Rather, as previously mentioned, the direct gaze originates from an anonymous female figure. Despite a whole series of signals of immanence, the picture thus does have an outside. The arrangement is not ‘private’, it is not a scene of family-like seclusion and intimacy; instead, it intensively makes contact ⁶ Saxl, quoted in Hellwig (2015: 129). ⁷ Saxl’s lecture notes, facsimile, and transcript are in Hellwig (2015: 129).

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with the viewer. What is also conspicuous is that the women do not touch one another, neither gently nor violently; there is no direct physical contact. Everything here is tension, relationship, and mediation. The absence of a certain group of figures (male) and a certain kind of gesture (the direct touch) is perhaps even more revealing than what is visible. This is a tactile quality too: where the eye sees nothing, all that is left is carefully to feel one’s way forward.

7.2. The Precarious Mediality of the Sense of Touch It is clear that Velázquez did not actually stage a contest of the arts, but rather reflected on the interwovenness of the arts and sensory qualities. The sense of touch seems to be woven in underneath all the other sensory qualities. In this way, Velázquez’s approach approximates Aristotle’s reflections on the sense of touch in On the Soul, where the sense of touch is in some instances treated in close proximity to koine aisthesis, as the common sense, as a sense that is one and many at the same time, and that is subtexilis—in all senses.⁸ Aristotle, as Emmanuel Alloa has shown,⁹ here challenges older ideas of the sense of touch being a sense without medium and makes an effort to align it with his analytical schema for sensory qualities and perception. As is well known, he presumed a threefold schema that distinguished between the perceived, a medium, and the perceiving organ. Aristotle discusses whether the sense of touch differs from other sensory perceptions in that the medium and the organ are not to be clearly separated in touching. We see the visible through transparency with the eye, and the audible penetrates through the movement of the air to reach the ear; in other words, the medium affects the organ, the organ is acted upon by the medium. With the sense of touch, however, the direction of affecting is not that clear. ⁸ I am referring to On the Soul II.2, 413b4–9 and III.12, 434b11–18. The meaning of the phrase koine aisthesis in Aristotle has of course been subject to extensive debate since antiquity. Cf. the recent study by Gregoric (2007). He demonstrates (2007: 204) that koine aisthesis has a number of partly overlapping and partly contradictory meanings throughout Aristotle (the sensory capacity of the soul, the sense for simultaneous perception, perceptual discrimination, control of the senses, monitoring of the senses, as a synonym for the sense of touch) and claims that the expression was not fixed as technical term in his writings. ⁹ Alloa (2015).

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The tangible touches the skin, but the organ is not acted upon by the medium, but rather ‘concurrently with it, like the man who is struck through his shield’.¹⁰ As the metaphor of the sword and shield indicates, the sense of touch is also the sense that makes the perceiving being especially vulnerable: the skin is the organ for pain. These ideas lead Aristotle to understand the flesh, including the skin, not as an organ, but rather as a mediating instance, as the medium of the sense of touch, whereas the sensory organ for touch must be located somewhere inside, close to koine aisthesis¹¹ or in the heart. Additionally, the sense of touch can simultaneously perceive and distinguish such diverse sensations as pressure, roughness, and temperature. As such, it is capable of demonstrating to the senses that they sense.¹² For Aristotle, by mixing and segregating sensory perceptions, the sense of touch first makes them indistinguishable, and it allows for self-reference. The sense of touch is thus the sense that is many senses simultaneously and, at the same time, the basic organ of (self-) perception. It is like ‘the point, which is divisible in the sense that it can be considered as one or as two’.¹³ Aristotle uses the point as the model of this twofold character. It is the starting point and borderline phenomenon, simultaneously the centre of a circle and the infinitely divisible intersecting point of a line. The sense of touch is a border phenomenon in two respects: as a mediator between inside and outside in the medium of the skin, and as the sense that enables demarcations and distinctions. It acquires its special position among the senses, because it thus sets cognition and judgement in motion. The sense of touch is sometimes understood as the sense that brings forth the perception of perceiving. Consequently, aisthesis is already reflexive as such and not first due to cognitive processes after or above it. The sense of touch makes it possible to cultivate a capacity for distinction, including the distinction between active and passive, which can quickly change location in touching. The sense of touch produces reactions, and to a certain extent it is the most experimental sense, allowing for multiple modulations of affects. ¹⁰ Aristotle, On the Soul, chapter II, 423b3. ¹¹ Heller-Roazen (2007) traces the notion of koine aisthesis (as ‘inner touch’) as a sensuous self-reference throughout Western philosophy. He argues that in ancient thought it assumed a position that consciousness would later occupy as a ‘cognitivist’ concept. ¹² Aristotle, On the Soul, chapter II. ¹³ Aristotle, On the Soul, chapter III, 526b30.

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If we follow these definitions further—the sense of touch as foundation and coordinator of sensory experience and nexus of the ability to differentiate—this takes us into the realm of techniques of the self. In his examination of medieval mysticism, Niklaus Largier has shown that the sense of touch, as a medium for the relational connection of affects, was specifically used by mystics to modulate affects.¹⁴ In prayer, which operates with words and gestures (for example, the Ignatian Exercises), but also in the writings of Thomas Aquinas, ‘dangerous proximity’, which touch evokes, is a central component of transformative self-techniques. These do not undertake a distinction between ‘natural’ corporeality and the virtual, but instead develop a zone of contact that is equally imaginative and physical, within which the most diverse borderline experiences become possible. It is conceivable that the social media of our time,¹⁵ which are equally social and tactile, although free of theology, could take up from these kinds of techniques and thus also inherit what is dangerous about the haptic. In the experimental zone of the tactile, relations of the self to its outside (conceived as God in mysticism, later as the social sphere or the environment) are created and shredded, founded and negated. The reason why this threshold space is dangerous is because among the many possibilities there is always also the possibility of wounding, of the reality of pain. The passage through this zone can also be highly destructive. Leibniz’s description of ‘small perceptions’ as thorns and barbs, which disquiet and incite perception, still refers to this mystical–experimental complex.¹⁶ And even today, a theory of the social that is attentive to sensuality and sexuality is familiar with the metaphor of the porcupine, which stands for the necessity of balancing closeness and distance: if the distance is too great, there is a danger of freezing, while too much closeness results in the danger of being wounded by the other’s spikes. Judith Butler precisely summarizes the precariousness of touch in the social sphere when she writes that violence ‘is surely a touch of the worst order’.¹⁷

¹⁴ Largier (2008). More recently, Largier (2018) elaborates this line of thought towards a genuine ‘speculative sensuality’ in contemplation. ¹⁵ On this, see Herwig (2017). ¹⁶ Cf. Heller-Roazen (2007: 193–209). ¹⁷ Butler (2004: 28.)

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7.3. Against an Anthropology of Capacity In Javier Telléz’s film A Letter on the Blind, for the Use of those who See from 2008, the latent danger of touch is palpable. It also leads to the trace of a highly significant European tradition of thinking: that of an anthropology of capacity. The title is borrowed from Denis Diderot’s famous essay ‘Letter on the Blind for the Use of Those who Can See’ from 1749, in which he attributes a special capacity for abstraction to the blind because of enhanced tactile perception, but at the same time denies them a capacity for empathy.¹⁸ Blind people, therefore, seem ‘inhuman’ to him. The anthropology of capacity and Diderot’s correction of his assessment will continue to interest us. Telléz’s second source is a parable widely known throughout Asia about six blind men, or men in the dark, touching an elephant. Since each of them touches a different part, they come to very different understandings of the elephant. It is like a pillar, like a tub, like a brush, like a fan, and so on. There are a number of interpretations and explanations of the story: it is considered a parable for the limitations of human perception or as a call for communicative action (one comes closer to the truth when different insights are conjoined). Yet it can also be read as a complementary narrative to Plato’s parable of the cave: sensory perception, proximate sensuousness, is not subordinated here to the truth of conceptual understanding. Rather it is the communicative—that is, cultural—constitution of sensory perception that is thematized; it is the context that brings certainty, not the pure idea. What do those of us who see see in the film? We see six blind people touching an elephant. We see hands moving hesitantly or persistently over the landscape of an elephant’s skin. We see faces showing a broad range of reactions: curiosity, caution, happiness, excitement, euphoria, but also fear, even disgust. The blind men talk about their experience of touching. The surprising size of the elephant is mentioned several times, comparisons are drawn (the skin feels like rubber), and the opinions about whether it is a pleasant experience are widely divergent. Telléz’s film brings a context and a weave of relationships into the play of perception, which are missing in the original parable: he stages the

¹⁸ A new translation and comprehensive commentary on Diderot’s essay can be found in Tunstall (2011); translated original text pp. 167–227.

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encounter in an abandoned public swimming pool in New York, which is reminiscent of a circus arena. He exhibits the exhibiting of the animal and the men, thus recalling the long tradition of fascination with what is different. He shows us the visual arrangements that frame and present what deviates from the standard of the ‘humanum’. Yet, because of this exhibition of exhibiting, imagination becomes tremendously alert. We wonder not only what the men are probably feeling, but also how the elephant perceives the touches. Does it care? Does it find it pleasant? Or is it simply well trained enough just to bear it stoically? The film is Aristotelian because it thematizes the sense of touch as establishing relationships and as a medium of insight; but it is also Aristotelian because, as viewers, we feel shame in watching the blind men touching. We observe people who ‘lack’ vision as they gain an experience. Yet Telléz’s film entices us to follow a track, where a sensory capacity does not imply an incapacity as a negation, a lack, but rather where sensory experience emerges in a weave of media, cultural, and social components. Again it is Aristotle who supplies the key word; however, not the Aristotle of On the Soul, but rather the Aristotle of Metaphysics.¹⁹ On sensory capacity we read: καὶ ἡ ἀδυναμία καὶ τὸ ἀδύνατον ἡ τῇ τοιαύτῃ δυνάμει ἐναντία στέρησίς ἐστιν, ὥστε τοῦ αὐτοῦ καὶ κατὰ τὸ αὐτὸ πᾶσα δύναμις ἀδυναμία. Incapacity and the incapable is the privation contrary to capacity in this sense; so that every capacity is an incapacity for the same result in respect of the same subject.²⁰

So capacity exists, and where it is absent there is incapacity, lack, nothing. There is much that is based on this seemingly simple opposition, including the anthropology of capacity from the early Enlightenment. It was a component of a manner of thinking that linked somatic capability with moral and cognitive essences. This may be exemplified by the endeavours of the cleric and philosopher Étienne Bonnot de Condillac to draw up a complete list and explanation of human capacity. His ideas centred around the question of how sensory perception and

¹⁹ For the following ideas I am indebted to Birnstiels (2016), who in turn draws on Setton (2012). ²⁰ Trans. H. Tredennick (adapted from the Loeb edition, 1933). See also Setton (2012: 7).

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cognitive–moral achievements (such as understanding language, sociality) are linked. He studied human capacity speculatively in additive and subtractive experimental arrangements: what are the effects if one takes away the sense of sight or the sense of touch? Does this change something in sensory perception as a whole and in the human capability for insight? For this, Condillac invented a kind of philosophical hairdresser doll, a statue, to which he gave one sensory capacity or another and took it away, and he reflected on the effects—for instance, on imagination. Here, too, the sense of touch enables self-reference and reference to others, and it relates to the formation of structure and the capacity for abstraction. Although this is certainly not a case of ocularcentrism, what results from it on the whole is a mechanism of grading capacity, a mechanism that makes people who are somatically equipped in different ways more or less human. Birnstiel argues that this ‘anthropological accounting’²¹ was exhausted with Denis Diderot at the latest. In his ‘Letter on the Blind for the Use of those who Can See’, which Javier Telléz cites again in his film, Diderot still followed Condillac by attributing a greater ability for abstraction to the blind, as already mentioned, but a deficit in empathy, therefore designating them as ‘inhuman’. He revised this view later, however, because of his acquaintance with Mélanie de Salignac, a niece of Sophie Volland’s, who had been blind since the age of 2, and whom he came to know and appreciate as an extremely sensitive being. For our context, it is all the more puzzling that ‘the thinking about technology [ . . . ] astonishingly ties into the morally connoted anthropology of zones of the body and the theory of capacity based on it, which actually came to its internal conclusion with the work of Enlightenment philosophers like Condillac and Diderot’.²² Dirk Setton, who refers to Birnstiel, has developed an understanding of capacity that can enhance our understanding of technology in relation to the human physique, which will be discussed in the next section. He no longer relates capacity and incapacity symmetrically to one another (incapacity as the privation of capacity), but rather regards this as ‘a kind of constitutive negativity’,²³ as something that has no content now and can therefore also not be interpreted in an evolutionary or transcendental way.

²¹ Birnstiels (2016: 30).

²² Birnstiels (2016: 32).

²³ Setton (2012: 8).

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The passage from Aristotle just quoted is a corrupt version, which is how Setton arrives at his redefinition: in several versions, the iota written under the last letter of the word ἀδυναμία in the second part of the sentence is missing, the so-called iota subscript. This changes the case: the dative becomes nominative. If the missing iota subscript is added to the text, we arrive at the following: καὶ ἡ ἀδυναμία καὶ τὸ ἀδύνατον ἡ τῇ τοιαύτῃ δυνάμει ἐναντία στέρησίς ἐστιν, ὥστε τοῦ αὐτοῦ καὶ κατὰ τὸ αὐτὸ πᾶσα δύναμις ἀδυναμίᾳ. ‘Incapacity’ and ‘the incapable’ is the privation contrary to capacity in this sense; so that every capacity has a contrary incapacity for producing the same result in respect of the same subject.²⁴

Sensory capacities are thus—as in Diderot’s revision—de-essentialized and de-teleologized. This has consequences for dealing with the senses, for the manner in which perception and cognition are constituted is not fixed.

7.4. Teletactility As we take up the historical thread again, the following will focus on the relationship between tactility and technics, an area in which the old anthropology of capacity reappears in new garb. The issue of objectification and a clear distinction from sensory perception became a methodological and theoretical problem in the experimental physiology of the nineteenth century. This applied all the more to the sense of touch with its dubious self-reference and reference to others, with its multiple modalities and the multitude of organs involved. Two books from the mid-nineteenth century bear vivid witness to this epistemological trouble spot: Ernst Heinrich Weber’s Tastsinn und Gemeingefühl (1846, ‘The Sense of Touch and the Common Sensibility’) and Rudolf Hermann Lotze’s Mikrokosmus (3 volumes, 1856–64).²⁵ For both authors (and following on from Aristotle), Gemeingefühl, or common sensibility, does not primarily mean something social, but rather something subjective: common sensibility was the designation, for example, for perceptions of pain that cannot be clearly localized. ²⁴ Trans. H. Tredennick (from the Loeb edition, 1933). Cf. Setton (2012: 7). ²⁵ Cf. Weber (1905); Lotze (1923).

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Why is Lotze significant at all and more than just a footnote in the history of physiology and psychology? His mental experiments were influential for the psychology of the twentieth century, especially for gestalt theory, phenomenology, and philosophical anthropology. The Mikrokosmos was also a sub-current in the thinking of Sigmund Freud, who had several of Lotze’s books in his library. William James, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Helmuth Plessner, and Arnold Gehlen all read and quoted Lotze, and the deficient being (Herder, ‘Mängelwesen’) is knocking on the door here again everywhere. The passages that have had the most effect in the history of theory are devoted to two themes: the self-perception of the subject in space and the question of teletactility, tactile perception outside the body. In terms of self-perception in space, Lotze takes a path that follows neither the Kantian a priori nor the thesis of schooling the perception of space and time, which, in other words, could be called ‘cultural–constructivist’. Rather, he favoured a specifically corporeal reflexivity that today we would call embodied. He devoted himself to the question of how categories, orders, and stores of knowledge form in the back-and-forth between experience and memory, between inside and outside, in the playful, intervening, and working way of dealing with the world. According to Lotze, these schemata are a result of experiences and forms of knowledge articulated on the periphery of the body. He thus conceived of knowledge and action as lying in the body and its relations. Here the sense of touch serves to establish relationships, aligning past experiences with current ones. In this, eye–hand correlation is especially important— for example, for gaining insight from experimenting: ‘While one hand constrains the object and the other tests it and changes its position for new testing, our knowledge arises along the path of the experiment.’²⁶ Ernst Heinrich Weber, Lotze’s teacher, on the other hand, devoted himself in a central passage of his investigation Tastsinn und Gemeingefühl to the phenomenon that tactile sensation continues in an extension not belonging to the sensing body. He investigated this using sticks attached to fingers and toes, in other words ‘extensions’—although hardly spectacular—to the body. Lotze supplemented Weber’s experiments with observations close to life. About a stick held in the hand, he

²⁶ Lotze (1923: ii. 202).

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wrote that with its help one could feel something at a distance ‘as though touching it directly’.²⁷ He left his stamp on the whole arsenal of figures, present in phenomenology, gestalt theory, and media theory up to today, of the ‘extension of existence into the ends and surfaces of a foreign body’.²⁸ The blind man with his cane, the doctor with his tube, the writer with his pen, the painter with his brush—they all appear in Lotze’s text. In his understanding, compassion is not automatically soothing empathy, but rather also the basis for violence. He writes that only one who can feel with his opponent the sensation of a rod on his back will also sense the impulse to hit him.²⁹ Lotze presents many examples from everyday life and from fashion. He describes, for instance, how wearing a hat or sweeping garments so affects the wearer’s sense of the body that they move differently, present themselves differently. Lotze thus grasps teletactility and ‘eccentric projection’ as borderline phenomena, which as such can be technically manipulated. It is precisely this reorientation in research that leads into prosthetics. Lotze’s ideas had a substantial impact on practical (that is, technical and medical) research in the 1910s and 1920s. To illustrate this, I would like to bring up the research by David Katz, who began examining amputees and their prostheses in the First World War and is considered an important representative of gestalt theory. He investigated prostheses and their repercussions for the sense of the body physiologically, but he also endeavoured to develop a psychology of everyday life, a psychology of concretely dealing with prostheses. At this point, the bodily experience of a prosthesis-wearer and of a ‘normal’ person come surprisingly close, for Katz argued that commonplace perception is fundamentally prosthetic. The psychological mechanism, by which [ . . . ] the sensitization of the actually sensitive as well as the other artificial limbs takes place, is that which is universally known, which results in an expansion, by means of tools or even our clothing, of the area of sensation of our body-self, as when a doctor uses a tube to gain information about body cavities not accessible to the eye, when a blind man feels his way through the world with a cane, or when we all perceive the consistency of the ground through the soles of our shoes.³⁰

²⁷ Lotze (1923: ii. 202). ³⁰ Katz (1921: 7).

²⁸ Lotze (1923: ii. 210).

²⁹ Lotze (1923: ii. 204).

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This passage is incisive because of the way it levels the difference between deficient and ‘normal’ perception. An amputee, a blind person, a doctor, and ultimately everyone make use of prostheses to expand their body-self. In David Katz’s work—and in a larger network of research work from the field of gestalt theory that ties into it—we can follow the transfer of mental figures from concrete application to a general psychological theory of corporeal perception and its technical implementation. Katz’s research begins with experiments in military hospitals during the First World War and ends with a general theory of perception that reaches into cybernetics. In his late book The World of Touch, David Katz refers in three respects to Lotze and arrives at a speculative theory of technics as body extension: Somewhat tongue-in-cheek, Lotze stated what significance our articles of clothing, which act according to this principle [the probe principle], have for expanding the space infused by our bodily self. In the age of the automobile and airplane, it is by the same principle of external projection that the automobile driver feels the goodness of the road via the tyres, and the pilot feels the elasticity of the air via the wings of the airplane.³¹

Based on Lotze’s ‘untechnical’ conception of technics, so to speak, which takes recourse to touch, here Katz advances into the field that twenty-two years later will be called cybernetics: the theory of the regulation and steering of ‘systems’, especially those in which humans purposely interact with machines. If we stay with the chronology of Katz’s writings, we encounter a standard work of gestalt psychology, which was continuously revised after it was first published in 1944, contemporaneously with the selffounding of cybernetics in the course of the Macy Conferences (1946–53), and which was published in large editions until 1969 and translated into numerous languages. In the 1948 edition we read about gestalt psychology as the ‘theory of the dynamic self-regulation of the psycho-physical organism’,³² but there is nothing about sensitive prostheses. On the contrary, here Katz emphasizes that the plasticity of the organism allows it—for instance, following an amputation—to relearn in an impressively automatic way.³³ So in the 1940s there is no more mention of technical substitution or of mutual accord between human and machine. ³¹ Katz (1989: 121).

³² Katz (1948: 57).

³³ Katz (1948: 24).

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How is this retreat from the consequences of a self-regulating model to be understood? Why does the psychologist, who speculated about tactile feedback between automobile driver and tyres in 1925, avoid prostheses in 1948, which could be meaningfully described as dynamic selfregulating systems? As much as I appreciate David Katz’s retreat from the consequences of his own thinking, it must nevertheless be emphasized that it was not the humanism of his later writings that was to be so influential for the twentieth century, but rather his research on remote touch and on feedback and steering effects between humans and machines. Via gestalt theory, psycho-physiological investigations of the nineteenth century found their way into computer sciences, and their results can still be found today in computer mice, operation robots, and drone technology. For precisely this reason, the sense of touch—now displaced to the outside of technical manipulation—still remains eminently political.

7.5. Antennae Teletactile technologies, which enable remote intervention (such as battle drones), and those moving ever closer to us, which we take into bed with us, which may even be implanted, and which store sensory-related data, have become the normality of the twenty-first century. The phenomenological differences between technically modified sensations and those that come from the activity of the senses may not have been erased by the ubiquity of technical media, but in the practice of everyday life they have been minimized. Nor is a multiplication of interfaces to be discounted: all these textures, media skins, and high-performance tubes of the twenty-first century are the not really distant heirs of the psychophysics of the nineteenth century and the prosthetic–cybernetic research of the early twentieth century. However, they have also inherited the fragility and the ambivalence of the tactile, qualities that have clung to it since Aristotle: the more technologies intervene in the soma, the more diverse the fields of experimentation become. But also the potential access to our sensory maps and access to the data casually generated just by living go deeper and deeper as well. This applies to health and communication data, but also to the diffuse and elusive affective states that can be increasingly queried and exploited.

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Another trace leads from sensory physiology into the philosophy and art studies of the early twentieth century. References to the psychophysics of perception introduced a cultural studies turn in the view of art, which also helped the sense of touch to gain some prominence. This may be exemplified by Alois Riegl’s theoretizations of haptic and optical images, which arose in association with Ernst Mach,³⁴ Pavel Florenskij’s study on the inverted perspective and the tactile character of icons,³⁵ or the view of art interested in affect and movement, which led Aby Warburg and Fritz Saxl back to the fable of Arachne.³⁶ In all these cases, the tactile is a promise of expansion and renewal, not only in a scientific perspective. What is hoped for is no less than a liberation of the reception of art (or also of perception as a whole) from the corset of ocularcentrism. In this respect, art history bears a certain resemblance to the avantgarde of its time, such as Raoul Hausmann’s speculations on ‘eccentric sensation’ coming from Ernst Marcus.³⁷ The inheritors of this expectation towards the tactile are found in very different fields over the course of the twentieth century: in philosophy with Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Michel Serres, as a founding figure of a new science—namely, that of media studies by Marshall McLuhan³⁸—and specifically also in contemporary cultural studies, which query and map the relation of bodies, signs, discourses, and practices, while tracing the historical and media specificity of sensory perception at the same time.³⁹ There are two current directions dealing with the tactile that seem to me to go beyond previous research: a praxeological direction inspired by scientific research and a media–ecological direction. As Antoine Hennion argues, a praxeological re-perspectivation of insight results not only in an object-oriented questioning of agency (as developed by Bruno Latour and others), but also in the necessity of reflecting on subjectivations of processes of consciousness and of a metaphysics of the will.⁴⁰ ³⁴ Vasold (2016). ³⁵ Florenskij (1989). ³⁶ On the role of the sensory-somatic in Warburg’s art history, see Ekardt (2011). ³⁷ On this, see the essay by Thiel (2017), who also makes it clear, however, that Hausmann’s interpretation of the Kantian Marcus is quite idiosyncratic. ³⁸ On the tactile as a topos of media studies (Benjamin, Moholy-Nagy, McLuhan), cf. Gruber (2016). For these theorists of media, according to Gruber, the conjoining-differentiating character of the sense of touch, its function in the interplay of the senses, was central. ³⁹ See, e.g., Böhme (1998); Benthien (2002); Binzcek (2007); Gelshorn, Huber, and Neuner (2008). ⁴⁰ Hennion (2016).

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This is why Hennion gives so much scope in his ideas on practices of engendering to the probing exploration within routines, the co-genesis of object and subject, and experimentally feeling one’s way: We are talking about the climber’s grip, the jazz player’s blue note, the care worker’s finely judged gesture, or, alternatively, the footballer’s pass [ . . . ] Now all these words speak of touch, of contact. They refer us to brushing up against surfaces [ . . . ] Might we not cleave to this strong impression and adopt an unorthodox watchword: to get into things, we have to stay on their surface?⁴¹

In Hans-Jörg Rheinberger’s investigations of experimental systems, the motif of slowly advancing through as yet unfamiliar spaces is also more prominent than exposing the unknown. Following George Kubler, Rheinberger regards the procedure of the scientist as being analogous to that of the artist, who works in the dark, ‘led by the tunnels and shafts of earlier works as he follows a vein’.⁴² His understanding of experimental systems as facilities that enable ‘opening up a district’ (Martin Heidegger) is accompanied by a special interest in the experimenting, testing character of touch, which does not remain limited to the frequently over-used functionalism oriented to the structure of the human body with the handling and testing observation of a research object (such as skilled eye–hand coordination when operating a microscope). Instead, he is more interested in the possible conditions of a dynamic perception of difference, possibly an incapacity in the sense of a potential, as already outlined, an as-yet-undefined mode of perception. The object and material reference of the open experiment is the result of a trained practice of floating attention, in which touching ‘gains colour’. In other words, it not only perceives itself as touching, but also gains additional new dimensions: Of course one does not conduct blind experiments and waste time by simply trying things out without thinking about it. One naturally has certain ideas, but the point is to develop a feeling and attention for what becomes noticeable at the periphery of what is happening, and to be able to pick up from that as needed. This can often take on the colours of touching, so that one tries something here, tries something there, moving in this space of experiment in a certain undecided way.⁴³

The way visual and haptic concepts are related to one another is revealing: thoughtlessly trying things out corresponds to not-seeing, but ⁴¹ Hennion (2016: 210). ⁴² George Kubler, quoted in Rheinberger (2013). ⁴³ Rheinberger (2015: 26), my translation.

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that which becomes noticeable at the periphery (of vision) can be taken up. Probing is a small, iterative process, not dauntlessly taking hold. Experimentation seems to require a hypersensitive skin that can process complex operations. This involves more of an attention technique of serendipity and an overall feeling for time–space constellation than a purposeful grip that knows what it will soon have in its grasp. The media–ecological perspective distances itself even further from anthropocentric versions of the haptic tied to hands and manipulations. The normative–essentialist character of an anthropology of capacity has already been discussed. What is increasingly proving to be equally problematic is the constriction to only a few senses that is constitutive of the Western discourse on perception: seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching. It is almost absurd that, in the German translation of Diderot’s anthropological speculation in ‘D’Alembert’s Dream’, touch (Tasten) actually becomes keys (Tasten): ‘We are indeed instruments with capacity for sensation and memory. Our senses are like so many keys played by nature that surrounds us and which often play by themselves.’⁴⁴ Here the sensory organs with their multiple processing mechanisms thus become ‘so many’ discrete switches that are each separately activated. The accord that allows a synthetic judgement takes place apart from the sensory perception, in the processing of data. This could be countered with Leibniz’s ‘small perceptions’ or indeed with a media– ecological perspective, which regards sensory perception as an emergent process with conscious and preconscious shares and is primarily interested in the transitionalities between various states of perception. Even though the multimodality of the haptic already appeared as a problem with Aristotle, this did not lead to the conclusion that can be called ecological: from this, a fundamental uncountability of sensory capacity can be derived together with a transition from extensivities to intensivities. Gilles Deleuze and—especially relevant for our field of investigation— Félix Guattari proposed such a change of perspective. On the one hand, they focus time and again on the progressive forms, choreographies, and dramaturgies of non-perceived and perceived sensations: the air that ⁴⁴ Denis Diderot’s ‘D’Alembert’s Dream’ is quoted and discussed by Angerer (2017). She explains the consequences of such a physiology of the senses by looking at a current renaissance of the affective.

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continuously streams unnoticed through the nose, mouth, and throat, and the moment when ‘something’ becomes noticeable, the mechanoreceptors that register a difference: cold, warmth, dust, stench. In this sense, we are always concretely ‘in touch’ with the world, but sometimes we just do not notice it.⁴⁵ With their emphasis on the milieu-related emergence of ever new sensory capacities (and the disappearance of others), Deleuze and Guattari supplied a vocabulary in the 1970s,⁴⁶ which has meanwhile gained in plausibility through the contemporary biology of heterogenesis (e.g. from Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan⁴⁷) and connections to ecological policies for valorizing non-human and parahuman subjectivity. ‘New senses’ are no longer science fiction, when magnets are implanted in finger tips so that the owners of the fingers are better able to pick up screws, or when bionics emulates construction principles from surfaces in nature, with which we then enter into intimate connections. However, the scenarios are not necessarily all technical: those who live together with animals will also discover new sensoria, just as someone reading about the independent activity of the microbiome in the intestines begins to feel the inside of their digestive organs. The body changes through using it, in and through body-technical routines, and thus its sensory map changes too: skins (on the finger tips, on the soles of the feet) become thicker or thinner, the retina can be distorted in one direction or another, the sense of taste mutates with a growing acquaintance with new kinds of food and food preparation, and the sense of space is modulated to adjust to schemata of movement that are used more or less as part of a routine. At the moment, however, our sense of space seems to be in an especially poor state. New circles (‘cultural circles’ and others) are being carved in, instead of us being allowed probingly to explore the distance that has grown closer to us. The greatest challenge may even be to develop a sensorium at all for all the new and old co-inhabitants, the technical, the biological, the mineral, and the human ones. Whether or not this will become the Happy New Ears that John Cage wanted (because of the ear drum, hearing also comes through the skin) or something else entirely, is not yet foreseeable, but it is certainly worth putting out antennae. Or stretching out a paw. ⁴⁵ Thanks to Hanjo Berressem for his explanations on this. They come from a manuscript for a lecture in Weimar in Autumn 2016 (Symmetries of Touch, Bauhaus University, 5–7 October 2016) with the title ‘ “The Lightest of Touches:” Aerosols. The Remote Effect of Thoughts’. ⁴⁶ Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 1994, 2004). ⁴⁷ Margulis and Sagan (2002).

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8 The Shards of Zadar A (Meta-)Archaeology of Cinema Ulrich Meurer

8.1. Archaeologies Digging for media. In 1983, Atari Incorporated decides to bury its video game ‘E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial’. After the hastily developed (and allegedly flawed) game has turned out a non-seller during the preceding Christmas season, 700,000 cartridges are dumped in a 30-foot deep trench in a desert landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico, and covered with cement. It is only thirty years later that Andrew Reinhard, a member of the American Numismatic Society and a classically trained archaeologist whose work focuses on ancient Greek pottery, is hired to excavate the Atari burial ground. His team consists of archaeologists who have done fieldwork in Greece and Cyprus before devoting themselves to the study of late capitalist or contemporary pasts, one of them specializing ‘in removing, cleaning, and assembling human remains’, in order to ensure a proper and professional handling of the unearthed artefacts. At the end of a three-day dig, more than 1,300 game cartridges have been retrieved and are eventually distributed to various museums for preservation and display, one being purchased for the collection of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC.¹ Digging through media. In 2014, the members of MAD-P, the ‘Media Archaeology Drive Project’ at the University of York, undertake an excavation of a ten-year-old 40GB Samsung hard drive that they have ¹ See Reinhard (2015: 86–7). Ulrich Meurer, The Shards of Zadar: A (Meta-)Archaeology of Cinema In: Classics and Media Theory. Edited by: Pantelis Michelakis, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198846024.003.0008

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recovered from their department’s stock. Using several established fieldwork methods such as the Museum of London Archaeological Service’s recording system—numbering the individual ‘context’ (the remains of a specific event in an excavated stratum), taking photographs, registering the find in standardized form, drawing it by hand on semi-transparent tracing paper, and finally removing the object to uncover what is underneath—as well as a so-called ‘Harris Matrix’, a diagram to visualize the stratigraphic sequence and depth of the dig, the team ‘drills down’ through the digital folder structure saved on the drive and records its contents. In a second work step, MAD-P performs a ‘physical excavation’ of the drive by disassembling it piece-by-piece, once again documenting the process with the help of similar formalized methods and then bagging and labelling the parts for archiving.² Both cases, the dig for leftovers from Atari’s failed business venture and the critical deconstruction of a discarded storage medium, suggest that the fields of ‘archaeology proper’ and ‘media archaeology’ share a number of common features. To begin with, MAD-P claims that ‘archaeologists can be understood as the prototypical media archaeologists’, since they study a plurality of past media with regard to their materiality and discursive functions, invent or improvise media processes to conduct their research, and then employ still other media to disseminate the results.³ And, while the archaeologist’s work is thus dependent on or entangled in a variety of media operations, many of media archaeology’s basic notions of time and objectivity seem to show an at least allegorical affinity to concepts of geological depth and the preservation of deposits ‘in the ground’: speaking as pacesetter of media archaeology, Jussi Parikka declares that his discipline has always been fascinated with ‘remnants of past media cultures—monuments from past media ages’⁴ and sees the cultural site into which a specific medium is embedded ‘as sedimented and layered, a fold of time and materiality where the past might be suddenly discovered anew’.⁵ Obviously, Parikka’s statement amounts to a certain substantiation or fossilization of media as well as stratification of time itself (although he speaks of its ‘folds’—whose infinite divisions would challenge, according to Deleuze, all boundaries between layers, between thing ² See Perry and Morgan (2015: 94–104); see also Perry (2014). ³ See Perry and Morgan (2015: 95). ⁴ Parikka (2012d: 64). ⁵ Parikka (2012d: 3).

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and environment, interiority and exteriority⁶—they rather resemble ‘faults’ or geological fractures in a rigid and separable matter); his description employs the extrication of artefacts from the soil of time as an epistemological metaphor to emphasize the physical concreteness of past or buried media cultures. Beyond this affinity, which, as one will see, might be little more than a yielding to a terminological temptation, both disciplines also refrain from the immediate insertion of a given object into a discursive context or narrative setting. Instead of subjecting media to ‘hermeneutical’ interpretation, instead of treating them as ‘textual’ elements that can be deciphered and fitted into a likewise intelligible, readable, linear, and preconceived historical récit, the two archaeologies partake in what Wolfgang Ernst calls ‘antiquarianism’, a bridging of the gap between the physical presence and discursive absence of the past, by touching and tasting the immediate, material object. For antiquarians, history is not just text but the materialist emancipation of the object from an exclusive subjection to textual analysis. Antiquarianism acknowledges the past as artifactual hardware, so to speak, upon which historical discourse operates like a form of software. In a digital culture of apparent, virtual, immaterial realities, a reminder of the insistence and resistance of material worlds is indispensable, and all the more so from a media-theoretical point of view.⁷

While this conviction—that matter matters—may have left its strongest imprint on ‘German’, ‘hardware’, or ‘materialist’ media theory, which, according to Parikka, goes ‘under the hood’ to investigate the material ‘ontologies of and challenges to the storage, distribution and processing of communication events’,⁸ the need to think of history outside narratives and in terms of an assemblage of finds seems to approximate the production of knowledge to archaeological fieldwork. In fact, after only a short moment of hesitation when faced with the irreversibility of their approach, the members of MAD-P proceed with the dismantling of the hard drive since it is precisely this operation that will authentically reflect ‘archaeological methodology as a destructive investigation’.⁹ Even if Shane Butler notes in another context that ‘not all archaeologies, real or metaphorical’, must necessarily be this invasive or produce ‘such

⁶ Deleuze (1993: 6). ⁸ Parikka (2012d: 63–5).

⁷ Ernst (2013c: 43). ⁹ Perry and Morgan (2015: 97).

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irreversible damage’,¹⁰ the team’s decision—just like their manual sketches of digital icons from a computer interface—not only shows methodological rigour; it also accentuates the physical, tangible, corporeal traits of archaeology. In this way, the disciplines’ meeting ground is prepared by a twofold notion of singularity/objectivity. Their shared antiquarian’s ‘sense for the sensual’ prefers the precision of case studies and physical data processing to the projection of broad and generalizing theories; it devotes itself to the thing, to the apparatus, and thereby develops a taste for its haptic qualities, its casing and texture, the ‘moldy, decaying fragment (mummies and parchments, remnants of bodies and objects)’.¹¹ And finally: why does Ernst speak of ‘mummies’ and ‘remnants of bodies’ (and not of folios or yellowed first editions in the antiquarian’s archive) if not to conjure—at least on some half-hidden, subliminal level—the shadowy image of one of the most archetypical and formative scenes from the history of archaeology, the opening of an Egyptian tomb, its infectious miasmas, the torchlight, ancient funerary objects and crumbling bandages, together with its dark memories of colonialism, its traits of cultural appropriation, even its associations of the uncanny and undead in all its popular restagings? In this sense, the ‘mummy’ connotes far more than the mere transformation of human (and) history into a brittle object, or a connection between Ernst’s own concept of the antique and André Bazin’s famous definition of the photographic image as ‘change mummified’.¹² Its phantasmatic appearance seems to indicate how archaeology proper and media archaeology share a latent potential (or proclivity) for extrapolating imaginary worlds from the exhumed remains: the mummy as a corporeal object, ‘tanned and petrified in sodium’,¹³ serves as germinal body or seed that may generate alternative pasts, presents, or futures. It points to an eccentric sphere of archaeology, including Tutankhamun’s mythical ‘curse’ that befell

¹⁰ Butler (2016: 12). ¹¹ Ernst (2013c: 43). ¹² See Bazin (1960: 8). Interestingly, Wolfgang Ernst (2013c: 43) himself refers to Bazin’s notion of photography that ‘resides with the corpse’, as if he senses that irritating presence of the mummy in his text and therefore must make an effort to reintegrate this all too resistant and animated figure into his discourse on media archaeology. However, this quotation—being only loosely connected to the preceding discussion of ‘antiquarianism’ or to the subsequent shift to the analytical tools of ‘new historicism’—remains strangely isolated and, thus, seems to develop a life of its own. ¹³ Bazin (1960: 5).

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the crew of Howard Carter in 1925 as well as the proliferating internet legends about Atari’s buried game cartridges, and simultaneously to the speculative idea of ‘it could have been different’, identified by Parikka as a prominent notion in media archaeology.¹⁴ Far from being simply ‘false’, such fictional, counterfactual, or expanded realities originate from a creative quality in scientific thinking that reaches out to the unrealized, imaginary, and im/possible. The mummy, a peculiar and idiosyncratic foreign body in Wolfgang Ernst’s ‘defense of antiquarianism’, summons all the dead, vanished, non-existent, fabulated media that nevertheless form an objective resource for understanding the assumptions at work in our views of media pasts or technological innovation¹⁵—and also the revenant of ‘ancient cinematography’ addressed later in this chapter. However, despite the many purported methodological, material, or imaginary intersections between traditional and media archaeology, and regardless of the previous invocation of ‘sediments’, ‘layers’, and ‘folds’ of time from which fragments of the past could be extracted, Parikka and his collaborator Erkki Huhtamo immediately caution the reader that their discipline ‘should not be confused with archaeology’ and that this term must be used with care.¹⁶ And Wolfgang Ernst—who has just described both fields of knowledge as equally reluctant and mistrustful concerning the construction of continuous historical narratives, as objectcentred and focused on the artefactual singularity of their findings— maintains elsewhere that the most rigorous and stringent approaches in media archaeology are not at all ‘about “digging” out “dead” media’.¹⁷ On the contrary, they reflect on the technological conditions and operative aspects of hardware or software that constitute the basis for media processes in past or present cultures. As a consequence, short-circuiting the discipline with archaeology-as-such or insisting on tropes of fieldwork and excavation must appear flat and problematic; the figure of ‘unearthing’, so intimately interwoven with Enlightenment concepts of disclosure, illumination, and ‘bringing to light’ (and passed on through Romanticism to Freudian psychoanalysis),¹⁸ turns into an empty rhetorical image: ‘Revealing and discovering [in media archaeology] is of a more difficult nature, closer to Martin Heidegger’s epistemological discussion of ancient ¹⁴ See Parikka (2012d: 12). ¹⁵ See Parikka (2012d: 43). ¹⁶ See Huhtamo and Parikka (2011a: 3). ¹⁷ Ernst (2015c: 15). ¹⁸ See Butler (2016: 12); see also Stockreiter (1998).

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Greek aletheia.’¹⁹ Even if Ernst readily concedes that there are as many variants and methods of media archaeology as there are conceptions of media, his clear-cut description of the field’s most ‘radical’ and core concerns—exploring the ‘signal level’ or ‘techno-mathematics’ of media and thereby disclosing the discontinuities between media artefacts and traditional cultural or symbolic practices—is hardly compatible with dead metaphors of ‘archaeology’ and the ‘archive’. Media archaeology does not resume or extend the lineage of archaeology (for instance, by correlating the frieze on the Trajan’s Column to chrono-photographical image sequences); it outlines the technical, instrument-based, and dispositive structure of media to set them apart from and, at the same time, specify their functional position within ‘culture’.²⁰ A gap opens up between archaeology proper and such an investigation of media deep structures that disrupts notions of temporal/symbolic/ cultural continuity. In view of Ernst’s postulate, there is hardly any reason why the excavation of Atari video game cartridges from a New Mexico dumping ground should be labelled ‘media archaeology’ and not simply ‘archaeology’ (or, in order at least to take into account its aspect of contemporaneity and emphasis on mass-produced electronic devices, ‘industrial archaeology’, ‘archaeology of the contemporary past’, or ‘garbology’). Likewise, designating the retrieval and documentation of data from a used hard drive as ‘media archaeology’—mainly because the deployed work process is modelled on the MoLAS recording system— proves a rather ambiguous interdisciplinary gesture: on one side (on that of archaeology), concrete temporal as well as spatial ‘depth’ begins to disintegrate and slides towards the purely metaphoric once it is brought into contact with the fundamentally different structural configuration of

¹⁹ Ernst (2015c: 16.) This reference to Heidegger would demand a broader analysis. Heidegger dismisses modern conceptions of truth as mere ‘correspondence’ between a knowing subject and known object. Therefore, a conventional archaeological approach— the uncovering of an ‘actual’ past by the subject—could indeed be interpreted as a minor mode of truth. In contrast, the Greek notion of aletheia means the disclosure of Being to us by itself, a state of ideal ‘unhiddenness’. While every medium seems invariably linked to relations and to ‘truth’ as ‘correspondence’ rather than self-revealing aletheia (after all, the path to truth leads out of the cave of media representations to a light that ‘presents itself ’), Ernst’s method of media archaeology might indeed resemble Heidegger’s critical examination of traditional notions of truth: both exhibit unrecognized sublayers—either by ‘deconstructing’ modern misconceptions of ‘truth’ or by analysing the technological micro-processes that run underneath every individual moment of culture. ²⁰ See Ernst (2015c: 17).

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a digital storage device. This becomes all too obvious when the project members have to translate the physical depth of an excavation into ‘doubleclicks’ (DC) that lead ‘down’ from the desktop ‘surface’ into the folder structure, in order to introduce an applicable unit of measurement and still conceive of a hard drive as ‘stratified’ or ‘deep’.²¹ On the other side (on that of media archaeology in terms of Ernst’s ‘techno-mathematics’), this examination seems to have reached neither the deep level of code and program that determines the operation of individual files, their interaction and display on the interface, nor that of instrument-based function, the electro-mechanical set-up of the device itself. Apparently, a slight change of perspective and closer look at the conceptual and methodological detail suffice to take ‘media’ out of ‘archaeology’ in the first quoted case and ‘archaeology’ out of the ‘medium’ in the second. Their relation between the two terms remains frangible and always contestable. Aside from archaeology proper, media archaeology is, of course, affiliated with yet another prominent strategy of extracting events and objects from the records of the archē—namely, Michel Foucault’s concept of archéologie. And, while the association of archaeology proper and media archaeology presents itself as inconsistent, the complex net of meanings extending between the two of them and Foucault’s archéologie produces ever deeper uncertainties, indistinct seams, and half-missing links. Nonetheless, his ‘archaeologies of power and knowledge’ are frequently cited first among the multiple models or backgrounds of media archaeology.²² One point of proximity to Foucault is the previously outlined liberation of media objects from ‘literary’ and necessarily ‘anthropomorphic’ historiography that is now replaced by the technological data and inherent discursive potential of the find. This perspective may root in, or rather start out from, the antiquarian’s inclination for materiality, but clearly transcends its sensory and vaguely privatistic stance ²¹ See Perry and Morgan (2015: 98). MAD-P’s use of the ‘Harris Matrix’ shows a similarly precarious adherence to archaeological standards: usually, its ‘law of superimposition’ states that in a series of layers the upper strata are younger and the lower older. In contrast, a folder structure is—roughly—generated from ‘top’ to ‘bottom’ with the oldest folders containing or ‘covering’ newer ones (as long as one wants to adhere to the notion of chronological order in the network configuration of digital storage media). However, the conventional numbering of folder levels in MAD-P’s matrix does not consider this inversion of the common archaeological stratification. ²² See Parikka (2012d: 5).

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towards the archive in order to assemble an extensive field of incidents that then can be aligned and organized according to epistemological criteria springing from the evidence itself. Thus, although Wolfgang Ernst does not indicate his source or call Foucault by name, the Archaeology of Knowledge makes itself heard when he speaks about the antiquarian and media analyst achieving a ‘monumental relation to the past’, an attitude that intends to ‘avoid prematurely interpreting archaeological evidence as documents of history but rather isolates this data into discrete series in order to rearrange them and open them for different configurations’.²³ In many ways, Ernst’s proposition is directly patterned on Foucault’s characterization of current history or historiography (which, beyond serving as a ‘program’ for media archaeology, also toys explicitly with the idea of a link between novel conceptions of history, Foucault’s own discourse-analytic operations (archéologie) and traditional archaeology): In our time, history is that which transforms documents into monuments. In that area where, in the past, history deciphered the traces left by men, it now deploys a mass of elements that have to be grouped, made relevant, placed in relation to one another to form totalities. There was a time when archaeology, as a discipline devoted to silent monuments, inert traces, objects without context, and things left by the past, aspired to the condition of history, and attained meaning only through the restitution of a historical discourse; it might be said, to play on words a little, that in our time history aspires to the condition of archaeology, to the intrinsic description of the monument.²⁴

At the same time, however, the quote’s nexus between ‘monuments’ and the forming of ‘totalities’, between individual artefacts and the re/construction of more extensive discourses, is perceived as a critical point of friction by certain exponents of media archaeology, depending on their respective disposition for either the technicality/materiality of ‘monumental’ objects or the broader impact of these objects on the ‘totality’ of a cultural setting. In this sense, it may come as a surprise when Wolfgang Ernst addresses ‘radical’ media archaeology as the study of decidedly ‘non-discursive’ technological formations and hardware operations—a ²³ Ernst (2013c: 44). ²⁴ Foucault (2002: 8). Despite Foucault’s playful joining of archaeology as a discipline with his own archéologie du savoir, Wolfgang Ernst (2015c: 16) points out that the association between archaeological digging practices and discourse analysis is ‘one of the biggest misunderstandings’ in the recent intellectual past.

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focus that seems to qualify the logic of Foucault’s archéologie and cultural analysis.²⁵ In contrast, Erkki Huhtamo claims that media archaeology follows Foucault’s determination to analyse ‘the regular formation of objects that emerge only in discourse’, but not ‘the enigmatic treasure of “things” ’²⁶—a rejection, in turn, of the many imaginable applications of media archaeology that could be geared precisely to this non-subjective, self-sufficient, post-human, opaque, or new-materialist ‘thing’, and also of well-established approaches that often enough proceed from ‘enigmatic things’, eccentric devices, and the eroticism of Delphian machines to light up their cultural environments as widely branching ‘discourse networks’. In still other cases, media archaeology may well have decided to take its cue from Foucault’s discourse analysis, but propose some ‘critical additions’ to his study of knowledge and power. To derive a metamethod that also applies to his work on media constellations, Siegfried Zielinski adopts and modifies Foucault’s notion of ‘genealogy’—which itself harks back to the Nietzschean idea of ‘descent’, not to be understood as a going back in time to restore a continuity that operates above and beyond the dispersion of forgotten things, but as the formation of a myriad of events through the unique aspect of a common trait or concept.²⁷ ‘Genealogy’ thus allows Zielinski not only to challenge origins or teleologies and confront them with the (equally Foucauldian) portmanteau concept of horizontal, beginningless, and leaderless anarchaeology. By re/constructing a multiplicity of genealogies for any medium, he reshapes Foucault and converts his approach into a variantology of media, the ‘imaginary sum total of all possible genealogies of particular phenomena’.²⁸ By now, it has probably become clear that the links between media archaeology, archaeology proper, and Foucauldian archéologie cannot be interpreted as lines of development or points of analogy. Instead, they themselves appear as ‘genealogical’ elements held together by an everchanging ‘unique aspect of a trait or a concept’. According to the momentary choice of that trait or particular concept—be it excavation, invention, verticality, materiality, a-historicity, discourse—the genealogy of disciplines is modified, shifts its synchronous shape and diachronic span, includes a formerly excluded aspect, changes its adjacencies and ²⁵ See Ernst (2015c: 17). ²⁷ See Foucault (1977: 146).

²⁶ Huhtamo (1997: 223). ²⁸ Zielinski (2015: 23).

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zones of neighbourhood. Any generalization concerning the binary relation between two of these areas of knowledge, let alone the at least sextuple relation between all three of them (possibly formulated as ‘syllogism’ deducing a similarity of, say, media archaeology and l’archéologie from their common non-affinity to archaeology proper), is easily reversed or altogether suspended: their collocation, arrangement, and intersections can only be tested anew in every given case.

8.2. Ancient Cinema The case is this.²⁹ In April 2011, the Canadian media artist Henry Jesionka visits a flea market in the Croatian town of Zadar where he comes across an unusual and apparently ancient bronze object. The badly corroded artefact, tapered in the form of an acute triangle, has a flat surface and two opposing vertical features, one holding a dull metal plate, the other shaped like a double fin and exhibiting a groove or slot (Figure 8.1 (1)). The flea market vendor cannot provide any information regarding the object’s purpose. However, he directs his customer to the spot where it was unearthed, a beach near the lagoon of Nin, just north of Zadar. A week later, Jesionka visits the indicated place and closely searches the banks of the tidal zone. Among the garbage, debris, and clay shards that litter the sand he eventually makes more finds, including several fragments of hand-painted glass and some coins that have washed up on the shore and are now taken to the Muzej antičkog stakla, the city’s Museum of Ancient Glass, to be examined. Josip Zanki, who is introduced by Jesionka’s website as one of the museum’s expert historians, identifies the fragments as manufactured in the local Roman glassworks and dates them to the first century , when Zadar (or Iader, as it was called then) was the most important harbour of Liburnia³⁰—a region along the north-eastern Adriatic coast, colonized in the early years of the reign of Emperor Augustus, part of the Roman province of Dalmatia and geographically outlined in book iii of Pliny the Elder’s Natural History. The broken glass pieces show various painted scenes: the back view of a ²⁹ This paragraph and the next summarize Henry Jesionka’s extensive text/image/video documentation of his Ancient Cinema project; all materials are accessible via . ³⁰ See Vujovic (2012).

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Figure 8.1. Items from Henry Jesionka’s Ancient Cinema project . Photographs used with kind permission of the artist: © 2012 Henry Jesionka

woman dressed in a palla and ankle-length, seductively loose stola, who is picking twigs from a blossoming shrub; a man with a short tunic and lance fending off an attacking lion; a pair of lovers (judging from their dress, they are possibly the same figures as in the previous images), who exchange caresses under a slender tree; a nude female with a fur shawl around her waist. However, each of the scenes—the flower picker, lion fighter, courting couple, and divested lady—emerges on a whole series of shards, and from one piece to the next one can perceive slight variations, a hand or garment in a changed position (Figure 8.1 (2)). Zanki explains these deviations either as minor flaws caused during the plates’ mass production or, as it happens, as the minimal difference between two phases of the respective figure’s movement, so that ‘we can say, maybe, that this is the first world cinema’.³¹ In the light of a number of additional artefacts gathered up at Nin, this creative hypothesis of the painted glass tablets being not only mere multiples, but veritable serial images or ‘slides’ then prompts an ³¹ Josip Zanki in the video episode 3 ‘Ancient Glass Fragments: Are They Frames from a Movie?’, .

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even more elaborate proposition—that of an intricate zoetrope-like mechanism for their projection, conceived and built during the Classical era of Roman antiquity. There are, for example, fragments of a clay lamp that appears to have served as a light source and also a handful of ‘Roman barbarous coins’, minted and used regionally and not throughout the empire, with distinctive markings: their obverse side shows the profile of a bearded man wearing a crown and an inscription that reads  , ‘to the contriver of light’, while the reverse side features a symbol of the sun surrounded by eight rectangular shapes that might be interpreted as the diagram of an ancient image projection device (Figure 8.1 (3)). And, placed in relation to these objects, the initial find of the bronze piece is now assumed to be only one of a series of connectable components that, when put together, constitute a circular disc with mounts to hold the glass slides and a rim of mirrors for projection (Figure 8.1 (4)). In fact, the analysis of the entire collection of pieces by various local scholars and professionals suggests that they are ‘the remains of a first century .. “Graeco-Roman” film projector’ for animated movies, as claims one of the essays on Jesionka’s website .³² Finally, in 2012, all these objects and a working re-creation of the optical device are exhibited in St Donat’s church in Zadar. What happens to history, historicity, and historiography when Henry Jesionka eliminates almost every long embosomed notion of pré-cinéma, when he boldly overrides the various canonical lineages and possible genealogies of the filmic apparatus, its multiple links to all the ways of seeing, discourses, and technologies (from the earliest camera obscura to the magic lanterns and ‘philosophical toys’ of the nineteenth century) by summarily antedating the mechanical realization of projected moving images to the ancient world? What happens when his work intervenes with our assumptions and general models of origins, technological reason, progress, teleological objectives, which inform not only the persistent idea of a development of cinematic optics, but that of ‘history’ as a whole? One adequate way to approach these questions could be to determine what place the Ancient Cinema project occupies in the wider field of media archaeology.

³² Sanders (2012).

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First of all, Siegfried Zielinski concedes that cinema, in a narrow sense, may well have emerged from the specific convergence or concentration of scientific, economic, and social currents in industrialized modernism; but, in a broader sense, the ‘arts of sound and images in technical (re)production were not invented in the 19th century. The phases of the evolution of cognition and the development of this dispositif and form of expression extended over a far longer period,’ granting cinema—as a highly composite medium—as well as the speculative art of film their own ‘deep time’.³³ And beyond this sheer unlimited temporal reach of the cinematic, media archaeologists Simone Natale and Gabriele Balbi highlight the significance of evidence ‘which pertains to the realms of the fantastic, such as speculations, imaginary narratives, predictions, and other forms of fantasies regarding media technologies’. While academic scholars might tend to dismiss such fabrications as irrelevant to historical analysis, they nevertheless become crucial for understanding the ‘consciousness’ and scope of thinking of a particular age.³⁴ However, Jesionka seems to neglect or transgress the framework of both Zielinski and Natale/Balbi’s criteria: instead of dismantling cinema into its component parts and tracing their genealogical nets and nodes of formation throughout all possible pasts, Ancient Cinema presents us with an almost fully formed version of motion pictures (missing, of course, some relevant aspects like photographic ‘indexicality’ or a flexible film strip). It does not so much explore a deep time that would acknowledge the spatiotemporal dispersal of individual constituents of the cinematic dispositif as perform a ‘gedanken experiment’ that invents its own mode of deep time by annihilating the notion of gradual diachronic convergences and substituting it with a model of sudden, inexplicable loss and incidental reconstruction. Moreover, Jesionka’s iridescent vision of cinema in Classical Roman antiquity can hardly be integrated into the scheme that Natale and Balbi delineate in order to address the imaginary as a structural component of media history. Their approach examines technological fantasies in relation to the historical ‘life cycle’ of each medium (namely, a specific era’s prophetic fantasies about possible media futures; fantasies about ‘new’ media that have just been introduced and whose cultural significance and application are

³³ Zielinski (2015: 22).

³⁴ Natale and Balbi (2014: 203).

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still under negotiation; fantasies about completely established or ‘old’ media that are endowed with a nostalgic aura of obsolescence or disappearance). Meanwhile, the cinematic apparatus from Zadar does not reveal a contemporary thinking about prospective, current, or outdated media; it offers an old medium as new, projects its science fiction into the past, and does so without devoting itself to melancholic yearnings, but with a feeling of exultant wonder.³⁵ Most likely, Jesionka’s website and exhibition can be located in the eccentric, but by no means marginal, field of media–archaeological artworks, which advocate, as claims Jussi Parikka, a ‘what if ’ view to media culture by planning and building a ‘spatially present machinic installation’, thereby setting into action alternative histories that challenge our notions of technological innovation: ‘Through such material existence, the media– archaeological work puts the spectator/user/viewer into a new relation with the imaginary, and hence forces us to engage creatively with the presence of media—new and old, imagined and real.’³⁶ Yet, its distinctive property would consist not in realizing an impossible or merely conceptual medium that was never really born, but in the unscathed transposition of actual and entirely available media components to the Roman era. It would belong to the set of what Zielinski describes as ‘untimely media’, existing outside their own time and ‘realized in technical and media practice either centuries before or centuries after being invented’.³⁷ Nonetheless, this rather indeterminate and cumbersome procedure of aligning the Ancient Cinema project with a selection of media– archaeological contexts reveals again that it is first and foremost the inherent logic of the ‘case’, its concrete ways of imagining, critical potential, and ideological suppositions that can perhaps shed more light on the work’s stance towards history. A first undisputable fact would then be that the whole set-up is not designed to mislead, deceive, or demand an

³⁵ Admittedly, one might interpret Jesionka’s project as ‘nostalgic’ inasmuch as it focuses on ‘old’ optical techniques that are increasingly superseded by digital screen surfaces. His Ancient Cinema would then appear as reaction to the disappearance of the classical cinematic dispositif. In this sense, Thomas Elsaesser (2004: 92) suggests that media archaeology’s occupation with photographic indexicality, old stage machinery, or the materiality of nineteenth-century visual culture originates from a certain unease regarding the postphotographic, computer animation, or the ‘hyper-medium’ of the computer. ³⁶ Parikka (2012d: 43). ³⁷ Zielinski (2006b: 30).

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actual revision of historical ‘knowledge’. Jesionka’s own paradoxical wording of ‘speculative evidence’ is by no means necessary for his audience to understand that all clues are fabricated by the artist himself, resulting in an elaborate hoax that is intended to be identified as one. Therefore, since his proposition does not aim at rewriting history as such, it obviously addresses certain mechanisms in its production through ‘historiography’. It does not so much suggest a novel timeline of cinematography as bring to mind fundamental notions of provenance, causality, authenticity, or claims of ‘truth’ at work in the very idea of history. And it does so by interweaving at least three distinct ways of ‘modulating’ the relation between past and truth—falseness, irony, and anarchaeology. The False, however, does not refer to instances that are simply opposed to an empirical ‘truth’. With Deleuze, the concept is closely tied to a logic of contingent temporality, to the passage from a virtual past that holds all possibilities to an actual present that is conventionally seen as decisive realization of the possible. Here, the ‘false’ intervenes to introduce the concurrence or convergence of different and mutually exclusive actualities; it marks the simultaneity of the incompossible. On the one hand, Gilles Deleuze builds on Leibniz’s theory of possible worlds that posits facts that may be possible or even necessary in one world, but are not compossible with the facts of another or neighbouring one (in the first, the projection of moving images was invented in the nineteenth century, which makes it incompossible with a second where cinema emerges during the first century ). On the other hand, notes Deleuze, nothing except our will to save the straight line as force of time, nothing but our will to save truth and expel contradiction, prevents us from assuming that two incompossible facts belong to the same universe. From this follows a new status of (historical) narration: It ceases to be truthful, that is, to claim to be true, and becomes fundamentally falsifying [ . . . ] It is a power of the false which replaces and supersedes the form of the true, because it poses the simultaneity of incompossible presents, or the coexistence of not-necessarily true pasts [ . . . ] The falsifying narration [ . . . ] poses inexplicable differences to the present and alternatives which are undecidable between true and false to the past.³⁸

³⁸ Deleuze (1989: 131).

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In view of this radical and euphoric shift from Leibniz’s ingenious attempt to preserve the form of truth to Nietzsche’s praise of the false and its creative powers, Ancient Cinema not only exhibits a truth that is incompossible with traditional media history. It designs a past so transparent to the ‘false’ that it will neither rival and confidently replace our firmly grounded historical convictions, nor present itself as completely obsolete when interrogated by media–historical doxa. Jesionka’s project proposes a universe that demands and eliminates a decision and, by installing an oscillating, indiscernible, and joyfully falsifying narrative, negates any necessary connection between an original ‘truth’ and its representation through a ‘true’ story. In this manner, it even seems to subvert the entire world of ‘model’ and ‘reproduction’ that has been called into question by Deleuze on another occasion; it levels their Platonic hierarchy by making the simulacrum rise and affirming its right among original and copy, among the allegedly verified facts of history and imaginary historiography. The project’s two divergent ‘series’, the first century and the nineteenth century, are thus integrated or ‘internalized in the simulacrum—neither can be assigned as the original, neither as the copy’.³⁹ Irony. A second trait of Jesionka’s exhibition and website is the strategy or mode through which truth is put into crisis; in a strictly rhetorical sense, the term designates the form of this crisis (while the concept of the ‘false’ points to comprehensive issues of time and historicity, Deleuze reminds us that there are certain procedures in every art that can be employed to implement the false and thus ‘permit several stories to be told at once’⁴⁰). It is, of course, Hayden White who introduces irony, the ‘implicit negation of what is explicitly affirmed’,⁴¹ to historical meta-discourse. As a basic figurative practice, irony inspires second thoughts about the nature of the thing characterized or the in/ adequacy of the characterization itself. In this regard, antedating the invention of cinema to the Roman world and exhibiting this act as counterfactual (or rather false) splits up the statement into two levels or series. It operates as a manifestly duplicitous, forking and equivocal displacement in time—an ironic aporia or double vision to signal ‘in

³⁹ Deleuze (1990: 262). ⁴⁰ Deleuze (1990: 260). ⁴¹ White (1973: 34); see also Ernst (2013c: 52–3).

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advance a real or feigned disbelief in the truth of [the] statement’.⁴² Irony as a historical mode, maintains Hayden White, exceeds the realm of history in that it expresses a fundamental self-critical doubt in the very effort to capture the truth of things. It thus indicates the stance not of the historian, but of the philosopher of history; for it is the philosopher who assumes an ironic attitude ‘not only with respect to the historical record, but with respect to the whole enterprise of the historian as well’.⁴³ But irony is not only the master trope of meta-history: according to Wolfgang Ernst, its sceptical impetus is even enhanced, technologically modified, and made concrete in media archaeology. Here, irony doubts the truth of history and also points to the apparatus motivating this doubt; it ‘corresponds to an awareness of the medium at work with the message [ . . . ], the message being an emphatic notion of history’.⁴⁴ Irony in media archaeology thus seems to adopt a ‘romantic’ attitude, however not in the sense of Novalis’s self-reflexive ‘presence of the spirit’⁴⁵ that displays an artist’s critical consciousness of the creative process, but as ‘presence of the technology’ employed in this process. Whenever a medium—the projection screens, installations, and showcases that make up the ‘ironical museum’ in Zadar’s decommissioned Byzantine church of St Donat, or Jesionka’s Ancient Cinema website with its compiled text material, photographs, and video files—comes into focus, its role in the production of cultural and historical constructs is exhibited: ‘The critical notion of the ironical museum (or medium) transfers the discursive analysis of rhetorical tropes from literature and speech to spatial visual regimes and to the technologies themselves.’⁴⁶ All of Hayden White’s suspicions regarding a straightforward ‘truth’ of historical narrative are confirmed and deepened by the ‘coming-out’ of a medium that proves responsible for such ‘true’ narratives and, thus, is the message. Anarchaeology emerges as the peculiar effect of the project’s ironic approach to Classical Roman cinema. At a first glance, Ancient Cinema plays into the hands of teleological thinking by suggesting a fixed point of origin in the first century that precedes, anticipates, and in certain ways programmes cinema’s completion in the modern era. Even if this development shows disruptions, interferences, and fits of amnesia—after all, ⁴² White (1973: 37). ⁴⁵ Novalis (1997: 29).

⁴³ White (1973: 376). ⁴⁶ Ernst (2013c: 53).

⁴⁴ Ernst (2013c: 52).

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the ancient projection machine has only just been ‘rediscovered’ by Jesionka and therefore cannot have acted as a direct precursor of modern cinema—the mere alteration of its birth date or extension of its life span do not overcome basic notions of ‘root’, ‘lineage’, or ‘culmination’.⁴⁷ At the same time, however, the ironic affirmation of these topoi implicitly destabilizes the entire concept of archē. Instead of initiation and evolution, the project opens out into the wide array of synchronic and diachronic aspects that form the composite medium and deep time of cinema. It creates a Zielinskian anarchaeology by giving ‘free rein to the phenomena, events, and processes that are the subjects of interest’.⁴⁸ Its anarchaeological ‘game with potentialities, with spaces of possibility’⁴⁹ not only goes back in cinematic time or significantly expands the cinematic world (Zielinski notes that ‘by seismographic prospecting in the depths of past present-days one [ . . . ] leaves behind the focus on the metropolises in northern and western Europe, one moves towards the mare internum in the south, the Mediterranean’⁵⁰). Its extensive anarchaeological and genealogical associations also become apparent when Jesionka’s exhibition and digital displays juxtapose the Roman shards and bronze objects from Nin with visual devices from various periods and places—Palaeolithic cave paintings; the ‘Loupe of Sargon’, a crystal lens from c.730  that was found on the site of the ancient Assyrian city of Nimrud;⁵¹ Heron of Alexandria’s ‘Marvellous Altar’, a firstcentury  rotating device that was allegedly driven by convection currents and showed several dancing figures;⁵² or proto-cinematic shadow plays from the Chinese Han Dynasty. They form a multidimensional assemblage of objects and intricate web of correspondences rather than a onedimensional starting point and two-dimensional line of descent. This, then, informs the meta-historical logic and creative imaginings of Ancient Cinema: the false, the concurrence of the incompossible, as its conceptual groundwork; irony, the implicit doubt in an explicit statement, as its rhetorical trope; and anarchaeology, the focus on virtual and peripheral genealogies, as its dominant effect.

⁴⁷ Likewise, Thomas Elsaesser (2004: 89) points out that wherever New Film History— mainly associated with ‘archaeological’ methods—‘charts its longue durée accounts [ . . . ], it also serves to legitimate a covert but speculative and, in all likelihood, transitory teleology’. ⁴⁸ Zielinski (2015: 23). ⁴⁹ Zielinski (2015: 29). ⁵⁰ Zielinski (2015: 22). ⁵¹ See O’Hare (2012). ⁵² See Hightower (2012).

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8.3. Ein Stein on the Beach In view of all this, Henry Jesionka’s project certainly relates to the principle issues of media archaeology, Foucauldian archéologie, and archaeology proper. It conducts a media–archaeological investigation of alternative or variant pasts by designing a fictional medium that is granted material existence as a work of art.⁵³ At the same time, Ancient Cinema performs an exercise in the ‘archaeology of knowledge’ by approaching the discursive practice of cinema history through a collection of ‘monuments’ that are then grouped and placed in relation to one another in the exhibition.⁵⁴ Finally, it is precisely the invocation of archaeology proper as the most empirical and material method of unearthing the past that exposes the recurring patterns of origin, technological ingeniosity, or progressive reason in historical discourse. But is this really what a beach offers? Can the beach present itself as a terrain of the concrete and empirical, of monuments and patterns, of matter that is systematically excavated and subjected to established scientific fieldwork methods? Such a dense universe, where the earth is pleated and folded, where the world is literally in a state of intense concentration, would rather be constituted by the mountains, claims Claude Lévi-Strauss. High mountains possess a ‘formal quality’ and pose technical, mechanical, or geometrical problems; they are characterized by sharp contrasts between level ground and steep slopes that ‘take on the look of high walls’.⁵⁵ It is here—in a landscape of orthogonal features and cuts through geological time—that one may dig vertically and scoop out archaeological trenches. Meanwhile, the beach and sea horizon form ‘a landscape many degrees below proof ’, watered down and diluted, where the scientist, scholar, or artist does not so much excavate as collect. And the finds consist of smoothed-down fragments of nature and rubble rather than identifiably preserved artefacts; they are scattered on a pliable expanse of sand and not fossilized in a stratified depth: The shore itself, and that marginal area ceded from time to time by the reflux which prolongs it—these I find attractive by reason of [ . . . ] the unexpected

⁵³ In his mappings of such ‘weird objects’, Jussi Parikka (2012d: 43) even seems to adopt the Deleuzian link between ‘falseness’ and ‘in/compossibility’ when he asks: ‘What if the contemporary media culture is not a Leibnizian best of all possible worlds?’. ⁵⁴ See Foucault (2002: 155). ⁵⁵ See Lévi-Strauss (1961: 333–4).

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universe which lies hidden within them, and the possibilities which they offer of observations and discoveries most flattering to the imagination [ . . . ] I enjoy walking on shores left bare by the receding tide, following [ . . . ] the itinerary which that tide has imposed upon me; picking up stones with holes through the middle of them, shells whose geometry has been reshaped by the motion of the waves, or spectral fragments of sea-wrack, and making a private museum of these things: a museum which, for a moment, seems quite the equal of those other museums to which only masterpieces are admitted.⁵⁶

In short, the beach is a landscape of natural variability and contingency, an area of chance, not of exact science, strategy, or stratigraphy, where random events leave their fleeting traces. It is from this plain that Henry Jesionka receives his scattered knowledge: with the recurring image of the beach (or the jumbled flea-market tables), coincidence becomes the source of historical conjecture—only serendipity, the accidental discovery of stray fragments on a horizontal surface of equiprobability, good fortune, occasional finds half buried in wet sand that form his ‘private museum’ of Roman media masterpieces.⁵⁷ Furthermore, this liminal shoreline has always been a terrain vague for subliminal invention and nostalgia, a place of the imaginary. Joshua Billings describes it as a threshold space—between inland and open water, grove and sea, being and longing, speaking and sighing—where the philhellene of the eighteenth century could enthusiastically indulge in his winckelmania and envision the wave-gazers Iphigenia, Laocoön, and Philoctetes as protagonists in his longing for the lost world of antiquity.⁵⁸ Henry Jesionka, for his part, approaches the beach as a similarly ambiguous and transitory field of possibilities that bears fantasies about the Classical past and its long forgotten media. To the rigorous trajectories of hard science, the beach thus responds with flatness, fabulation, fortuity. Exploring the solid, geologically layered sectional views of archaeology or the malleable, diffuse layout of a tidal repository (see Figure 8.2)—just

⁵⁶ Lévi-Strauss (1961: 332). ⁵⁷ In fact, the fugitive and unstable terrain of the beach recurs as epistemological metaphor in structural and discourse analysis: Lévi-Strauss (1961: 332) notes: ‘My love for the mountains is draining away from me like a wave running backwards down the sand’, and the closing words of Foucault’s Order of Things (1994: 386) envision a similar fate for the whole discursive existence of human sciences: ‘If some event [ . . . ] were to cause them to crumble [ . . . ], then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.’ ⁵⁸ See Billings (2016).

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Figure 8.2. Scene of a chance encounter: the beach (hemmed in by vertical rocks). Marco Basaiti, The Calling of the Sons of Zebedee, 1510. Ministero dei beni e delle attività culturali, Gallerie dell’Accademia di Venezia

as the specific features of all possible ‘scapes’ of thinking, Plato’s agora, Hegel’s shoreless ocean, Benjamin’s city streets, Baudrillard’s desert, Serres’s cloud banks—invariably reveals a distinct epistemological paradigm. (Since Shane Butler’s conception of ‘Deep Classics’ initially employs the image of a ‘geologist, who has stumbled upon, or perhaps quarried to find, a sidelong perspective on time’s stacked strata’,⁵⁹ it therefore feels somewhat unsettling to follow his terminological chain of ‘Deep Classics’, ‘DeepC’, ‘deep sea’:⁶⁰ as if the sidewall of an excavation contained the same kind and arrangement of knowledge as the poorly lit continuity of the ocean.) In this respect, combing the beach and lagoon of Nin not only answers to the specific vague, random, ‘immethodical’, or ‘irrational’ constitution of the Ancient Cinema project; it also sheds light on a latent, but insisting and crucial trait or topos in media and cinema historiography as a whole. When compared with respect to ⁵⁹ Butler (2016: 1).

⁶⁰ See Butler (2016: 17).

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their redundant morphological elements and ideological function, the key narratives of (pre-)cinematic invention may well focus on moments of ingenuity, planned experiments, the fight of reason against outdated prejudice, enlightened breakthrough, and constant progress. However, their entire corpus seems traversed by subliminal, but unmistakable traits of chance, epiphany, and irrationality (fortune: the anecdote of a bet between railway tycoon Stanford and newspaper editor MacCrellish that initiated Eadweard Muybridge’s chronophotographical studies of a galloping horse in 1872; hysteria: the legend of the panicking audience in Paris’s Grand Café when seeing the approaching train in 1895; accident: Georges Méliès’s jammed camera when filming the Place de l’Opéra in 1907, which miraculously transformed a coach into a funeral cart and thus introduced trick photography). Unforeseen and haphazard shards of reality, events strewn about a sandy plane of immanence, the imaginary and even the delusional appear as indispensable parts and formative ‘genetic sequences’ of media–historical lore. And it is the beach with its dispersed possibilities and fictional objects that provides an adequate conceptual site, a ‘Denkbild’ for these contingencies. Finding cinema on the shore among shells and ‘spectral fragments of sea-wrack’ inscribes the invention of film into a widely branching, coincidental, precarious, and creative historical practice. The image of retrieving artefacts from the tidal zone undermines the seemingly solid empirical groundwork of our actual present and infuses it with the unpredictable presence of many virtual pasts.

8.4. Coda: The ‘Rationality’ of Capitalism With this, the Ancient Cinema project turns towards a decidedly political critique of cinema histor(iograph)y. It no longer confines itself to anarchaeology, to delineating the medium’s multiple genealogies or uncovering the clandestine propositions that go with its allegedly linear pedigree; it also hints at the ideological assumptions at work in the cinema apparatus’s socio-economic mother soil and thus aligns itself with all those ‘imaginary media that [ . . . ] investigate the nature of progress, change and the novelty-obsessed technological culture’.⁶¹ ⁶¹ Parikka (2012d: 139).

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Although media archaeology demonstrates tirelessly that the cinematic art, mechanism, and dispositif are not the result of a sudden perfection of immediate precursors or an invention of the nineteenth century, cinema’s technological consolidation and institutionalization can hardly be separated from high capitalism, its industrialized societies, and scientific standards.⁶² At least in its most colloquial sense, cinema thus remains tied to a socio-political regime that presents itself as productive, progressive, and ‘reasonable’ or—according to Cornelius Castoriadis (and more precisely)—is circularly based on and legitimizes itself through a self-instituted principle of ‘rationality’.⁶³ However, this selfproclaimed rationality of capitalism and the notion of its emergence as an epiphany of reason are merely simulated: ‘On the theoretical level, the constructions of academic political economy are incoherent, or meaningless, or valid only for a fictive world, and [ . . . ] on the empirical level, the way the capitalist economy actually functions has no more than a remote relationship with what is said about it in “theory” ’.⁶⁴ Therefore, the execution of capitalism’s fictional regularities and preservation of its rationality ‘pertain to an art, not to a “science” ’.⁶⁵ Its regime has to resort to certain aesthetics of calculability and reason, to diagrams, lineages, and narratives that help to obscure the unmitigated absurdities of capitalism (while even in these narratives the accident, fantastic chance, and hysterical delusion seem to rise uncannily to the surface again). This, then, is the image of the beach, the unforeseeable, contingent, and scattered: first, a media–archaeological reformulation of the historical discourse of cinema; second, a critique of the medium’s ideological condition that uncovers its insufficiently repressed imaginary and irrational deep structures. Jesionka’s installation exhibits how ‘capitalist’ narratives of technical innovation are at bottom organized around an illicit ⁶² See Zielinski (2015: 22): ‘The 19th century can be defined as the consolidation period of an industrialisation and capitalism that was pervaded by media technologies, but not, however, as the epoch in which the interwoven relationship of arts, sciences, and technologies that interests us here began to unfold.’ ⁶³ See Castoriadis (2005: 83): ‘Capitalism is the first social regime to produce an ideology according to which it would be “rational”. The legitimation of other types of institutions of society was mythic, religious, or traditional. In the present case, it is claimed that there exists a “rational” form of legitimacy. Of course, this criterion—being rational (and not consecrated by experience or tradition, handed down by heroes or the gods, and so forth)—is in fact instituted by capitalism.’ ⁶⁴ Castoriadis (2005: 86). ⁶⁵ Castoriadis (2005: 104).

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nucleus of absolute fortuity and arbitrariness. The pseudo-archaeological, but purely coincidental, discovery of shards, coins, and bronze objects from Classical antiquity on the beach of Nin ironically repeats and reflects the irrationality in what could be labelled ‘capitalist media historiography’. The dream of a Graeco-Roman film projector, the account of its finding and reconstruction attest to a fundamental loss of control. If nothing else, this comments on the self-conception of media archaeology: its critical undertakings are an expression of late capitalism’s waning belief in its own canonical narratives, techno-history, and rationale.

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9 Parrhasius’ Curtain, or, a Media Archaeology of a Metapainting Patrick R. Crowley

He even has to make an effort to admit to himself that insects or birds perceive a quite different world from that of human beings, and that the question as to which of these two perceptions of the world is the more correct is quite meaningless, since this would require them to be measured by the criterion of the correct perception, i.e. by a non-existent criterion. Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense’ (1873)¹

The category of painting that we now call trompe l’oeil presents an interesting challenge for historical analysis in the sense that it straddles the fields of both art history and natural history in an ethological sense (that is, the study of animal behavior, with particular emphasis on viewing habits). Although the term trompe l’oeil has its historical roots in the nineteenth century, it has been argued that it can potentially be traced back to some of the very earliest complex human depictions such as the cave paintings in Paleolithic Europe some twenty-five thousand years ago.² Thus, for many art historians as well as philosophers and anthropologists of art, the historical emergence of trompe l’oeil constitutes a somewhat paradoxical phenomenon. On one hand, it counts as

¹ Nietzsche (1999: 148).

² Davis (2011: 16, with further bibliography).

Patrick R. Crowley, Parrhasius’ Curtain, or a Media Archaeology of a Metapainting In: Classics and Media Theory. Edited by: Pantelis Michelakis, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198846024.003.0009

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evidence for a natural-historical revolution in human depictive practices and cognition; on the other, it is an extreme, essentially transhistorical case of picture-making and perception (both in the sense of mundane perception and in the more specialized perception of pictoriality, or the formal configuration of marks intended to be recognized as a depiction in a given visual culture).³ The tricky thing about trompe l’oeil, it has been argued, is that the very category may constitute something of a misnomer—in other words, that it tricks the eye (if it tricks the eye at all and does not go unnoticed and simply seen as the mere things it depicts) only before the crucial recognition of its very affordance as a picture (that is, its pictoriality), thus rendering the trick moot for all intents and purposes.⁴ Yet who, or rather what set of criteria, adjudicates what counts as a deception in the first place? Indeed, why is deception even the appropriate or operative term here? And how might we begin to attend in an historical fashion to the phenomenological question of how human agents, whether in the distant or even the more recent past, saw such pictures as pictures? To investigate these questions, I wish to examine what is surely the locus classicus of trompe l’oeil in the history of art: the legendary competition between the painters Zeuxis and Parrhasius as recounted in Pliny’s Natural History: descendisse hic in certamen cum Zeuxide traditur et, cum ille detulisset uvas pictas tanto successu, ut in scaenam aves advolarent, ipse detulisse linteum pictum ita veritate repraesentata, ut Zeuxis alitum iudicio tumens flagitaret tandem remoto linteo ostendi picturam atque intellecto errore concederet palmam ingenuo pudore, quoniam ipse volucres fefellisset, Parrhasius autem se artificem.

³ I borrow the concept and the language of ‘pictoriality’ from Davis (2011, 2017). Cf. Podro (1998: 4–28). ⁴ For a representative point of view, building on the philosopher Richard Wollheim’s concepts of ‘seeing-in’ and ‘seeing-as’, see Neer (2010: 222 n. 145): ‘there is no experience that corresponds to mistaking an image of something for the thing itself—even a trompe l’oeil like Parrhasios’s curtain. If you are fooled, then by definition you do not see the image as an image. You see it as the real thing, just as Zeuxis had the experience of looking at a curtain. Trompe l’oeil is therefore a misnomer—the tense is wrong. The experience is not of being fooled but of ceasing to be fooled or of refusing to be fooled or, at most, of playing along. Hence the experience is usually not subversive or unsettling, as many recent critics seem to wish, but comforting and normalizing; that may be why trompe l’oeil is generally used as a pleasing gimmick, a party trick, hocus-pocus.’

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This last [i.e., Parrhasius], it is recorded, entered into a competition with Zeuxis, who produced a picture of grapes so successfully represented that birds flew up to the stage-buildings; whereupon Parrhasius himself produced such a realistic picture of a curtain that Zeuxis, proud of the verdict of the birds, requested that the curtain should now be drawn and the picture displayed; and when he realized his mistake, with a modesty that did him honor he yielded up the prize, saying that whereas he had deceived birds Parrhasius had deceived him, an artist.⁵

Of course, there is a potentially significant historical and cultural gulf between what Zeuxis and Parrhasius each saw in the fifth century  and what Pliny imagined them to have seen nearly half a millennium later, to say nothing of what we moderns imagine Pliny to have imagined, and so on.⁶ Yet ever since Pliny’s famous account of the contest, and especially since the Renaissance, the story of the two Greek painters, and above all the picture of the curtain—a painting about painting, a metapainting—has epitomized Western mythologies of vision, representation, and the ontology of painting itself. In the context of this volume, my interest in the contest, and in the conceit of Parrhasius’ curtain in particular, has little to do with painting as a medium in the narrow sense of an artistic discipline or technique (for example, sculpture, engraving, photography, and so on). Instead, I subscribe to the slogan of a diverse and growing body of literature in recent media theory (especially as practised in Germany, but increasingly in an Anglo-American context as well) that has rallied around the conviction that, as Eva Horn has succinctly put it, ‘Es gibt keine Medien’ (There are no media).⁷ Following the lead of Friedrich Kittler, the founder of these interwoven strands of media theory, the insistence that there ‘are’ no media targets essentializing accounts that had previously tended to focus on the ontological question of what a medium is (a not inconsequential matter, considering the sheer range of technologies, techniques, objects, energies, elements, and so on that potentially fall within its seemingly infinite and ever-expanding

⁵ Pliny the Elder, Natural History 35.65–6. Unless otherwise noted, all translations of Greek and Latin texts in this chapter are drawn from the Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). ⁶ On the ‘asymmetry’ between these historical periods as well as literary and archaeological evidence, see especially Bergmann (1995: 83–7). ⁷ Horn (2008: 6–13).

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disciplinary purview).⁸ Media–archaeological approaches, by contrast, are concerned with the more epistemological question of how media constitute relations of power and knowledge. As Craig Dworkin suggestively writes: ‘Those objects that are casually referred to as “media”, accordingly, are perhaps better considered as nodes of articulation along a signifying chain: the points at which one type of analysis must stop and another can begin; the thresholds between languages; the limns of perception.’⁹ Rather than explaining what media are, or trying to define their ‘nature’ with any degree of specificity, these anti-ontological approaches share a common interest in media as networks of technologies enmeshed within institutional frameworks and zones of social practice. As Joseph Vogl argues in his media–archaeological analysis of Galileo’s telescope, the better question might ask how media function as moments or ‘events’—that is to say, how even a material artefact (for example, the telescope) ‘becomes’ a medium.¹⁰ In this respect, Vogl writes, what is at stake is not so much the ‘nature’ of the medium, the technology of the telescope qua telescope, as the effects that it generates and the knowledge that it produces: in short, what Michel Foucault called a ‘dispositif ’, or the heterogeneous elements of a whole system of forces and relations of power (not limited to, but including, ‘discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral, and philanthropic propositions [ . . . ]’).¹¹ The curtain of Parrhasius, and trompe l’oeil painting in general, is not a medium. Rather, it constitutes an effect of media, a material object—one that is itself a product of discursive mediation—that is simultaneously a site of knowledge production. These questions of media constitute the stakes of the present chapter, which makes a simple claim about the vaunted realism of trompe l’oeil pictures in Greco-Roman art and visual culture. In a nutshell, I argue that this realism was constituted not simply, or perhaps even chiefly, by means of its imputed depictive plenitude—what the philosopher Nelson

⁸ See, e.g., Siegert (2003: 30–8); Mitchell (2007: 395–406); Dworkin (2013); Kittler (2013f: 219–29). ⁹ Dworkin (2013: 32–3). See also the same author’s suggestion that ‘Media—if there are such things—are only recognizable as collectivities’ (Dworkin 2013: 30). ¹⁰ Vogl (2008: 14–25). ¹¹ Foucault (1980: 194).

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Goodman would call the ‘syntactic density’ or ‘repleteness’ of this nonlinguistic notational system—but also, and perhaps most fundamentally, in questions of medium specificity surrounding the material support of the painting as well as in the geometrical–optical relations between pictures and their beholders in real space.¹²

9.1. Ancient Tricks, Modern Gimmicks For Ernst Gombrich, whose magnum opus Art and Illusion (1960) was a watershed in the fields of art history and psychology, the contest between Zeuxis and Parrhasius marks an epochal turning point in the history of art whereupon ‘illusion could turn into deception only when the context of action set up an expectation which reinforced the artist’s handiwork’.¹³ ‘Indeed,’ Gombrich goes on to say, ‘the most successful trompe l’oeil I have ever seen was on the level of Parrhasius’ trick—painting simulating a broken glass pane in front of the picture.’¹⁴ Despite the significance he attributes to it, it is nonetheless telling that Gombrich characterizes Parrhasius’ picture as a ‘trick’, one whose gimmicky quality he describes with equal parts respect and disdain: ‘In the cool light of reason,’ Gombrich bemoans, ‘Parrhasius’ feat is somewhat less admirable’.¹⁵ Gombrich never went on to explain why Parrhasius’ picture is ‘somewhat less admirable’ when considered from a cold-blooded, rational point of view, but his appraisal of the painted curtain as a ‘trick’ seems to go beyond the simple sense of deception. While Gombrich himself never uses the word ‘gimmick’ to describe the painting (although others have explicitly done so), it nicely seems to capture the peculiar admixture of the art historian’s admiration and annoyance.¹⁶ As Sianne Ngai has argued, the gimmick (a word that does not appear in print until the 1920s) emerged as both a labour-saving device and an aesthetic form in the modern matrix of capitalist forms of life.¹⁷ Contrasting it with ancient devices that we might consider ludicrous today (for example, the deus ex machina in Greek theatre), she asserts that ‘the capitalist gimmick, however, is both a wonder and a trick. It is a form we marvel at and distrust, admire and disdain, whose affective intensity for

¹² Goodman (1976). ¹³ Gombrich (1960: 206). ¹⁴ Gombrich (1960: 206). ¹⁵ Gombrich (1960: 206). ¹⁶ See n. 4. ¹⁷ Ngai (2017: 466–505).

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us increases precisely because of this ambivalence.’¹⁸ Ngai goes on to list a number of the gimmick’s ‘antinomies,’ two of which seem especially suggestive in the case of trompe l’oeil. Among them: The gimmick is a device that strikes us as working too hard. The gimmick is a device that strikes us as working too little . . . The gimmick is an unrepeatable ‘one-time invention’ (Jameson’s singularity) The gimmick is a device used ‘hundreds and thousands and millions and billions of times’ (Twain’s joke).¹⁹

These two antinomies, it seems to me, go a long way in helping to explain Gombrich’s frustration and disappointment with Parrhasius’ picture. While the deception of Zeuxis surely constitutes a feat, as Gombrich is forced to admit, there is something decidedly hollow or cheap about the whole set-up (or the management of ‘expectations’, as he says) that deflates his artistic triumph. It is an aesthetic of captiousness, a ‘gotcha’ painting. This temporal element of the ‘gotcha’ moment in trompe l’oeil leads straight into a feedback loop in the second antimony, that the gimmick is at once unrepeatable and yet something we delight in over and over and over again. In his suggestive analysis of the trompe l’oeil paintings of William Harnett, produced in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Michael Leja takes up precisely this issue: namely, that, even when contemporary American viewers knew that the painting was a trompe l’oeil (as recounted in various historical reports that often distinguished them according to predictable groupings of class, age, and gender), they nevertheless stood enthralled under its spell, sometimes even going so far as to try to scratch off the curled edge of a newspaper clipping.²⁰ Leja provocatively links such encounters with these depictive tactics to Neil Harris’s concept of the ‘operational aesthetic’ with reference to P. T. Barnum, the famous showman and purveyor of hoaxes or ‘humbugs’. According to Harris, ‘Barnum understood that the opportunity to debate the issue of falsity, to discover how deception had been practiced, was even more exciting than the discovery of fraud itself ’.²¹ Accordingly, as Leja suggests, Harnett’s pictures deserve to be put in the context of a ¹⁸ Ngai (2017: 469). ¹⁹ Ngai (2017: 493) (I have preserved the order of these two items, but extracted them from a larger set). ²⁰ Leja (2004: 125–52). ²¹ Harris (1973: 77). Cf. Steinmeyer (2003).

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broader mosaic of nineteenth-century attractions in which varied forms of visual discernment were brought to bear against emergent techniques of marketing and advertisements: from cinematic encounters with oncoming trains to panoramic spectacles, saloons, and picture galleries alike.²² Most curiously, perhaps, many of Harnett’s patrons were involved in the production of manufactured dry goods whose display in shopfronts assumed a crucial role in the manipulation of consumer desire. Thus, as Leja shows, Harnett’s trompe l’oeil compositions of familiar objects coincide historically with the illusory nature of the commodity form as well as the vexing problem in capitalist life-worlds, described by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno in their Dialectic of Enlightenment, that the contradictory experiences of seeing through an illusion and yet still feeling seduced by it are by no means mutually exclusive. The point of this brief excursus on the status of trompe l’oeil in modernity, as well as its suggestive links to the aesthetic form of the gimmick, is twofold. First, I wish to draw out some of the ways in which we moderns might be thoroughly conditioned by capitalist forms of life that obscure the seemingly objective manner in which we approach the ancient evidence (and, indeed, that our mere awareness of such conditioning might yet be insufficient for overcoming it). In other words, that Parrhasius’ curtain might have been a gimmick for Gombrich, or indeed for us, but it could not have been so for Zeuxis, or indeed for any other ancient viewer, at least not in those terms.²³ Moreover, as Leja’s account of Harnett’s pictures helps us see, it is by no means self-evident that trompe l’oeil constitutes what we often casually call a deception (Pliny’s language of error and fallere in the contest notwithstanding), and that there might indeed be mutually overlapping experiences that contribute to a far richer and more densely realized picture of the sociology of knowledge than the simple binary between country rubes and urban sophisticates allows. Second, as tempting as it might be to identify certain ancient trompe l’oeil pictures with modern examples against which they appear indiscernible on the level either of form or of content (the subject

²² On these issues of spectacle and credulity in modernity, see also Gunning (1989); Crary (2002); Bellion (2011); Bear (2015). ²³ For an explicit link between Parrhasius’ curtain and the concept of the ‘gimmick’, see Neer (2010: 222 n. 145); cf. n. 4 above.

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of the following section), they too belong to different forms of life, to different visual cultures. If it is true that ‘Roman artisans consciously construct an illusion and make it transparent at the same time’, as Rebecca Molholt observed of floor mosaics (an observation that has also been made of the immersive spaces of second style wall-painting and of Roman aesthetics more generally), then it seems essential to attend to the ancient criteria for what counts as ‘illusion’ and ‘transparency’ that may, or may not, overlap with their modern counterparts.²⁴

9.2. Forms of Deception For Norman Bryson, whose influential account of the contest emphasizes its foundational, if legendary, role in the artistic tradition of Western painting, it is Pliny’s ‘naive’ or innocent vision that informs his understanding of reality as a ‘transcendent and immutable given’.²⁵ Accordingly, Bryson argues that Pliny is not really interested in the painterly effects of realism at all, but rather in the impossible pursuit of a ‘stenographic transcription of reality’ or ‘an Essential Copy of the real’ itself. To see whether this is really the case, it seems necessary to think more carefully, even in an admittedly oppositional sense, about what constitutes and counts as verisimilitude for Pliny when he describes Parrhasius’ curtain as having been represented ita veritate—a phrase that is often translated simply as ‘realistic’ (itself a contentious point of view) but that has tacitly been imbued with the sense, without any empirical evidence being offered, that the picture was also executed with a high degree of naturalism. However evocative Pliny’s famous description of the contest might be, it nevertheless signally excludes any mention of what Parrhasius’ picture actually looked like, an omission that should trouble any sort of attempt that seeks to identify a criterion for what counts as realism, let alone naturalism, in the case of trompe l’oeil for certain historical agents at certain standpoints. Moreover, Pliny’s account reveals precious little in the way of how the two paintings were set up or displayed for their ²⁴ Molholt (2008: 15). On the illusionistic and immersive spaces of Roman wall-painting, see especially Bryson (1990: 17–59); Grau (2003) 25–32; and, most recently, Squire (2017: 188–253). Cf. Walton (1990). ²⁵ Bryson (1983: 1–10 and passim).

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critical appraisal. Only the tiny phrase in scaenam situates the contest in a theatre, suggesting that the respective techniques of illusion employed by the two painters were self-consciously drawing upon the conventions of scenographic painting, a practice that had famously attracted the ire of Plato.²⁶ There will be more to say about the context of the theatre in terms of the expectations it sets up for the various protagonists involved, let alone the reader, but for now I wish to focus on the issue of resemblance. Let us begin with the question of form. Given that various artists of the Dutch Golden Age explicitly engaged with Pliny’s famous anecdote— Gerrit Dou, for example, was known as the ‘Dutch Parrhasius’ among his contemporaries, and then, of course, there are the numerous paintings with trompe l’oeil curtains that evoke real picture-curtains—it is easy to understand why Parrhasius’ curtain has long been associated with their crisply painted and licked surfaces.²⁷ A sumptuous painting in the Art Institute of Chicago offers a perfect example in which a curtain, the topography of its pressed folds indexing both flatness and depth, has been drawn back to reveal a still life of flowers that is itself presented before an architectural backdrop (Figure 9.1).²⁸ The strategic juxtaposition of

²⁶ According to Stephen Bann’s influential reading of the contest, it is highly suggestive that a scene of purportedly mimetic excess such as this should take place in a theatre, a space that automatically places us in the world of illusion and make-believe and whose very etymology designates it as a ‘place for seeing’. For Bann, the deceptive conceit of Parrhasius’ curtain is that its setting purposely invites the viewer to regard it as a stage curtain that would have been decorated with other painted or embroidered figures. Unlike modern techniques of stagecraft, he says, stage curtains in the ancient world were lowered at the beginning of the performance and raised at the end, meaning that the figures depicted on them would either be visible all at once or else become visible in a gradually unfurling motion. By depicting a lowered curtain that incites Zeuxis to demand that it be raised, Bann writes: ‘Parrhasius had managed to create the illusion of a space in which figuration was destined to appear’ (emphasis in original). Ingenious as it is, Bann’s argument raises more questions than it ultimately answers. Chief among them is the vexing question of what a stage curtain is doing in a Greek theatre of the fifth century  in the first place. As Bryson has pointed out, the kind of stagecraft that Bann describes was a distinctively Roman contribution to the history of stagecraft in Classical antiquity. In fact, Greek theatre of the Classical period did not use stage curtains of any sort. While Hellenistic theatre seems to have used them to conceal set changes, these were much simpler affairs than the elaborate Roman version that emerged from and retracted into an inconspicuous slot located just in front of the stage. Bann (1989: 27–40); cf. Bryson (1990: 180–1 n. 17). ²⁷ See especially, Hénin (2010: 248–61); Siegert (2015a: 164–91); and Fucci (2015: 144–75). ²⁸ On this painting, see especially Fucci (2015: 162).

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Figure 9.1. Adriaen van der Spelt and Frans van Mieris, Still-life with Flowers and a Curtain, 1658, oil on panel, 46.5  63.9 cm. Art Institute of Chicago. Courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago

various textures, luminosities, and zones of spatial indeterminacy (the silky sheen of the curtain, the delicate translucence of the flowers, the mottled stone of the archway) solicit the interaction of the viewer no less than the narrativizing detail of the curtain—a device commonly used as a picture cover—that is only partially drawn to reveal what lies behind it.²⁹ The fact that this painting was not a solo endeavor, but rather a collaboration by two painters, Adriaen van der Spelt and Frans van Mieris, only adds fuel to the sense that it was self-consciously harking back to the contest between Zeuxis and Parrhasius. Even if no one believes that Parrhasius’ curtain looked quite like the one by van der Spelt and van Mieris, the unstated intuition that can be inferred from art historical accounts of Pliny’s account seems to be that it must have been vaguely similar, if indeed it had any chance of fooling a celebrated painter such as Zeuxis. The underlying assumption here seems to be that the formal distinction between the trompe l’oeil pictures of one historical period and another is one of degree, not of kind. ²⁹ Elsner (2015: 219–58).

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As a test case, even if it is closer to Pliny’s time than to that of Zeuxis and Parrhasius (a point to which I shall return), we could look to the Republican sanctuary in Brescia that was lavished with a decorative programme of richly painted frescoes in the second quarter of the first century (Figure 9.2).³⁰ Within each of its four cellae, real fluted columns with Ionic and Corinthian bases were placed in front of the walls, which were in turn covered with depicted columns and encrusted polychrome marble. The two cellae on either end of the sanctuary were embellished even further with the addition of a ravishing trompe l’oeil ensemble that includes a fictive dado, painted columns, and a curtain depicted so that it convincingly sags pendulously under its own weight, visually echoing the ribboned festoons embroidered into its surface topography (fascinatingly, these depicted ribbons hang over the ornamented pattern in several places, further confounding the distinction between reality and artifice). Rather than being tacked to the wall like a tapestry, the curtain hangs from a set of silver rings threaded together by a delicate string

Figure 9.2. Wall-painting from the Republican sanctuary at Brescia, second quarter of the first century  (detail). Photograph by the author

³⁰ See especially Moormann (2011: 59 ff.) and Rossi (1998: 269–70).

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whose fineness nearly dissolves into the sheer plenitude of elaborate, almost excessive detail. At the very centre of the wall, directly between two painted columns and two real ones just in front of them, the curtain appears to have been lifted up and folded over itself in order to expose a glimpse of brick or marble revetment that is otherwise hidden along the perimeter of the room. By seducing the viewer with its undulating folds that construct and collapse the distinctions between surface and depth, concealment and revelation, the curtain both facilitates and disrupts our visual mastery of the depicted scene. Still, Pliny’s tantalizing description of Parrhasius’ curtain as ‘ita veritate repraesentata’ remains somewhat elusive and almost coyly vague. Was it, like the Brescia painting, a virtuoso product of naturalistic reality effects? Or did it win the palm by other, more subversive, means? The question behind these questions seems to be: realistic or naturalistic for whom? One of the most curious features of Pliny’s account has to do with the ethological perception of Zeuxis’ picture by the birds who flew up to peck at his grapes (a trope that recurs two other times in Pliny: first, when crows attempted to alight on the rooftiles of the stage-paintings commissioned by Claudius Pulcher in the First Punic War; and again when Aemelius Paulus Lepidus had a snake painted on a strip of parchment as a kind of scarecrow to silence a flock of birds that had been keeping him up at night—in this case, a curious synthesis of a fictive animal skin painted on a real animal skin, its reptilian and mammalian distinctions notwithstanding).³¹ It is telling that Pliny conveys a story about the criteria for animal perception that occurred after the contest with Parrhasius: It is said that Zeuxis also subsequently painted a Child Carrying Grapes, and when birds flew to the fruit with the same frankness as before he strode up to the picture in anger with it and said, ‘I have painted the grapes better than the child, as if I had made a success of that as well, the birds would inevitably have been afraid of it.’

According to Pliny, Zeuxis evidently believed that the criteria for animals and humans were coextensive. Was this a widely held view, one perhaps even shared by Pliny, as Bryson suggests? Or was Zeuxis doubly deceived? On this point, it is essential to attend to the matter of judgement in the

³¹ Pliny the Elder, Natural History 35.23, 35.121.

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contest. While Pliny refers to the ‘verdict’ (iudicio) of the birds, a word with obvious jurisprudential overtones, an intriguing biographical detail about Parrhasius found in Quintilian relates that the painter was so thoroughly adept at his craft that he became known as ‘“the lawgiver” [legum latorem] because the rest follow the representations of gods and heroes which he laid down, as though they had no other choice’.³² Birds might be capable of making judgements, but humans are the ones who establish the terms of the debate. For Jacques Lacan, the question of what the paintings of Zeuxis and Parrhasius looked like offered compelling evidence, not for the history of realism or illusion in the history of Western painting, but rather for the problem of how not only human subjects but even inanimate objects, by virtue of the way in which they organize the field of vision and make visible the nature and qualities of objecthood, can look back and return the gaze: If the birds rushed to the surface on which Zeuxis had deposited his dabs of colour, taking the picture for edible grapes, let us observe that the success of such an undertaking does not imply in the least that the grapes were admirably reproduced, like those we can see in the basket held by Caravaggio’s Bacchus in the Uffizi. If the grapes had been painted this way, it is not very likely that the birds would have been deceived, for why should the birds see grapes portrayed with such extraordinary verisimilitude? There would have to be something more reduced, something closer to the sign, in something representing grapes for the birds. But the opposite example of Parrhasius makes it clear that if one wishes to deceive a man, what one presents to him is the painting of a veil, that is to say, something that incites him to ask what is behind it.³³

Lacan’s reading of Pliny is oppositional, to be sure, but it nonetheless makes a strong claim that birds and humans (let alone painters) might in fact have rather different criteria for what counts as verisimilitude.³⁴ Indeed, Lacan’s insistence on the issue of sign-inference shares much in common with certain ancient concerns about the same topic as it pertains to various animal and human forms of life. A key example from the second century  can be found in Sextus Empiricus’ critique of propositional sign-inference in earlier Stoic

³² Quintilian, The Orator’s Education 12.10. ³³ Lacan (1998: 111–12). ³⁴ Mitchell (1994: 329–44).

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philosophy, where he takes up the issue in the case of non-philosophers and non-humans: For often illiterate helmsmen and farmers with no experience of dialectical principles are expert judges of signs—the former on the sea, judging winds and calms, storms and still seas, and the latter on the farm, judging good and bad crops, droughts and heavy rains. In fact, why are we talking about human beings, when some of them have even attributed some concept of the sign to nonrational animals? For the dog, when it tracks an animal by its footprints, is actually using signs; but it does not for that reason take in an appearance of the proposition ‘If this is a footprint, an animal is here’.³⁵

Here we could think of the philosopher Arthur Danto’s claim that ‘pictures as such are not like propositions’, at least when understood as a pictorial language.³⁶ Yet Danto went even further to collapse some of the key distinctions between human and animal perception in his claim that ‘the eye is not historical, but we are’, a critical qualification of the art historian Heinrich Wölfflin’s aphorism that ‘vision itself has a history’.³⁷ Citing a famous experiment in which pigeons were trained to recognize objects in pictures that were presented to them, Danto sought to argue that, if vision does change historically (a phenomenon that art historians typically call ‘visuality’), it is only in the trivial sense of shaperecognition (for example, that a Roman teleported into the present might not ‘see’ or recognize a computer as a computer, but that he or she might, over time, come to do so once he or she had seen a sufficient number or range of examples).³⁸ Yet, as Whitney Davis has persuasively countered, the experiment with the pigeons (which Danto used, without offering any empirical evidence, to argue against any meaningful evolutionary changes to ‘the eye’, or the neurobiology of vision ‘in the bare six hundred years between Giotto and Ingres’) is of limited value to us in the sense that, like the iudicio of Pliny’s birds, it reduces the complex phenomenon of object-resemblance to one of shape-recognition, which

³⁵ Sextus Empiricus, Against the Logicians, 2.270–1, trans. Bett (2005) 142. ³⁶ Danto (1992: 15–31). ³⁷ Danto (2001: 9). One could also think of Michael Baxandall’s concept of the ‘period eye’, a concept that Whitney Davis characterizes as having a ‘neuropsychological basis’ and links to Gombrich’s ethological theories of perception. Davis (2017: 318 n. 4). ³⁸ Herrnstein, Loveland, and Cable (1976: 285–302).

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does not account for, and even specifically excludes from consideration, the presence of pictoriality.³⁹ Here we come to a crucial point that, so far as I can tell, has passed unnoticed despite the copious ink that has been spilled on the contest between Zeuxis and Parrhasius. Given that Zeuxis asked that the curtain be removed (remoto linteo) and that the painting be revealed (contrary to many early modern accounts of the contest, Pliny never in fact says that Zeuxis tried to touch the picture with his own hand, much as this would dramatize and make explicit the suggestive relations of vision and touch in Pliny’s telling), what prompts him to understand or recognize his mistake (intellecto errore)?⁴⁰ Did he later go up and try to touch the painting, only to be humiliated in front of his rival (tellingly, Pliny describes how Zeuxis feels pudor—the emotion of shame or modesty that, perhaps not coincidentally, was often described as a metaphorical ‘covering’ of cloth like the very curtain that deceived him)? Did someone simply tell him that he was mistaken? Or rather did it somehow dawn on Zeuxis, by a mere shift of aspect, that he was in the presence of a picture?

9.3. Drawing a Blank The key to the contest between the two painters, as scholars have discussed from various points of view, has to do with the material support of the painting. While the word that Pliny uses to describe Parrhasius’ curtain, a linteum, can indeed refer to a curtain, it primarily denotes a modest piece of linen or cotton canvas that can be used for all sorts of things: the sails of ships, coverings for open storefronts, and, last but not least, as a material support for panel paintings (a format that we tend to forget about given their scarcity in the material record in contrast to their better-preserved counterparts in fresco). Hence, as Helen Morales keenly observes: ‘There is a linguistic index of the visual dissolution between signifier and signified which dupes Zeuxis in the purposeful ambiguity of the word linteum, which is used to denote both (linen) canvas—the artist’s material—and (linen) curtain—the painted image.’⁴¹ ³⁹ Davis (2011: 11–42, 187–92). Cf. Danto (2001: 7). ⁴⁰ On the topic of error in Roman art criticism, see Vout (2018: 15–36). ⁴¹ Morales (1996: 185). I would like to thank Noam M. Elcott for sharing with me his unpublished paper in which he tracks an art-historical phenomenon he calls ‘medium-

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To Morales’s point, I would add that, if, in fact, the picture were an essentially blank linen support upon which a sparing, but no less suggestive, configuration of lines (Parrhasius, as we shall see, was especially renowned for his draughtsmanship) had been added—itself a trend of recent fashion that exploits the play between the graphic marks of lines depicting the folds of fabric and the natural folds of the garment on a body that sometimes correspond to, but sometimes deviate from those marks—the semantic ambiguity of linteum would only be further amplified by this archly visual pun. Paolo Pino suggested as much in his Dialogue on Painting of 1548 in which he supposed that Parrhasius, ever the trickster, might have painted a white canvas so that the material stuff of paint and its material support effectively cancelled one another out in a zero-sum game.⁴² Pino’s imaginative scenario likewise recalls Pliny’s account of the contest between two other Greek artists, Apelles and Protogenes, each of whom set out to draw ever finer lines than the other on the same panel, with the result that ‘its vast surface contain [ed] nothing else than the almost invisible lines [lineas visum fugientes], so that among the outstanding works of many artists it looked like a blank [inani] space, and by that very fact attracted attention and was more esteemed than any masterpiece’.⁴³ There is something inescapably, if deceptively, modern about Pliny’s description of the blank space of the painting by Apelles and Protogenes. For the reasons outlined above, the suggestion that such a painting bears any relation to, say, Barnett Newman’s ‘zip’ paintings on the basis of a mere morphological resemblance would be to succumb to an art historical deception, what Erwin Panofsky called a pseudomorphosis.⁴⁴ But specific trompe l’oeil’, in which, as he puts it, ‘medium self-effacement’ is traded in for ‘medium-self-advertisement’, a condition that he evocatively links, along with a number of historical antecedents, to the Protestant eucharistic theology of consubstantiation. On the issue of mimetic transparency and opacity as it pertains to the concept of the readymade with specific reference to Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even, cf. de Duve (1996: 403): ‘As for the chessgame of painting, in this case Duchamp is not so much Zeuxis as Parrhasios: the best ruse is the most transparent one, the one that catches the viewers in the trap of a delay in glass.’ ⁴² Quoted in Hénin (2010: 260 n. 5); for the reasons I give in n. 44, I do not share Hénin’s view (2010: 250) that such a painting would ‘make it a sort of Malevitzian White square on white background, a true predecessor of postmodernism’. ⁴³ Pliny the Elder, Natural History 35.83. ⁴⁴ Panofsky borrowed the term from Oswald Spengler, who in turn borrowed it from the field of mineralogy. For Panofsky (1964: 26–7), pseudomorphosis, seen as an art historical

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lookalikes can also be instructive. In his discussion of the avant-garde strategy of deploying a blank canvas as a readymade, one whose opticality and flatness Clement Greenberg regarded as the degree-zero condition of painting and its medium specificity, Thierry de Duve has described how it became possible for such an object to be presented as a picture, or at the very least a ‘would-be picture’ or ‘potential picture’, waiting to be actualized in the project of modernism: Even before it is touched by the painter’s hand, it already belongs to the tradition of painting, or rather, to a particular tradition—that of Western painting since the Renaissance. While it is prepared to receive the traces of the painter’s brush and is thus no more than a support, as part of the artist’s materials, it has already incorporated, readymade, the one convention established during the Renaissance—that one is to paint on a stretched canvas. To call it a picture [ . . . ] means to acknowledge the presence of that historical convention in an otherwise mundane commodity.⁴⁵

de Duve’s insistence on the issue of historical convention that frames the interpretation of what might otherwise be seen as a simple configuration of materials, a ‘mundane commodity’, recalls one of the central concepts of German media theory, the ‘technological–medial a priori’. Here, as Horn writes, media are not simply the ‘conditions of possibility’ of events but simply are the events in themselves. The key here, as Dworkin observes in his study of ‘blank’ media, is that, ‘if we define media on the basis of inscriptibility, we are faced with the question of how to know when mere materials have become identifiable media. A certain sense of medium is caught between impossible chronologies.’⁴⁶ The ‘impossible chronologies’ bound up in the conditions of inscriptibility have a suggestive link in Pliny’s discussion of the ‘remaining lines’, the liniamenta reliqua, of unfinished paintings that make sorrowfully visible an artist’s very thoughts (cogitationes) before death removed the phenomenon, designates ‘the emergence of a form A, morphologically analogous to, or even identical with, a form B, yet entirely unrelated to it from a genetic point of view’. See also Bois (2015: 127–4; 2016: 161–80). ⁴⁵ de Duve (1996: 250). Cf. Greenberg (1940: 296–310). ⁴⁶ Dworkin (2013: 29). We might do well to bear in mind Meyer Schapiro’s observation (1994: 4) about the ‘image field’ as a kind of degree-zero invention of human civilization: ‘The remarkable expressions of the monkey-painters in our zoos should also be considered from this point of view. It is we who elicit those fascinating results by putting paper and colors in the monkey’s hands, just as we get monkeys in the circus to ride a bicycle and to perform other feats with devices that belong to civilization.’

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hand from the work.⁴⁷ But we need not restrict ourselves to painters. In his account of the grisly death of Archimedes, Valerius Maximus attributed an artfulness to the diagrammatical lines of the famous mathematician:⁴⁸ But as Archimedes was drawing diagrams with mind and eyes fixed on the ground, a soldier who had broken into the house in quest of loot with sword drawn over his head asked him who he was. Too much absorbed in tracking down his objective, Archimedes could not give his name but said, protecting the dust with his hands, ‘I beg you, don’t disturb this’, and was slaughtered as neglectful of the victor’s command; with his blood he confused the lines of his art [sanguine suo artis suae liniamenta confudit].

Valerius’ gruesome, almost pornographic, picture of rivulets of blood coagulating with dust and the geometry of lines is powerful, not only because of its sheer visual impact, but also for its double sense of ‘confusion’ between pictures and reality, fantasy and fact—an almost gladiatorial contest between blood and sand, art and life. Parrhasius, not coincidentally, was famous for his lines. In his discussion of the painter’s legacy in his own time, Pliny remarks that ‘there are many other pen-sketches [vestigia graphidis] still extant among his panels and parchments, from which it is said that artists derive profit’.⁴⁹ The word vestigia here implies the sense of a trace or index, thus conveying an almost melancholy sense of absence and loss. Going further, Pliny notes: Indeed, it is admitted by artists that he [Parrhasius] won the palm in the drawing of outlines [in liniis extremis]. This in painting is the high-water mark of refinement; to paint bulk and the surface within the outlines, though no doubt a great achievement, is one in which many have won distinction, but to give the contour of the figures and make a satisfactory boundary where the painting within finishes, is rarely attained in successful artistry [extrema corporum facere et desinentis picturae modum includere rarum in successu artis invenitur]. For the contour ought to round itself off and so terminate as to suggest the presence of other parts behind it also, and disclose even what it hides [ostendatque etiam

⁴⁷ See especially Platt (2018a: 492–517). ⁴⁸ On the significance of diagrams in the rhetorical basis of Greek mathematics, see especially Netz (1999). For a suggestive study of the iconicity of diagrammatical lines in mathematics and philosophy, both ancient and modern, see Krämer (2010) and Kennedy, Chapter 4, this volume. ⁴⁹ Pliny the Elder, Natural History 35.68.

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quae occultat] [ . . . ] Nevertheless he seems to fall below his own level in giving expression to the surface of the body inside the outline.⁵⁰

This passage has provoked much speculation ever since Johann Joachim Winckelmann cattily wondered aloud whether Pliny ‘understood what he himself wrote’ and held that it was simply inconceivable for a competent draughtsman not to ‘know his body from all sides and in all its movements’.⁵¹ Gombrich later tried to resolve the matter more tidily by suggesting that Pliny meant only to suggest that Parrhasius’ achievement lay in the logic of the profil perdu, thus giving a quite literal meaning to the ‘Greek revolution’. To return to the question of what Parrhasius’ curtain actually looked like, Pliny’s silence on the matter, when examined in context, might best be explained or at least justified by the fact that he framed the whole episode with a detailed analysis of each artist’s personal style. As has often been noted, Pliny’s contrast between Parrhasius’ line and Zeuxis’ colour (which he describes just prior to the contest) provided an important precedent for later Renaissance distinctions between Florentine disegno and Venetian colorito. Needless to say, this does not mean that the work of Parrhasius must have resembled that of a so-called linear painter like Sandro Botticelli.⁵² Indeed, if it was even remotely similar to the sinuous drapery on the so-called Parrhasian white ground lekythoi of fifth-century Athens, it seems eminently plausible, as I have already suggested, that the contours of the curtain could have been depicted with line alone.⁵³ The most important takeaway here seems to be that Parrhasius’ primary weakness as a painter—his difficulty in producing form within an outline that can suggestively ‘disclose even what it hides’—seems anathema to the very conceit of the painted curtain, the very point of which was to do precisely that. Returning to Morales’s observation about the semantic density of the word linteum, we might add yet another layer to complicate this already complicated picture: the common Latin word for drawn lines—linea or linia—in its most literal sense means a ‘linen thread’ or ‘string’. Depending on how far one is willing to go, it is therefore ⁵⁰ Pliny the Elder, Natural History 35.67–9. ⁵¹ Quoted in Carter (2013: 90). ⁵² Roworth (2007: 32). The fundamental discussion of ‘linear’ and ‘painterly’ styles is Wölfflin (1950: 18–40). ⁵³ Bianchi Bandinelli (1938); Rumpf (1951).

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possible to see Pliny’s description of Parrhasius’ picture three ways: as a motif (that is, a curtain); as a material support (that is, the canvas itself); and finally, in a quasi-synthesis of both, as the elemental form of a string that makes up the ramified texture of the canvas, perhaps even a line pictorialized simply as a line like those of Apelles and Protogenes.

9.4. Angles of Vision The point I wish to underscore here is that, if indeed Parrhasius’ curtain is to be heuristic for a historical account of trompe l’oeil, then it should include not only formalist accounts of its medium specificity (again with reference to Greenbergian notions of flatness and opticality), but also ‘post-formalist’ approaches such as those articulated by David Summers and Whitney Davis, who posit a ‘virtual coordinate space’ that takes into account the angles of vision whereby, in Davis’s terms, a picture succeeds to pictoriality, or the process by which a particular configuration of marks becomes visible as a picture in a beholder’s visual space.⁵⁴ In this last section, therefore, I wish to make the case for trompe l’oeil, or at least the specific example of Parrhasius’ curtain, as the effect of a topological transformation. It is useful to return to Lacan’s reading of the contest in order to address these issues of vision more directly. Having drawn a distinction between human and animal sign-inference, Lacan instrumentalized the grapes of Zeuxis as an example of what he calls the dompte-regard, a ‘taming of the gaze’, and the curtain of Parrhasius as a trompe-l’oeil, a ‘tricking of the eye’. While some art strives to trick the eye, he says, all art strives to tame the gaze. For Lacan, the ability of art to tame or neutralize the gaze in this way constitutes the most basic and universal function of what he called the image-screen, or the geometrical configuration of vision whereby the subject-as-viewer becomes the subject-as-viewed.⁵⁵ ⁵⁴ Summers (2003) and Davis (2017). For an introduction to ancient theories of vision and optics that inform my thinking in this section, see especially Lindberg (1976) and Smith (2015). ⁵⁵ Hal Foster (2004: 282) has cogently explained the significance of this distinction: ‘Traditionally in Western philosophy, tropes like “veils” and “screens” figure as blinds that obscure truth, illusions that mystify reality: we are supposed to shed them [ . . . ] In Lacan, on the contrary, the screen is a necessary protection without which we are at the mercy of the real.’

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For Lacan, the image-screen not only constitutes a necessary protection; it also produces a sensation of aesthetic pleasure. Using the example of the famous anamorphic skull in Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors, Lacan observes: ‘What is it that attracts and satisfies us in trompe-l’oeil? When is it that it captures our attention and delights us? At the moment when, by a mere shift of our gaze, we are able to realize that the representation does not move with the gaze and that it is merely a trompe-l’oeil.’⁵⁶ Lacan’s insights about the topological dimension of how we come to appreciate a trompe l’oeil picture—what Davis would call the ‘foreshortened affordances’ by which we image it as a picture by looking at it from one or another standpoint—invites us to think about the disposition of pictures in ‘visual coordinate space’. Although he suggests that Zeuxis’ grapes need not have been as ‘admirably reproduced’ as those of Caravaggio’s Bacchus, Lacan nevertheless seems to assume that Parrhasius’ curtain must have been so for it to trick the eye of an artist. But, as I have been arguing, the criterion of verisimilitude and realism does not hang exclusively, or even primarily, on the presence of depictive plenitude. Lacan’s own emphasis on the geometricization of vision offers a persuasive counterpoint. Lacan builds his theory of the trompe l’oeil on a wellknown passage from Plato’s Sophist that draws a distinction between likeness-makers in general and those who aim at ‘fantastic art’, or the production of semblances.⁵⁷ In large works of sculpture and painting seen from below and from a distance, Plato says, the distortion of scale represents things in order that they might appear to be proportional and hence beautiful, rather than transcribing something exactly as it is. The effect of distortion is predicated on the differential angles of vision between the upper and lower regions of the work such that they are incommensurate with the thing they represent. More significant still for present purposes is a passage in Vitruvius that likewise broaches the problem of optical distortion, but within a theatrical context that served as the crucial setting for the contest between the two painters:

⁵⁶ Lacan (1998: 112). ⁵⁷ Plato, Sophist 235e6–236c6. See also Hyman (1989: 84–94) and the response of Podro (1998: 182 n. 17), and Notomi (1999: 136 ff).

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Agatharchus at Athens, when Aeschylus was presenting a tragedy, was in control of the stage, and wrote a commentary about it. Following his suggestions, Democritus and Anaxagoras wrote upon the same topic, in order to show how, if a fixed centre is taken for the outward glance of the eyes and the projection of the radii, we must follow these lines in accordance with a natural law, such that from an uncertain object, uncertain images may give the appearance of buildings in the scenery of the stage, and how what is figured upon vertical and plane surfaces can seem to recede in one part and project in another.⁵⁸

This is a controversial passage that has often been interpreted as a commentary about the origins of painted perspective in stagecraft that I do not have the space to address here. But the main takeaway here seems to be that the perception of such protrusions and recessions in visual space is attributable not to the formal qualities of painting or even perspectival construction as such, but rather to the faculty of vision and its geometrical coordination in real space. Whereas Vitruvius and the Presocratic philosophers he mentions are concerned with the matter of how a beholder images pictures from ‘a fixed centre’ in the space of the theatre, others had considered the problem of a mobile observer in the manner that Lacan describes in the encounter with the anamorphic skull. Responding to some of these older philosophical puzzles, Sextus Empiricus describes how various positions, distances, and locations all conspire to modify and inhibit our apprehension of a given set of phenomena. As an example of how this works with positions, he observes that ‘the same painting when laid flat appears smooth, but when inclined forward at a certain angle it seems to have recesses and prominences’.⁵⁹ Sextus was not alone in being vexed by the phenomenology of panel painting and the matter of how its protruding surfaces could be perceived as hollow depths, and vice versa. In his Optics, also written in the second century , Ptolemy notes: According to the colors applied to them, surfaces sometimes appear convex and sometimes concave. Thus, a painter who wishes to represent these two shapes by means of colors paints the part he wants to appear higher a bright color, whereas the part he wants to appear concave he paints with a weaker and darker color. This is why we judge a concave veil to be convex when we view it from afar. The

⁵⁸ Virtuvius, On Architecture 7.11. For a stimulating discussion of this passage, see especially Burnyeat (2017: 37 ff.), and, with reference to the contest between Zeuxis and Parrhasius, Nichols (2017: 149–50). ⁵⁹ Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism 1.120.

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reason is not that the wind disposes it in such a way that sunlight and the visual flux reach the area of concavity [blown inward by the wind]. Rather, the reason is that the [relatively] orthogonal rays strike the middle of the veil so that it shows forth vividly, whereas at its outer edges either no ray at all or a somewhat oblique one strikes it, which is why it appears dark [toward the edge]. Accordingly, then, the edges of the veil appear depressed while the middle appears elevated, and this is how something that is actually convex appears.⁶⁰

While Ptolemy asserts that painters achieve the illusion of concave and convex effects through their manipulation of color, it is crucial to observe, as his example of the veil illustrates (one that seems to evoke Parrhasius’ curtain without explicitly mentioning it by name), that we are talking about more than the mere materiality of paint. For Ptolemy, building on a suite of previous optical theories, the perception of colour turns on the geometrical and optical coordination between the vertex of the eye and the ‘flux’ that radiates from it in the form of a visual cone that reaches its object. Whether we believe in flux today is immaterial to the matter at hand, for, as Michael Baxandall once remarked in his study of shadows: ‘We do not value painting for proximity to a real visual ray, but fifteenth century painting did have imitation of the real as an important part of its ambition.’⁶¹ With respect to the question of how the geometry of visual flux likewise bears upon kinaesthetic perception, Ptolemy, who went further than any other figure in the field of ancient optics in terms of describing illusions or perceptual ‘mistakes’, goes on to say: It is also assumed that the image of a face painted on panels follows the gaze of [moving] viewers to some extent though there is no motion in the image itself, and the reason is that the true direction of the painted face’s gaze is perceived by means of the stationary disposition of the visual cone that strikes the painted face. The visual faculty does not recognize this, but the gaze remains fixed solely along the visual axis, because the parts themselves of the face are seen by means of corresponding visual rays. Thus, as the observer moves away, he supposes that the image’s gaze follows his.⁶²

While very few examples of painting on linen or even wooden panel paintings survive, most of them from funerary contexts in the arid desert of Egypt (and in any case none of them situated in their original domestic

⁶⁰ Ptolemy, Optics, 2.128, in Smith (1996: 122). ⁶² Ptolemy, Optics 2.133, in Smith (1996: 124).

⁶¹ Baxandall (1995: 151).

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contexts), representations of how such paintings were hung do exist in greater frequency, whether in stage-like settings or small paintings set against altars as votive objects in sacral idyllic landscapes. Unlike frescoes that are constitutive of the flat wall that simultaneously serves as their material support, panel paintings are usually depicted as being canted at some angle projecting towards or receding from the viewer. The physical display or disposition of Parrhasius’ picture—whether canted or flat, seen from head-on or rather from an oblique angle—operated as a determining feature of its psychological persuasiveness. Several depictions of the contest can be seen in early modern prints—some showing the picture as a canvas leaning against a wall, others showing the picture flush with the wall as if it were a mural painting (itself a fascinating, but utterly ignored discrepancy).⁶³ But the key takeaway here is that the standpoint from which Parrhasius’ painting was seen or became visible in a beholder’s visual space is precisely what needs to be reconstructed art historically. One final example might serve to show how all of these diverse strands of evidence might converge on a material artefact that coordinates both the physical and epistemological relations between pictures, their configuration in real space, and the calculated angles of vision that make them visible, whether really or discursively so, to the beholder/reader. At the close of De speculis, a medieval translation of an ancient Greek optical treatise on mirrors and reflections (sometimes attributed to Hero of Alexandria but more cautiously and conventionally to ‘PseudoPtolemy’), the reader is given instructions for the following brief, illustrated by a diagram (Figure 9.3): ‘To put a mirror in a given place, so that everyone who approaches will see neither himself nor someone else, but only whatever picture [ymaginem] someone has chosen in advance.’⁶⁴ Following a series of similar propositions that serve to showcase the ⁶³ For an evocative example of how early modern trompe l’oeil pictures were likewise concerned with the physical disposition of the work, one could think of Cornelius Gijsbrechts’s Reverse of a Framed Painting (1668–72). I am indebted to Noam M. Elcott for drawing my attention to the way in which the unframed painting was meant to be placed on the floor in order capture the beholder’s notice and invite them to pick it up and turn it over. See especially Stoichita (1997: 276 ff.); and, for a suggestive connection between this painting and ancient depictive practices, Zorach (2017: 586). ⁶⁴ Jones (2001: 165–6, 178–9) (Jones believes that the diagram was indeed included in the original Greek treatise). Cf. Tybjerg (2003: 443–66), and Burnyeat (2017: 71–3). On the visual rhetoric of diagrams in mathematics and philosophy, see n. 48.

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Figure 9.3. Diagram of the mirror construction in proposition 24 in PseudoPtolemy, De Speculis. After Jones (2001). Reproduced by permission of the author

potential for mirrors to distort, multiply, surveil, or otherwise conceal the intended object of vision, this final example is unique in the sense that its illusory power is predicted on the crucial difference of swapping out a human subject for an inanimate object. The trick itself was relatively simple to construct: a mirror situated against a wall is inclined towards the observer at such an angle so as to reflect a picture, concealed behind some kind of barrier, tilted back at an angle parallel with the mirror.⁶⁵ Crucially, as Alexander Jones has pointed out, the reflected image in the mirror will appear to have the same tilt as the picture concealed behind the barrier (thus having the same canted appearance as the aforementioned representations of panel paintings). While there is much to unpack here, what particularly captures my interest is the barrier that separates the beholder from the object of vision. Intriguingly, the medieval translator had some trouble with the original Greek word that he wrote in the margin: phragma, a word that ⁶⁵ For a media-archaeological account of modern phantasmagoria and its debts to ancient devices such as the mirror construction of the De speculis, see, e.g., Gunning (2007: 94–127); Elcott (2016a: 97–9; 2016b).

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covers a considerable semantic range, but with a recognizable family resemblance that revolves around the concept of a defence mechanism. Among other things, it can designate a protective fence or screen (in the context of hunting); the rocky boom of a harbour; the earthen breastwork of a temporary fortification; the inky cloud of black pigment emitted by a cuttlefish; and even the fleshy envelopes of the eyelids themselves. Like those other examples, the barrier in the mirror construction organizes the parameters and conditions of both movement and visibility. It is a true dispositif in the Foucauldian sense of the word, one whose mediality functions as an assemblage of scientific, philosophical, and even architectural techniques of control over the human observer. So too, I suggest, was the curtain of Parrhasius: its affordance as a picture in the context of a theatre certainly involves questions of vision and the gaze that are baked into its oft-cited etymology in Greek as a ‘place for viewing’ (theatron), but, like the phragma or protective screen in the mirror construction, it also expands to include a whole system of forces and relations of power and embodiment that cannot be reduced to a question of mere opticality.⁶⁶ What did Parrhasius’ curtain look like? Indeed, did it ever really exist? No one knows. But the wager of this chapter is that his picture did not win the contest (at least as we know about it from Pliny’s anecdote) on account of its realism or naturalism so long as we define or intuit these effects in terms of their formal qualities alone. If indeed Parrhasius can properly be credited with devising the first ‘metapainting’ in the history of art, then he did so, not simply through some masterful display of illusionistic technique, nor even a canny choice of subject matter that exploited or even subverted the expectations for its appraisal. Those tactics notwithstanding, Parrhasius won the palm because he turned his weakness to his advantage and let the geometry of vision itself produce the media effect of protrusions and recessions—the optical illusion of bulk and stuff—within his famous lines.

⁶⁶ See especially Goldhill (2000). On the problem of privileging visual accounts of the constitution of power and knowledge at the expense of other embodied forms of experience, see Crary (1999).

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10 White Noise Transmitting and Receiving Ancient Elegy Genevieve Liveley

Multas per gentes et multa per aequora vectus advenio has miseras, frater, ad inferias, ut te postremo donarem munere mortis et mutam nequiquam alloquerer cinerem. quandoquidem fortuna mihi tete abstulit ipsum. heu miser indigne frater adempte mihi, nunc tamen interea haec, prisco quae more parentum tradita sunt tristi munere ad inferias, accipe fraterno multum manantia fletu, atque in perpetuum, ,   . Carried through many peoples and many seas, I arrive at these sad funeral rites, brother, To give you the last gift of death And to speak in vain to the silent ash. Since fate has taken you from me, Alas, poor brother, so unfairly taken from me, But for now receive this which in the ancient custom of our ancestors has been handed down as the sad gift for funeral rites, wet with so much of your brother’s tears, And so forever, brother,   . Catullus 101¹

¹ All translations in this chapter (from both ancient and modern languages) are my own unless otherwise indicated. Genevieve Liveley, White Noise: Transmitting and Receiving Ancient Elegy In: Classics and Media Theory. Edited by: Pantelis Michelakis, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198846024.003.0010

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10.1. Introduction In 2000, following the death of her estranged brother, poet and classicist Anne Carson began to construct a scrapbook or ‘collage journal’ (reminiscent of an eighteenth-century mourning diary²) recording her memories of him. Nox purports to be a replica of that journal, reproducing yellowed, photocopied pages, complete with the traces of handwriting indentations, stains, and even staples. Analogous to the deliberately awkward intermedial translation of Catullus’ Latin elegy 101, the hypermedial ‘photocopying’ of Carson’s original collage book in Nox is deliberately skewed to show that it is, in fact, also a copy—itself an imitation, a kind of translation and remediation.³ Indeed, the book plays heavily with both its mediality and its materiality. According to one critic: Nox stages the materiality of the page as a materiality behind glass. It archives and preserves its own paper materiality as a hand-made memory book. A medium within a medium, Nox is a book about remediation—the reworking of old media within the new media, and vice versa—just as much as it is about memory. It is a book about looking back. If, according to McLuhan, the content of media are other media, remediation is the material rewriting or repurposing of media forms and conventions: a refashioning of media by means of and within each other.⁴

In this light, the photocopied notebook in a book, Nox, is no less an elegy for the death of the traditional printed book in the digital era than it is an elegy for Carson’s dead brother.⁵ In fact, in a 2011 interview Carson herself observed that ‘the book’s publication happened to coincide with Kindle, and I’m so pleased that it’s so un-Kindle-isable’.⁶ Nox also stages some of the fundamental issues of communications to and from the past that I will be exploring in this chapter—the first study of its kind to engage media theory in addressing a particularly ² See Palleau-Papin (2014). ³ On remediation (and hypermediacy) see Bolter and Grusin (1999). On intermediality, see Meyrowitz (1993), Schröter (2011), and Bruhn (2016). ⁴ Wurth (2013: 27). ⁵ The photocopier provides another glass-topped technology for remediation. What is more, as Pantelis Michelakis points out, my response to and remediation of this work (and his—as well as, perhaps, your own—reading of that reception) is mediated through a computer screen. ⁶ (accessed 31 January 2019). MacDonald (2015: 55) suggests that ‘the physical text of Nox is offered as sublime elegiac material precisely because it defies the durable technology of a regular, sturdily bound book’.

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contentious issue: the supposed connection between ancient Greek, Hellenistic, and Roman elegy. I want to investigate what is at stake in thinking about the dynamics of such a tradition, its transmission and reception, not in the more familiar classical context of reception theory but in the context of media theory—where considerations of transmission and reception require us to consider the apparatuses of communication systems, the materials through which they achieve their discursive operations, and the noise that accompanies their broadcast. I want to suggest, with media archaeologist Wolfgang Ernst, that when we recognize the continuity or otherwise of an elegiac tradition, we are dealing with what history calls tradition in the sense of transmission of signals, which the media archaeologist sometimes can decipher from noise only when technical filters are applied. At this point, media archaeology replaces philology as the art of deciphering texts.⁷

By applying some of the principles of Ernst’s media archaeology to the tradition of classical elegy, I will argue for a new evaluation of both signal and noise in this complex communication process, leading to a new appreciation in particular of Roman elegy’s concerns with its own materiality and mediality. I propose elegy as an especially salient case study in this context because Roman elegists such as Ovid, Propertius, Tibullus, and Catullus explicitly position their work as performing both a reception and a retransmission of a much older medium instantiated by the Greek and Hellenistic elegists and as a communication to future generations of readers. I suggest that the classical genre of elegy is particularly good to think with in terms of media (and remediation) because of the elegists’ own reflections upon reliable and unreliable devices and apparatuses of communication.⁸ Elegy is, moreover, a genre that is acutely aware of its own fragile status qua medium—self-consciously concerned with beginnings and ends, origins and deaths. Indeed, if—as media theorists such as John Guillory and Friedrich Kittler claim—the etymology of ‘media’ should recall for us its beginnings in the Latin medius, in the Greek mesos or metaxy—that is the medium, ‘in the middle’—then, this chapter

⁷ Ernst (2013a: 118). ⁸ See Catullus 70.4, Tibullus 1.4.21–4, and Ovid Amores 2.16.45–6 for parallels between writing elegy and writing words in the wind and water.

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argues, we should be mindful that the study of any medium presupposes its connection both to beginnings and to ends.⁹ Aptly, then, it is with the elegiac tradition’s focus upon death (mors)— rather than love (amor)— and with the twenty-first-century end of this tradition that I begin. Described in its paratexts as an ‘epitaph’, Carson’s Nox is published, not as a codex, but as a folded scroll (in leporello form) several feet long, concertinaed into a stone-grey coffin- or tomblike box casing. Deceptively tactile, with pages that seem to bear indentation marks from pencilled handwriting, the book contains facsimile photographs, pictures, sketches and scribbles, dictionary definitions, lyric pieces, fragments of history and biography, handwritten notes, letters and stamps, and transcriptions of telephone conversations. This columbaria of raw material is given structure and meaning by Carson’s deconstruction and reconstruction of Catullus’ elegy for his own dead brother, through embellished dictionary definitions for each Latin word in the order in which it appears in the original poem.¹⁰ As one reviewer put it: Carson ‘breaks down [ . . . ] “Catullus 101”, one word at a time with denotative and connotative swoons and sonic humming’.¹¹ Carson’s dictionary definitions are set on the left-hand pages of the text, deliberately reproducing the typical format of a bilingual Latin/ English translation—of which Carson once said in a radio interview that: ‘I spend a lot of my life looking at books with left-hand-page Greek or Latin, and right-hand-page English, and you get used to it, you get used to thinking in the little channel in between the two languages.’¹² Such thinking in and about the channel, thinking in and about the middle, the medium, is one of the book’s predominant concerns. Indeed, the dictionary entry for section 1.1 (per), amidst a full page of lexical examples,

⁹ According to Guillory (2010: 321): ‘The word media hints at a rich philological history extending back to the Latin medius, best exemplified in the familiar narrative topos of classical epic: in medias res. Yet the path by which this ancient word for “middle” came to serve as the collective noun for our most advanced communication technologies is difficult to trace.’ According to Kittler (2009b: 26): ‘[Aristotle] is the first to turn a common Greek preposition—metaxu, between—into a philosophical noun or concept: to metaxu, the medium.’ See also Hagen (2008: 13–29) and Alloa, Chapter 6, this volume. ¹⁰ As Nox has no page numbers, I refer to section numbers throughout. ¹¹ (accessed 31 January 2019). ¹² Wachtel and Carson (2016: 117).

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reminds us that per means ‘through the middle of (a number of persons or objects); [ . . . ] the medium through which things are perceived’. Nox plays with its own remediation and its own transmedial properties in other ways too. The stone-grey block of the book casing for Nox is reminiscent of that of a gravestone; the capitalized, sans serif font of its typescript imitates the font of a commemorative inscription on a headstone. The back of the box reads: when my brother died, i made an epitaph for him in the shape of a book. this is a replica of it, as close as we could get.

The book opens with a title page (of sorts) in which the name of the poet’s brother Michael is handwritten six times in thick black marker pen (whose ink seems to bleed through the paper onto the reverse of the page).¹³ On each line the name is written in increasingly larger— —font size, and superimposed with a transparent typewritten label reading ‘  ’: at once an epitaph and an evocation, akin to the ritual conclamatio or summoning by name that formed part of Roman funeral ceremonies—a connection already affirmed by Catullus in the elegy for his own dead brother, where the repetition of frater (brother) performs the same vocal function. Repeating this capitalized formatting, Carson reproduces her brother’s brief eulogy, originally spoken by his girlfriend at the funeral in Copenhagen that Carson was herself unable to attend, transforming words she herself never heard into the grave inscription that her brother (his ashes scattered at sea) never received: i do not want to say that much about michael you all know him in different ways. he and i led a turbulent life and had noisy arguments. nevertheless we never doubted our mutual love and respect. and now some food for thought. yesterday you cannot change. today you might alter. tomorrow does not give any promise.

Carson’s brother Michael had run away from home in 1978, and the siblings had spoken on the telephone only infrequently and exchanged only occasional letters in the intervening years. She records fragments of those letters and of those telephone calls in her scrapbook, but each record serves to emphasize the fundamental lack of communication that ¹³ See Plate (2015). See also Neef, van Dijck and Ketelaar (2006: 9) for the idea that handwriting functions as a marker of ‘autography, as an un-exchangeable, unique and authentic “signature” that claims to guarantee the presence of an individual writer during a historically unique moment of writing’, and Lecznar, Chapter 11, this volume.

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these apparatuses ultimately afforded. Letters, telephones, radios, prayers, are all shown to be poor devices for any kind of long-distance communication. In section 4.2 Carson writes that her mother Never got an address for him. Indeed during the last seven years of her life he wrote to her not a single word. Eventually she began to say he was dead. How do you know? I said and she said when I pray for him nothing comes back.

When Michael finally telephones Carson ‘about half a year’ after their mother’s death, she tells us ‘he had nothing to say’ (section 5.1)—their lack of communication poignantly captured by the dictionary entry on the facing left-hand page for ‘mutam [ . . . ] onomatopoeic [ . . . ] (of an animal) [ . . . ] mute’. Indeed, Carson’s reminder of the onomatopoeic etymology of the word ‘mute’—in Latin, Greek, and English—signals the inarticulate sound of the medium itself speaking, muttering. Even when nothing is communicated, the medium also always speaks, channelling and recording the noises that speak to us of its materiality—in this case the human (and animal) speech-organ of the voice itself. This failure of communication between brother and sister is further reinforced by the dictionary entry on the reverse of the page for ‘nequiquam [ . . . ] to no purpose or effect [ . . . ] late and pointlessly [ . . . ] for naught! (why?)’. The same emphasis is made by the juxtaposition on the following pages of ‘alloquor [ . . . ] to speak to (usually in a friendly manner) [ . . . ] invoke, call on (gods); to comfort, console’, with Carson’s typewritten recording of her uncommunicative, unfriendly, uncomfortable, telephonic exchange with her brother: ‘Mother is dead. Yes I guess she is . . . ’¹⁴ Michael’s words here are identified (and differentiated from the words spoken by his sister) by their boldface print—the literalization in print form of a motif to which the next section returns us (section 5.2): His voice was like his voice with something else crusted on it, black, dense—it lighted up for a moment when he said ‘pinhead’ (So pinhead d’you attain wisdom yet?) then went dark again. All the years and time that had passed over him came streaming into me, all that history. What is a voice?

Here the dark, black, boldface typography recording, reproducing, Michael’s voice (or, rather, something ‘like his voice’)—just as it picked ¹⁴ See Theodorakopoulos (2012: 159) for the idea that this example of ‘Carson’s technique of bricolage [ . . . ] makes sure that Catullus’ et mutam nequiquam alloquerer cinerem [and let me speak to your silent ashes all in vain] hits the reader with all its force’.

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out his insults in Carson’s earlier recording of this conversation (‘professor [ . . . ] pinhead’ (section 5.1))—represents only one ‘lighted up’ fragment of his conversation. His actual voice is blacker, denser, still —but we cannot actually hear it—just read an alphabetic substitution of something ‘like’ it. These various attempts at communication between brother and sister, through various channels, foreshadow a final delay in the news of Michael’s death, which reaches Carson (section 6.1) ‘while I swept my porch and bought apples and sat by the window in the evening with the radio on, his death came wandering slowly towards me across the sea’ (section 6.1). The mediation (or remediation) of this final communication is reinforced by a scrap of typewritten text ‘stuck’ to the base of the page which reads: ‘Something inbetween, [ . . . ]’ The transmedial significance of this delayed communication and the importance of that ‘something inbetween’ is highlighted by PalleauPapin, who suggests: The news of [Michael’s] death reaches her like a message in a bottle launched on the ocean. Such slow transmission of information holds the mystery of the relay between transmitter and receiver, and the hurdles in space and time, throughout the many years of separation that the information needs to overcome. The metaphor [ . . . of] the radio, with its well-established technicality, stands as a counterpart to such haphazard, lackadaisical transmission.¹⁵

Indeed, Carson’s careful juxtaposition of the radio and the letter here, as two analogous devices for long-distance telecommunication, transmits the quiet trace of an earlier connection. For Carson is not the first elegist (ancient or modern) to turn to classical elegy and find there an appropriate medium through which to channel her personal expressions of loss and lament.¹⁶ Nor is she the first elegist to reflect upon the operations—and the archaeology—of that medium. Most notable among such modern elegiac receptions, perhaps, stands Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters—which he described in a 1998 letter to the judges of the Forward Poetry Prize as an attempt ‘to open a direct, private, inner contact with ¹⁵ Palleau-Papin (2014: 14–15). ¹⁶ Significantly, Carson’s critics have attempted to understand her approach to elegy by looking back to English elegy in the pastoral tradition, such as Milton’s ‘Lycidas’, Shelley’s ‘Adonais’, and Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ but not to twentieth- or twenty-first-century elegy such as Hughes’ Birthday Letters. For a representative model of this approach, see MacDonald (2015: 54).

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my first wife [ . . . ] thinking mainly to evoke her presence to myself, and to feel her there listening’.¹⁷ In Birthday Letters Hughes repeatedly reflects upon the dynamics that help to make possible this posthumous communication and ‘contact’ with his first wife, fellow poet Sylvia Plath. In one poem (remediated in this collection as a letter), he explicitly reconsiders his own (poor) reception of one of Plath’s early pieces while they were both students at Cambridge, characterizing his flawed attempts at communication with her as analogous to a broken transmission via radio or television. He describes himself as ‘deaf ǀ To the white noise of the elegy’ (‘Caryatids 2’) that Plath herself produced while alive, and recalls his clumsy attempts ‘to spark ǀ A contact through the see-saw bustling ǀ Atmospherics’ in his early criticisms of Plath’s early writing.¹⁸ Simultaneously evoking and inverting the ‘white noise’ analogy that Hughes suggests in this Birthday Letters poem, Carson represents her own poor reception of her brother’s news—of her brother himself—as more akin to ‘black silence’, the darkness and silence of death, of night, of Nox. Yet, like the mute darkness of her brother’s voice, that black silence channels something, communicates something: ‘something inbetween’. The medium speaks.

10.2. In the Beginning: Greek and Hellenistic Elegy Carson attempts to understand, to translate, Catullus’ elegy through its lexical components, compiling her own dictionary entries for each word in the poem, finding (and inventing) etymologies and word histories, in both Latin and Greek, finding (and inventing or adapting) figurative uses and expressions for each entry.¹⁹ Wolfgang Hagen similarly attempts ¹⁷ Quoted in Wagner (2000: 22). ¹⁸ On Hughes’s reception of the classical elegiac tradition in Birthday Letters, see Liveley (2009). ¹⁹ Typical of Carson’s creative reworking of her dictionary definitions is the entry for parentum in section 8.1: ‘parens parentis masculine noun [apparently old aorist participle of PARIO] a parent, father, mother [ . . . ] parenti potius quam nocti obsequi to obey one’s parent rather than night [ . . . ] the creator; the originator, first practitioner (of an art or science); inventor (of an instrument); founder (of a school, etc.); author (of a book); (of abstract qualities, etc.) the origin, source, cause.’ Here Carson adapts the unattributed quotation ‘parenti potius quam nocti obsequi’ from Terence’s Hecyra (3. 4. 34), replacing the original object amori (love) with nocti—the night (nox). See also Palleau-Papin (2014).

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to understand the idea of ‘a medium’ lexicographically, through its etymology and word history—in particular, through the archaeological strata of its linguistic and semantic functions, associations, and figurative expressions as per (in or, better, through) the classical tradition. Thus: What is a medium? Let’s try historical semantics. ‘Medium’ is, first and foremost, a Latin word. It has a relatively clear etymology and an extensive word history already in classical Latin. Lexicographically, we identify it as the neuter of ‘medius [ . . . ]’ which functions as an adjective and a noun. Medius, like the Greek mesos, means ‘the middle one, located in the middle’, as in ‘mediam locavit—he gave her the middle place, but also in the partitive phrase ‘in ponere via media—in the middle of the road’ [ . . . ] and finally ‘medium’ is associated with figurative expressions concerning ‘the medium’ as in ‘Cum inter bellum et pacem nihil intersit medium—there is no middle way [medium] between war and peace’; or in Livy’s saying: ‘Ferme fugiendo in media fata ruitur—in fleeing a man runs straight into the path [media] of his death.’²⁰

Taking a cue from Hagen’s approach, and the insights into the etymology and aetiology of ‘medium’ that his quasi-philological and quasiarchaeological historiosemantische footnote uncovers, I also want to investigate what the origins of classical elegy might tell us about this medium and its communication strategies and operations. The etymological root of elegy itself, as the Roman elegists repeatedly like to remind us, comes from the Greek elegeia (ἐλεγεία), which is itself derived from the traditional Greek funerary lament e e legein (ἐ ἐ λέγειν)— to cry ‘woe, woe’.²¹ Thus Ovid, in an elegy to commemorate the death

²⁰ Hagen (2008: 13): ‘Was ist ein Medium? Versuchen wir es mit einer historischen Semantik. “Medium” ist zunächst und zuerst ein lateinisches Wort. Es hat eine vergleichsweise klare Etymologie und eine ausgedehnte Wortgeschichte schon im klassischen Latein. Lexikographisch identifizieren wir es als das Neutrum von “medius, a, um (altind. ádhyah, griech. μέσος, gotisch midjis, ahd. mitti = nhd. mitten)”, das als Adjektiv und Substantiv fungiert. Medius, ganz wie das griechische Mesos, bedeutet “der Mittlere, der in der Mitte Befindliche”; also “mediam locavit”: “er gab ihr den mittleren Platz”; aber auch im partitiven Ausdruck “ponere in media via”: “mitten in den Weg stellen”. Für eine Semantik des Zeitlichen registriert die Lexikographie zahllose Ausdrücke wie “medio tempore«, in der Zwischenzeit”, oder “in medios dormire dies”. Und schließlich verbindet sich mit “medium” der bildliche Ausdruck der Mitte wie in “cum inter pacem et bellum medium nihil intersit” oder in dem Livius-Zitat: “Ferme fugiendo in media fata ruitur”, zu deutsch: “Wer flieht, rennt seinem Schicksal mitten in die Arme” ’ The unattributed quotation from Cicero’s Phillipics 8.4 usually reads: ‘cum inter bellum et pacem medium nihil sit.’ ²¹ Etym. Magn. 326.48; Orion, Etym. Col. 58.7 Sturz. See also Maltby (1991), Keith (2011: 1), as well as Hinds (1998: 34)—who describes elegy as ‘a genre which never ceases to be alive to its own funereal aetiology’.

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of his elegiac predecessor Tibullus, draws an explicit etymological connection between elegy and funeral lament (Amores 3.9.2–4):²² Weep, Elegy, and let down your undeserving hair! Ah, it is all too true that your name comes from this. Flebilis indignos, Elegia, solve capillos! A, nimis ex vero nunc tibi nomen erit.

This etymology is revealing. It records the idea that elegy is always already both a repetition—(ἐ ἐ λέγειν) means to repeat the cry of ‘woe, woe’—and a remediation. For, as Ernst has suggested: the invention of the vocal alphabet in ancient Greece [ . . . ] created the possibility to record—and thus store and transfer—oral poetry as a stream of phonetic utterances, but also allowed objects like drinking vessels and tombstones to speak to the reader in the first person via their inscriptions.²³

With the technological invention of the Greek alphabet, the oral form of that original noisy vocal cry of lament—‘woe, woe’—was able to be recorded on silent (or rather, speaking) stone in the form of funerary epitaphs and written in formal funerary laments.²⁴ It was then remediated and reinscribed in the poetry—both written and performed— through which the early Greek and Hellenistic elegists used the medium to memorialize their dead wives and lovers in poetry. It was then further (re)remediated and (re)reinscribed in the poetry through which the Roman elegists memorialized both their mistresses and themselves. And then (re)remediated and (re)reinscribed further still in the poetry of those modern elegists such as Carson and Hughes, who successfully connect themselves with this elegiac tradition and its ongoing transmission. Tuning into the signals that establish the transmission of this elegiac tradition as such in antiquity is made particularly difficult by the loss of so much ancient Greek and Hellenistic elegy, and by the fragmented form of so much of that which has survived. But across this corpus we do

²² See Taylor (1970: 476) for the idea that Amores 3.9.37–40 provides ‘an example of the typical Alexandrian funerary epigram’. ²³ Ernst (2013a: 137). ²⁴ See Ramsby (2007) for some interesting speculations on the ‘translation’ of tomb inscriptions by the Roman elegists and the uses they are put to in their poetry. On Greek funerary inscriptions and reading, see Svenbro (1993).

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consistently receive the cry of ‘woe, woe’ as the common message. This theme of lament is the message the c.400  poet Antimachus’s Lyde, an elegiac memorial to the poet’s dead mistress—filled with ‘lamentations’ and ‘full of unhappy heroic stories, thus lessening his own grief through others’ sorrows’ (T 11–12 Matthews and Hermesianax fr. 7/45).²⁵ This sound of lament appears to have been picked up again in the lost poem Bittis composed by Greek elegist Philitas—a poem that is often paired with Lyde in later sources, suggesting that a similar mode of elegiac memorialization for a dead beloved is likely to have been at work there too.²⁶ Lament is again audible in Hermesianax’s Leontion, a collection that opens with mythological tales of Orpheus grieving for Agriope/ Eurydice (1–14), and Musaeus for Antiope (15–20). Indeed, Hermesianax set outs to do for his own beloved Leontion precisely what these mythological Ur-elegists do for their dead wives—that is, to confer poetic immortality upon the beloved (and poet himself) through the medium of elegy. In fact, as Joseph Farrell points out, it is Hermesianax who effectively establishes the genre of elegy as such by creating for it a kind of Foucauldian genealogy that ‘names Mimnermus as inventor of this genre and concludes with Philitas’, thus ‘making elegy the only [ancient] genre that is represented [in antiquity itself] as having a history that extends from the distant past to the present day’.²⁷

10.3. In the Middle: Roman Elegy Signals from this elegiac remediation continue right up to the last of the Hellenistic/Alexandrian elegists in the first century  and Parthenius’ lament for his dead wife Arete.²⁸ Here, in a rare example of direct one-toone transmission, Parthenius dedicates his elegiac book of Erotica ²⁵ See Krevans (1993) and Hunter (2013: 28). The Lyde was famously criticized by Callimachus as ‘a fat piece of writing and not sharp’ (Fr. 398 Pf. = Antim. Test. 15). Cairns (1979: 214–30) suggests that both Antimachus and Hermesianax were models for Tibullus in particular and for the Roman elegists in general. On Propertius and Antimachus, see Cairns (2006). ²⁶ On Philitas, see Knox (1993). ²⁷ Farrell (2012: 15). On the extant papyrus fragments preserving anonymous Hellenistic elegies on this same theme of elegiac lament, see Butrica (1996: 315), Lightfoot (1999: 71–5), Gibson (2005: 166–7), Farrell (2012). ²⁸ On Parthenius, see Lightfoot (1999: 23–39. On Parthenius and Propertius, see Cairns (2006).

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Pathemata (Sufferings in Love: ἐρωτικὰ παθήματα) to Gallus—whom the later Roman elegists come to identify as one of the founding fathers of their medium. Too little of Gallus’ own writing has survived for us to be able to do more than speculate on the content of his elegies—although sorrow and woe appear to be the theme of at least one fragmentary line.²⁹ But Gallus is also named—along with fellow Roman elegists Calvus and Catullus—in a poem by the first century  poet Propertius, in which he ambitiously connects his own work to this venerable canon of earlier Roman elegists (2.34.87–94). Ovid similarly imagines this same sequence of elegists—Calvus, Catullus, and Gallus—coming forward to greet the recently deceased poet Tibullus when he too arrives in the Elysian Fields (Amores 3.9.61–4).³⁰ In addition to signalling their connections to earlier Roman elegy, both Propertius and Ovid also make repeated references to their poetic predecessors in the Greek elegiac tradition. Like Hermesianax before them, they effectively establish the genre of Roman elegy as such by creating for it an ancient genealogy stretching from the mythical past to the present day. In key framing elegies in the second, third, and fourth books, Propertius names two of his most important influences as Callimachus and Philitas, even advising his reader in 2.34 ‘to imitate nostalgic/unforgetting Philitas, and the dreams of modest Callimachus’ (2.34.31–2: memorem imitere Philitan/et non inflati somnia Callimachi).³¹ There is an apt (con)fusion here between Propertius’ characterization of his elegiac predecessors, his future readers, and himself: it is, after all, Propertius no less than his reader who is implicated in the intermedial ‘imitation’ (imitere) of Callimachus. It is Propertius no less than Callimachus who is playfully ‘modest’ (non inflati) in positioning himself as the heir to these great names in the elegiac tradition. What is more, it is Propertius no less than Philitas who is ‘nostalgic/unforgetting’ (memorem) in this backward glance to elegy’s origins. Even at the ²⁹ ‘Sad, Lycoris, because of your misbehavior—Tristia nequit[ia . . . ]a, Lycori —[. . .]’ On Gallus, see Anderson, Parsons, and Nisbet (1979: 140–8) (for text, translation, and commentary). See also Van Sickle (1981), Verducci (1984: 132–6), Capasso (2003: 50–74), and Hollis (2007: 242–52). On the influence of Gallus, see Crowther (1983: 1641–5), Ross (1975), and Cairns (2006). ³⁰ In Tristia 4.10.51–4, Ovid adds his own name to an elegiac relay that begins with Gallus, then continues through Tibullus and Propertius, until it reaches Ovid himself. ³¹ For a survey of Callimachean echoes in Roman elegy, see Puelma (1982), and Fantuzzi and Hunter (2004).

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beginning of this tradition, it seems, elegists were looking back to something—creating the archaeology of their medium in repeatedly reminding their readers of elegy’s original concerns with cries of sorrow, with oral songs of lament, with papyrus pages, and little books. Indeed, Propertius goes on to declare himself content with a literary career in which he has been privileged ‘to have given pleasure with Callimachus’s little books, and to have sung, Coan poet [Philitas], in your mode/medium (3.9.43–4: inter Callimachi sat erit placuisse libellos ǀ et cecinisse modis, Coe poeta, tuis). Propertius even styles himself as the new and improved ‘Roman Callimachus’ (4.1.64: Romani [ . . . ] Callimachi), and as one who has taken the elegiac crown from Philitas (4.6.3: serta Philiteis certet Romana corymbis). He prays to the ghosts of both Callimachus and Philitas and positions himself as ‘the first to walk in [their] footsteps’ (3.1.1–2: Callimachi Manes et Coi sacra Philitae, ǀ in vestrum, quaeso, me sinite ire nemus). Propertius thus anachronistically and somewhat paradoxically uses such appeals to the early origins of elegy in order to advertise the originality of his own Roman remediation of this ancient genre.³² In Ovid, we find the same message rerecorded. In Amores 1.15 (Ovid’s elegy on envy, the literary tradition, and the anxiety of influence) he tells us that ‘Callimachus will always be sung across the whole world’ (1.15.13: Battiades semper toto cantabitur orbe). Elsewhere, but in the same selfpromoting vein, he declares that ‘there’s a girl who says she prefers my songs to Callimachus’ (2.4.19: Est, quae Callimachi prae nostris rustica dicat/carmina). Ovid’s Ars Amatoria 3.329 adds Callimachus and Philitas to a genealogical catalogue of elegiac poets—which includes Gallus, Propertius, Tibullus, as well as Ovid himself. Twice in the Remedia Amoris we find Ovid’s advice against reading any love poetry, but especially that of Callimachus and Philitas (759–60 and 381–2).³³ And, returning to this motif in his exile poetry, Ovid directly compares himself to both Philitas and Antimachus in a love poem addressed to his wife (Tristia 1.6.1–3). ³² See also media theorist Krapp (2011: 1) on ‘how to explain the anachronism of claiming precursors and forefathers while presenting a radical departure’. ³³ A similar echo of Propertius (1.9.11–12) appears in Ovid’s reference to Mimnermus in the Remedia (381–2). See Puelma (1982: 224–5), Knox (1993), and Lightfoot (1999: 88) for a discussion of the likelihood of whether or not the Roman elegists (or their contemporary audiences) actually read Philitas.

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Propertius and Ovid both position themselves at the receiving end of a long line of classical elegists, then. Their claims to elegiac community and to the continuity of elegiac communication—signalling of and to an elegiac ‘media relation’ stretching back hundreds of years—are unambiguous, and readily lend themselves to redescription and analysis under philological rubrics of intertextuality and allusion.³⁴ So, (why) do we need the tools of media archaeology to replace or supplement those of philology (or, indeed, of reception theory) in deciphering this elegiac tradition? Media archaeology proves its worth in this context because there is, in fact, no clear line of communication between Greek and Roman elegy. The connection between them is broken by the material loss of so much Greek and Hellenistic elegiac writing in antiquity (meaning that the Roman elegists had extremely limited—if any—direct access to the work of their predecessors). This broken signal is exacerbated by the substantial loss of Gallus’ and Calvus’ writings thereafter (meaning that it is extremely difficult to pick up the traces of any reception or transmission of Hellenistic elegy in their work). But, just as Hermesianax aligned himself with those ‘mythological’ elegists Orpheus and Musaeus, whose songs of lament he would and could not have ever heard in actuality, so Propertius and Ovid align themselves with those ‘legendary’ elegists whose songs they too are unlikely ever to have heard. Indeed, Richard Hunter reminds us that we cannot know whether or not Antimachus’ Lyde, Hermesianax’s Leontion, and Philitas’ Bittis ‘were actually known in any detail to the Romans’ and warns that ‘how much archaic Greek elegy was available to Roman poets or familiar at Rome is a difficult question, but it would be dangerous to be overoptimistic’.³⁵ Yet Propertius and Ovid explicitly and repeatedly speak of their connection with both Philitas and Antimachus. The contradiction is difficult to square. However, one solution is signalled in the subtle distinction that Propertius draws between ‘Callimachus’s little books’ of elegy and poetry in the ‘mode/medium’ of the Coan poet—that is, Philitas. Callimachus is aligned with a material text (his libelli), but Philitas is aligned only with

³⁴ Cf. Kittler (2009b: 26): ‘ “In the middle” of absence and presence, farness and nearness, being and soul, there exists no nothing anymore, but a media relation.’ ³⁵ Hunter (2013: 36, 25).

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the medium (his modis).³⁶ Both Ovid and Propertius seem able to establish their connection with Philitas, not through any material texts, but through the medium of elegy alone.³⁷ Thus media theory, rather than reception theory or philology, may help to offer insights into a communication process in which the medium is (also) the message, and in which (as we saw in Carson’s Nox) only fragmentary and onesided evidence remains to indicate that any transmission or reception ever actually took place. Many critics appear content to shut down the lines of this possible connection entirely. According to Joe Farrell, ‘elegy as written by Callimachus and Philitas and elegy as written at Rome are almost totally different genres’; they are, he suggests, ‘Two very different canons’.³⁸ In another account of the origins and development of Latin love elegy, Roy Gibson similarly suggests that of two traditions often cited in this connection—archaic Greek elegy and Hellenistic elegy—we can dispose quickly [ . . . ] Resembling Roman love elegy little in terms of content, at most these Hellenistic elegists offered the Roman elegists a style, manner and poetics to imitate.³⁹

Gibson principally focuses here upon the content rather than the shared medium of the elegists. Yet, in McLuhanian terms, Greek, Hellenistic, and Roman elegy share significant similarities in medium and/as message. In Roman love elegy, thematically l’amour rather than la mort may appear to dominate, but lamentation remains as a recurrent and dominant mode and motif in this new remediation of the genre. As Horace declares in his Ars Poetica: ‘the first/foremost theme of poetry in elegiac couplets was/is lament’ (75–6: versibus impariter iunctis querimonia primum) and the elegiac cry of ‘woe woe’ continues to sound loudly in its new Roman format, despite variations in the underlying source or cause of the lament.⁴⁰

³⁶ Cf. Aristotle’s distinction between different types of mimesis in the Poetics (1.1447a16–18): ‘they differ from each other in three ways: by representing in different media, by representing different objects, or by representing in different modes.’ ³⁷ See Bessone (2013: 44) for the idea that these references to earlier elegists and their shared medium constitute a kind of elegiac ‘family album’. ³⁸ Farrell (2012: 13, 14). ³⁹ Gibson (2005: 166). See also Knox (1993). ⁴⁰ See Tibullus 1.1, 1.3, 1.5, 1.9, 2.4; Propertius 1.6, 1.8, 1.11, 1.12, 1.17, 1.19, 2.13, 2.15, 2.19, 2.32, 4.5, 4.11; and Ovid Amores 2.5, 2.13–14, and 3.9 (a remediation of Tibullus 1.3).

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10.4. In the End: White Noise Media theory provides us with a useful heuristic with which to conceptualize and contextualize these confusing signals about the Roman reception of Greek and Hellenistic elegy, and to understand the operations of a communication process in which it is difficult to point to evidence that any transmission or reception actually took place: this is the concept of white noise. As Ernst (citing Richard Dienst) suggests: white noise permanently carries the memory of that moment of media archaeology when the images were not yet stable: ‘In the early years of radio, a transmission could be considered successful as long as an image took shape against the choppy grey static [ . . . success] rest[ed] on the fact of transmission— reproduction at a distance—not on the veracity of its representations.’⁴¹

In this light, and in the context of classical elegy, a transmission (‘reproduction at a distance’—in the case of elegy, both temporal and spatial) can be considered successful not only on the evidence of the clarity (or ‘veracity’) of its long-distance ‘reproduction’ of content, on the fact that some recognizable image or sound—however blurred, fragmented, or noisy—is reproduced at the point of reception (the sound of ‘woe woe’ or the image of a grieving elegist, for instance). Instead, a transmission can be considered successful if the noise of the transmitting system itself can be heard at the point of reception. Thus, as Jussi Parikka puts it: ‘The work of the media archaeologist starts by listening to the noise as much as to the message.’⁴² The media concept of white noise originates in the Shannon and Weaver model of telecommunication: a model that establishes the principles of communication as a process of ‘transmitting and receiving information’. The original model consisted of five elements: an information source, which produces a message; a transmitter, which encodes the message into signals; a channel or medium, through which signals are adapted for transmission; a receiver, which decodes or reconstructs the message from the signal; and a destination, where the message arrives.⁴³ Subsequent refinements to this model introduced an important sixth element, noise—defined as any interference with or variation to the message as a result of its transmission through the channel or medium ⁴¹ Ernst (2013a: 106), citing Dienst (1994: 20). ⁴² Parikka (2012a: 97). ⁴³ Shannon (1949).

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in which ‘the received signal is not necessarily the same as that sent out by the transmitter’.⁴⁴ As Warren Weaver explains: ‘when there is noise, the received signal exhibits greater information—or better, the received signal is selected out of a more varied set than is the transmitted signal.’⁴⁵ For a semiotician such as Umberto Eco, any such unintended noise is necessarily dysfunctional and entropic. Any noise in the medium threatens to distort the intended message. Too much of it, too varied the set, and any message is irrecoverably lost in ‘white noise’, that is for Eco ‘the undifferentiated sum of all frequencies—a noise which, logically speaking, should give us the greatest possible amount of information, but which in fact gives us none at all’.⁴⁶ However, for Ernst: ‘White noise does not mean nonsense.’⁴⁷ It means a different kind of information. In Ernst’s model of media archaeology, all media end up transmitting much more information than their intended message or content alone. Thus: In a free interpretation of McLuhan, to listen media–archaeologically is to pay attention to the electronic message of the acoustic apparatus, not primarily to its musical content as cultural meaning. The media–archaeological ear listens to radio in an extreme way: listening to the noise of the transmitting system itself.⁴⁸

Here, Ernst suggests the transmitting/receiving device of the radio as offering one opportunity of listening to the message of the medium, of listening for other content in the information that is carried in white noise. Recording devices and other media offer similar opportunities. Digital archives, video cassettes, audio tapes, phonographs, poems, letters, and tombstones all record and store the unintended ‘noise’ that is ⁴⁴ Shannon (1949: 65). Although Shannon and Weaver originally developed their model in the context of telephone engineering, as John Lyons (1995: 88) clarifies: ‘It should be observed that the terms “channel” and “noise” are to be interpreted in the most general sense. They are not restricted to acoustically based systems, still less to the systems constructed by engineers (telephone, television, teleprinter, etc). The distortions produced in one’s handwriting by writing in a moving train can be attributed to “noise”.’ ⁴⁵ Shannon (1949: 19). ⁴⁶ Eco (1989: 96). Just as ‘white light’ contains an equal distribution of all the colours in the visible spectrum, so ‘white noise’ combines all the frequencies in the sound spectrum. Examples would include the audio-visual phenomenon of the ‘white noise’ static hiss heard on the telephone, between stations on an AM or FM radio, or the ‘snow’ seen on an untuned television. ⁴⁷ Ernst (2013a: 106). ⁴⁸ Ernst (2013a: 68). See also Parikka (2012a: 97): ‘The phonographic and other similar media [ . . . ] carry the sound as a raw phenomenon of noise and scratch as much as the meanings of whoever happens to utter his or her voice on the phonograph.’

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distinctive to their respective media—the scratch of a phonograph stylus, the indentations of a pen, the whirr of a cassette motor, the click of a button, the compression of a digital transfer. In Greek, Hellenistic, and Roman elegy, these distinctive ‘noises off ’ would include the sound of lament—the elegiac cry of ‘woe, woe’ that is the traditional transmitted content of this medium. But what else can we hear? We can certainly hear the metre running. What Nietzsche (the first media theorist, according to Friedrich Kittler) described in his ‘utilitarian’ account of the origins of poetry as: the rhythmic force that reorders all the atoms of the sentence bids one choose one’s words with care, and gives one’s thoughts a new colour, making them darker, stranger, and more remote [ . . . ] a rhythmic tick-tock [ . . . ] audible over greater distances [ . . . ] supposed to get closer to the ears of the gods.⁴⁹

As Kittler similarly observes, metre (or rhythm) represents an ancient technological solution to an ancient telecommunication problem: how to ensure that a message to the gods, or to the dead, or to future generations of readers, reaches its remote target destinations with minimal distortion or noise. Language encodes the message into a signal, but it is metre that constitutes the channel or medium through which this signal is then adapted for transmission, metre that acts as the device for storing and retrieving the message. Thus, Kittler can hypothesize: At the origin of poetry, with its beats, rhythms (and, in modern European languages, rhymes), were technological problems and a solution that came about under oral conditions [ . . . ] the storage capacity of memory was to be increased and the signal-to-noise ratio of channels improved.⁵⁰

The idea that ancient metre might function as a technological solution for recording and transmitting, storing and retrieving a particular dataset—in ways analogous to those in which the ancient Greek alphabet is considered to have made possible the recording and transmitting, storing, and retrieving of the oral sounds of speech—is certainly appealing for the media archaeologist. But Kittler’s media aetiology for metrical poetry overlooks the McLuhanian message here. The transmitting system—the rhythmic tick-tock of the metre—itself contributes noise,

⁴⁹ Nietzsche (1974: 138), also quoted in Kittler (2009b: 79–80). ⁵⁰ Kittler (2009b: 79–80).

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changing the signal-to-noise ratio of the channel by adding greater information to the received signal. The medium also always speaks. And, in the case of elegy and the elegiac metre, the medium speaks of its archaeology—of ancient devices for recording and transmitting elegy, of crying ‘woe woe’. For, in Greek, Hellenistic, and Roman poetry composed in the elegiac metre, we can hear the white noise of other modes of archaic media technology and their communication apparatuses. As the etymology of elegeia ‘literally’ records, it was originally the invention of the alphabet that enabled elegy to code and therefore to record and transmit the traditional Greek lament e e legein (ἐ ἐ λέγειν)— to store and to broadcast the original (oral) signal of ‘woe, woe’ in a new medium. The invention of the alphabet also made possible the inscription of tombstones and funerary monuments and thus the recording and transmitting of a once oral lament through another new medium— storing in stone words intended to be read and received by passers-by at a distant point in time. In Roman elegy we can clearly hear the noises of these chiselled inscriptions: direct references to epitaphs and their inscriptions are commonplace.⁵¹ Catullus offers one of the earliest examples of this in the elegy commemorating the death of his brother (101). The final words of the poem ‘ave atque vale’ (‘greetings and goodbye’) famously record a ritual formulation often found in monumental Roman funerary epitaphs.⁵² Indeed, this elegy plays with various transmedial evocations of the traditional Roman funeral—inscribing in literary form both the noisy vocal rites and the silent stone monument that Catullus’ brother, who died far away from home, was buried without. For, according to Elena Theodorakopoulos, Catullus 101 alludes both to the ritual context of conclamatio (e.g. with the three-fold repetition of frater) [the ‘calling out’ of the dead] and to the notion of the epitaph inscribed on a tomb and read out loud by the passerby. The curious echoing qualities of the poem (e.g. multas, multa (l.1) and multum (l.9); miseras (l.2) and miser (l.6); inferias, l.2 and l.8; munere l.3 and l.8; frater (l.2, l.6, l.10) and fraterno (l.9)),

⁵¹ See Ramsby (2005) and Houghton (2013: 3) for an insightful discussion of the ways in which the elegists’ self-composed epitaphs ‘serve as an epitome of the broader poetic contexts in which they appear’. On epitaphs and funerary inscriptions in Roman elegy, see also Lattimore (1962), Schmidt (1985), Pieri (1988), Keith (2011), and Dinter (2013). ⁵² See Feldherr (2000) and Hope (2007: 231).

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and the alliteration on m which runs throughout it, are ways of drawing attention to the speaker’s voice, and to the silence of the grave.⁵³

So strong are these signals of ritual practice that several readers have seen the poem itself as ‘a material part of the rites for Catullus’ brother, a ritual lament [nenia] or an inscription actually to be carved on his tombstone’.⁵⁴ And ‘literally’, again, ‘the last gift of death’ that Catullus brings to his brother and bids him ‘receive’ is the elegy itself. But, in the context of a poem that reflects so self-consciously upon its own transmediality, it seems inappropriate to insist upon either the literariness or the materiality of the elegy inscribed here. Catullus’ elegy remediates the distinctive noises of several media technologies: the silence of the incommunicative dead and their mortal remains (mutam cinerem); the vocal cry of ‘woe woe’ that characterizes the traditional funerary lament and its elegiac transcription/recording in couplets here; the conclamatio and its own literary/rhetorical alphabetic reinscription; the epitaphic scratch upon stone of the final farewell (ave atque vale)—marked out in several Latin editions and their translations by the use of capitals: ‘  .’ The dead may be silent, but the medium speaks. The medium speaks again in Tibullus’ fictive epitaph, in which he unexpectedly asks to be remembered not as a lover or as a love poet but as a soldier, faithful unto death in service to his literary patron and military leader, Messalla—whom he has followed over land and sea (terra dum sequiturque mari), just as Catullus followed his brother through many people(s) and many seas (multas per gentes et multa per aequora vectus) to find his grave in the Troad. So, Tibullus writes (1.3.53–6): But if I have now already used up my allotted years, make sure a stone stands over my bones marked with this inscription:   ,    ,        . quod si fatales iam nunc explevimus annos, fac lapis inscriptis stet super ossa notis:           .⁵⁵

⁵³ Theodorokolpoulos (2012: 157). ⁵⁴ Feldherr (2000: 210). ⁵⁵ On Tibullus 1.3, see Lee-Stecum (1998: 118), Schmidt (1985: 312–16), Ball (1983: 57), Murgatroyd (1980: 117), Lee (1990: 121), as well as Maltby (2002: 201), who points out that

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The formulae are different from those used by Catullus, but similarly echo those found on actual funerary epitaphs, including the opening topos (hic iacet); the name of the dead (Tibullus); and the cruel cause of death (Messallam). Here, too, the alliteration on ‘m’ and ‘s’ draws attention both to the (dead) speaker’s voice, and to the (speaking) silence of the grave.⁵⁶ In this elegiac epitaph Tibullus does not explicitly identify himself as a love poet or ask to be remembered as such. Yet the medium communicates both messages. In Propertius, the white noise of the elegiac medium is more evident still. In the programmatic opening poem of his Monobiblos, Propertius declares his love for Cynthia and, in a loud echo of Catullus, asks his friends to ‘carry me through the furthest nations and through the waves’ (1.1.29: ferte per extremas gentis et ferte per undas). In a subsequent elegy, Propertius imagines himself dying far from home (like Tibullus and Catullus’ brother), the tiny (parva) beach covering over his corpse (1.17.8) and Cynthia grieving over his headstone, calling his name (clamasset [ . . . ] nomen) and noisily lamenting his death (1.17.19–24). In the programmatic first poem of his second book of elegies, he returns to this theme, anticipating a death that will render him no more than ‘a brief name on a slender tombstone’ (2.1.72: breve in exiguo marmore nomen). But in this case, it is not Cynthia who Propertius imagines mourning at his graveside but (echoing Tibullus) his patron Maecenas— cast here in the role of viator, the anonymous passer-by who just happens to read the inscription on a roadside grave (and to whom several real Roman tomb inscriptions are addressed). If, by chance, a journey should lead him to Propertius’ tomb (2.1. 75: si te forte meo ducet via proxima busto), Maecenas is instructed: And weeping, toss/lay such words as these at/upon my mute ashes: ‘        ’ .’

‘the phrase hic iacet is very common as the opening of real epitaphs, e.g., CLE 425.1, 430.1, 442.1, 508.1, 547.1, etc.’ ⁵⁶ We can also hear the ghostly voice(s) of Catullus 101 in this mix. Catullus’ elegy opened with a famous allusion to Odysseus—the man of many ways (‘aner polytropos’: ἄνδρα [ . . . ] πολύτροπον: Odyssey 1.1)—who, like Catullus and his brother, was carried through many people(s) and many seas (multas per gentes et multa per aequora vectus) and, like Tibullus, travelled over both land and sea (terra dum [ . . . ] mari). In elegy 1.3, Tibullus explicitly identifies with Odysseus (and through him, with Catullus): the poem is set on the island of Corcyra, identified in antiquity as Homer’s Phaeacia.

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  taliaque illacrimans mutae iace verba favillae: ‘     .’

Although these words are cast in the mode of a spoken eulogy rather than as an inscription, the familiar formulae they use transmit both elegiac and epitaphic information. The headstone epitaph to which Maecenas is to speak (in place of Propertius himself ) is slender (exiguus)—evoking a Callimachean aesthetic to which the Latin neoteric poets (Catullus included) and the Roman elegists affiliated their own writing in general and the elegiac genre in particular.⁵⁷ Lamenting and weeping (illacrimans)—perhaps even crying ‘woe woe’—Maecenas is to elegize his grief and address Propertius’ conventionally mute ashes (mutae [ . . . ] favillae).⁵⁸ Propertius is not named in Maecenas’ epitaphic tribute (with its conventional opening ‘huic’ and stated cause of death), but his identification as a stereotypical elegiac loser (miser) who is dedicated—even unto death—to a hard-hearted mistress (dura puella), is clear nonetheless. As indeed, is his status as a ‘follower’ not only of Maecenas but of Tibullus, of Catullus, and of a yet more ancient elegiac tradition. In another elegy in this sequence, Propertius once again imagines his own funeral and composes his own tombstone inscription (2.13.31–40): deinde, ubi suppositus cinerem me fecerit ardor accipiat manis parvula testa meos, et sit in exiguo laurus super addita busto, quae tegat exstincti funeris umbra locum, et duo sint versus: ‘    ,      .’ Then, when the fire beneath has turned me to ash, let a tiny urn receive my ghost, and over my little tomb let a slender laurel be planted, to shade the place where the pyre has burnt out; and on it let there be two verses: ‘       ,      .’

⁵⁷ The same Callimachean conceit is suggested by the reference to the tiny (parva) beach that provides the informal grave for Propertius corpse in 1.17.8. See also Horace, Ars Poetica 77, Propertius 4.1.59–60, Ovid Amores 3.1.40, Ars Amatoria 2.286, Fasti 2.4, and 6.22. See Farrell (2012: 19) on this Callimachean aesthetic in which material ‘qualities such as “few”, “small”, “light”, and “thin” contrast favorably with “many”, “large”, “heavy”, and “thick”’. ⁵⁸ Cf. Catullus 101.4.

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The same Callimachean aesthetic and elegiac poetics are invoked here with references to the ‘tiny’ urn (parvula) and ‘slender’ (exiguo) laurel; a slight variation on the conventional epitaphic formula (hic iacet); and a combined allusion to two common elegiac conceits—the identity of the elegiac poet–lover as a slave (servitium amoris), faithful to his one beloved (unus amor).⁵⁹ But, even the careless reader may notice that the elegiac couplet or ‘two verses’ (et duo sint versus) that Propertius inscribes for his own gravestone is (literally) followed by only a fragment of that: his already slender inscription (in reality) fills only a line and a half.⁶⁰ Fragmentation and silence speak here of the fragile materiality of the gravestone as elegiac medium—and signal the comparative durability of ‘verses’. Ovid’s reception of Propertius in the funerary epigraphs incorporated within his own elegiac writing appears to confirm this reading.⁶¹ In his first book of elegies, Ovid declares poetry to be more enduring than either stone or iron (1.15.31–2, Ergo, cum silices, cum dens patientis aratri ǀ depereant aevo, carmina morte carent), and lists the other great names who have achieved immortality through this medium (Amores 1.15)— among them the elegists Callimachus and Gallus.⁶² The final book of

⁵⁹ See Dinter (2011: 16) for a reading of this elegy as a ‘fully referenced altermedial illusion of an inscription’, which, for Dinter, reinforces the generic connections between Roman elegy and Hellenistic epigram rather than Greek and Hellenistic elegy. ⁶⁰ See Houghton (2013: 35)8 for an attractive rationale for this: ‘By leaving the inscription on his tombstone incomplete, so that it cannot stand as an independent composition, Propertius may be pointing implicitly to the impossibility of its usurping the function of an autonomous memorial. Underlining the essential textuality of the elegiac tomb and its titulus, the elegist emphasizes in the most graphic way possible the fact that these are not free-standing monuments, but constructions that depend for their survival on the poetic texts in which they are incorporated.’ ⁶¹ In his Heroides, Ovid similarly has some of heroines compose their own funerary inscriptions, and can again be witnessed playing with materiality and media: Phyllis and Dido both leave instructions in an elegiac epistle that their respective tombstones should reinscribe/remediate an epitaphic formula given in an elegiac couplet. cf. Heroides 2.147–8 and Heroides 7.194–6. ⁶² This motif recurs throughout Ovid’s corpus. See Amores 1.15.7–8, 41–2; 3.15.8, 20; Ars Amatoria 2.739–40, 3.403–4; Metamorphoses 15.871–9, Tristia 3.3.77–80, 3.7.45–52, 4.10.127–30; Epistulae Ex Ponto 2.6.33–4. For discussions of Ovid’s interest in ephemerality and obsolescence in different media, see Boyd (1997: 165–202), Nagle (1980: 77–81), Claassen (1996), Videau-Delibes (1991: 448–55), Farrell (1999), and Hardie (2002: 91–7). On Ovid’s epitaph, see Herescu (1958), Lascu (1972), and Schmidt (1985: 323–30).

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the collection includes a tribute to the dead poet Tibullus (Amores 3.9—in which we hear a remediation of Tibullus’s own anticipatory lament for his death⁶³) and ends with the same conceit, configuring Ovid’s elegiac corpus both as a more enduring replacement for his physical body and as a virtual tombstone (Amores 3.15.19–20): Peaceable elegies, playful Muse, farewell, to this work that will still stand long after I’m dead. inbelles elegi, genialis Musa, valete, post mea mansurum fata superstes opus.⁶⁴

From the living death that he characterizes as his life in exile, Ovid writes a similar elegiac letter to his wife, giving her instructions on the precise words—and even (pace Propertius) the style of font—he would like to see inscribed on his own tomb (Tristia 3.3.71–6): For the passer-by to read with a hurrying eye carve verses in great big letters upon my marble tomb:   ,     /         ;     ,     ,        ‘ ’   .’ quosque legat uersus oculo properante uiator, grandibus in tumuli marmore caede notis:                       ‘   .’⁶⁵

⁶³ See Williams (2003) for the possibility that Amores 3.9.19–20 signals a connection both to Tibullus 1.3.4 and to Callimachus Epigr. 2P. On the complex rerecording of Tibullus 1.3 in Amores 3.9, see Perkins (1992–3), Moreno (1995), Boyd (1997: 184), Lenz (1997: 302), Maltby (2002), Huskey (2005), and Ingleheart (2015). ⁶⁴ The formal ‘farewell’ (valete) here also invokes the formulation ave atque vale often found in Roman funerary epitaphs and poignantly recorded in Catullus’ elegy for his dead brother (101). See Feldherr (2000) and Hope (2007: 231). Compare with the ‘epitaph’ that closes Ovid’s Metamorphoses, where his literary corpus is again privileged as a substitute for the poet’s material/physical form and simultaneously identified with the oral speech (ora) that it records and transmits. See Hardie (2002: 96) on Ovid’s envoi: ‘Ovid will become the fixed and enduring monument, the nomen indelebile (15.876), an inscribed name that cannot be erased, but he will also live on the lips of every reader who animates anew the poetic corpus (15.878–9).’ ⁶⁵ See Houghton (2013) on the allusions in this elegy to Tibullus 1.3.5–10 and Propertius 1.17.19–24.

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The interplay between different media here is striking: we have the edited physical (or digital) literary text of the elegiac poem through which the message is communicated to a twenty-first-century reader; the letter to Ovid’s wife that ostensibly functions as the main elegiac/epistolary medium through which the poet communicates here; the stone inscription of the two elegiac couplets that will remediate Ovid’s self-authored epitaph in due course; and the spoken words of a future passer-by (viator)—a future reader. For, as Andrew Feldherr has suggested: ‘When the viator’s eye rests on the tombstone, when he speaks the words he reads there, he has become a conduit for articulating the identity, indeed for reproducing the “voice” of the dead.’⁶⁶ The viator, the future reader, has become a medium too. The reader has become another device or apparatus through which the dead speak: in Parikka’s suggestive formulation, the reader as medium acts as a ‘constellation between present-pasts’.⁶⁷ In a final twist to the complex remediation operations that we encounter in this elegy (and throughout the wider elegiac tradition), the reader is ultimately configured as yet another elegiac medium, another communication device in elegy’s multilayered media archaeology, the human machine operating as receiver and re-transmitter of messages. Thus, the distance or gap between transmission and reception is effectively effaced, the past successfully made present (re-presented). And it is when we listen—with media–archaeological ears—to the white noise contributed by this constellation of elegiac telecommunication apparatuses, listening for the noise of the elegiac system itself, that we can most clearly hear the elegiac (hyper)medium speak, that we can hear the message of the elegiac tradition qua transmission signalled in and through the noisy (human) cries of e e legein (ἐ ἐ λέγειν).⁶⁸ ⁶⁶ Feldherr (2000: 219.) Feldherr (2000: 218) adduces an analogous example of this strange ‘ventriloquism’ from the Latin Anthology, in which an epigram (721), reproducing/ transmitting the message of a grave epitaph, reads: ‘You want to know whether a poet lives on after death, traveller? Look at what you’re reading, and what I’m saying: your voice is mine’ (Vivere post obitum vatem vis nosse, viator? Quod legis, ecce loquor; vox tua nempe mea est). ⁶⁷ Parikka (2012a: 97). This is, in a sense, the effect of any reading of any ancient genre but elegy distinguishes itself in this respect by explicitly and repeatedly drawing our attention to the fact. ⁶⁸ My grateful thanks to Pantelis Michelakis, Rebecca Kosick, and seminar audiences in Bristol, Oxford, and Manchester for helping me to finetune this noisy piece of work.

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11 Parmenides at his Typewriter Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the Media of Philosophy Adam Lecznar

The high road is something eternally long, long, and no end in sight. It’s like human life, like human dreams. An idea is contained in the high road; but what idea is contained in a series of posthorses? Post-horses are the end of an idea [ . . . ] Vive la grande route, and then it’s what God will provide.¹

11.1. Philosophy’s Media When Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky steps out into the muddy Russian countryside at the dénouement of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel Demons (1871–2), he goes with no idea of his destination, no sense of his well-being, and with only the desire to travel. Stepan Trofimovich is at his lowest ebb: an ageing intellectual, anxious and angry about the nihilism of the younger generation (including his own son), he has been humiliated at a literary gala the previous evening and his patron, Varvara Petrovna Stavrogina, has just unceremoniously ended their twenty-year-long relationship.² As Dostoyevsky’s narrator describes the scene, he devotes an unexpectedly long discussion to the fact that the vain Stepan Trofimovich has taken to the high road on foot and not in a carriage. The narrator first suggests that it is due to the character’s ¹ Dostoyevsky (2008: 699). ² See Davison (1980). See Dostoyevsky (2008: 698–734) for the whole episode. Adam Lecznar, Parmenides at his Typewriter: Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the Media of Philosophy In: Classics and Media Theory. Edited by: Pantelis Michelakis, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198846024.003.0011

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grandiosity, declaring that the decision to hire a carriage with horses ‘must have struck him as too simple and prosaic; on the contrary, a pilgrimage on foot, even if with an umbrella, was much more picturesque’.³ This critique is quickly supplanted by a more humane reading of his actions: perhaps Stepan Trofimovich went out onto the road by foot, the narrator conjectures, because, ‘in order to hire a series of post-horses, you at least have to know where you are going’.⁴ But knowing this was precisely the greatest source of suffering for him at this juncture: he couldn’t for the life of him name and settle on a place. For, if he should decide on some town, his venture would instantly become both absurd and impossible in his own eyes; he felt that very keenly. And what exactly would he do in one particular town and not in another? [ . . . ] No, the high road was really the best thing; it was so simple to set off on it, and walk along it and not think of anything, as long as it was possible not to think.⁵

In the desperate trudge of Stepan Trofimovich, Dostoyevsky condenses a critical narrative for philosophy as a long, lonely road with no certain destination, a journey marked by aporia and suffering.⁶ Like Alcibiades in Plato’s Symposium, who complains of the madness that accompanies his frustrated conversion to Socratic thought, Stepan Trofimovich experiences profound disorientation as part of his refusal to act in a way that might mitigate his failures.⁷ For Dostoyevsky’s narrator, Stepan Trofimovich’s aporia requires a choice: it would be annihilated by the presence of a carriage with post-horses, since he would come into conflict with another possible emplotment of his journey, involving purposive movement, certain decisions, and an active involvement in his fate. I have begun with this scene from Dostoyevsky because Stepan Trofimovich’s decision to walk throws into sharp emotional relief the close connection between the technology of the world and the accompanying textures of philosophical thought that I want to explore in what follows. Dostoyevsky has Stepan Trofimovich set out without post-horses precisely because he is not thinking, and because his aporia will not

³ Dostoyevsky (2008: 699. See further Frank (2010: 626–49) for the novel as a whole and Stromberg (2012) for the narrator’s voice. ⁴ Dostoyevsky (2008: 699). ⁵ Dostoyevsky (2008: 699). ⁶ See Kofman (1988). ⁷ On the polyphonic element of Dostoyevsky’s novels, see Bakhtin (1984: 5–46).

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allow the engagement with the world that might generate thought and resolution. An alternative account of the journey of philosophy, and one that relies on the intervention of technology, is to be found in the writings of the Presocratic poet and philosopher Parmenides, whose fragmentary hexameter poem represents an early attempt to think philosophically about the nature of being.⁸ The opening scene of this work (often called the proem, and referenced as fragment B1 in most works) describes in complex and allusive language a journey in a horse-drawn chariot towards a goddess who proceeds to instruct the narrator in the proper understanding of philosophy.⁹ The mares that carry me as far as ardor might go Were bringing me onward, after having led me and set me down on the divinity’s many worded Road, which carries through all the towns the man who knows. It was on this road that I was being carried: for on it the much-knowing horses were carrying me, Straining at the chariot, and maidens were leading the way. The axle in the naves emitted the whistle of a flute As it was heated (for it was pressed hard by two whirling Wheels, one on each side), while the maidens of the Sun Hastened to bring me, after they had left behind the palace of Night Towards the light and had pushed back the veils from their heads with their hands. That is where the gate of the paths of Night and Day is, And a lintel and a stone threshold hold it on both sides. Itself ethereal, it is occupied by great doors, And much-punishing Justice holds its alternating keys. The maidens, cajoling her with gentle words, Wisely persuaded her to thrust quickly back for them The bolted bar from the gate. And when it flew open It made a gaping absence of the doors, after rotating in turn In their sockets the two bronze pivots Fastened with pegs and rivets. There, through them, The maidens guided the chariot and horses straight along the way.¹⁰

⁸ See Tarán (1965), Mourelatos (2008), Coxon (2009), and Palmer (2009) for this poem. ⁹ See Burkert (1969), Lesher (1994), Miller (2006), and Gemelli Marciano (2008) for this proem. ¹⁰ This translation is taken from Most and Laks (2016: 32–5), who designate this fragment as D4.1–22 (though, as already mentioned, it is most often numbered B1 following Diels–Kranz (Diels 1952)).

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This is a philosophical poem whose beginning is conspicuously studded with sharply physical snapshots, as the horses strain at their bits, the daughters of the sun push the veils back from their faces, the fastspinning chariot wheels screech as they overheat, and the gates of Night and Day swing open in a jangling cacophony of keys, lintels, and bronze pivots.¹¹ It is also deeply concerned with the metaphors of the road and the way as models for how to gain philosophical insight (these words translate the Greek words ὁδός and κέλευθος).¹² When the chariot arrives at its destination and the poem shifts into the divine instruction of the young initiate, a singular scene marks the transition: καί με θεὰ πρόφρων ὑπεδέξατο, χεῖρα δὲ χειρί δεξιτερὴν ἕλεν, ὧδε δ᾽ ἔπος φάτο καί με προσήυδα[.] And the goddess welcomed me graciously, took my right hand in her own hand, and spoke these words, addressing me[.]¹³

There is debate in scholarship as to the identity of this goddess, as well as the potential allegorical significance of the other details of the proem just cited.¹⁴ To introduce what follows I want to focus more specifically on the moment of physical touch that Parmenides’ narrator recounts at the conclusion to the journey, as the goddess takes his right hand in hers.¹⁵ Two interpretative approaches have governed the critical responses to this moment. The first focuses on the links between Parmenides’ poetry

¹¹ I use the word ‘physical’ here following Brooke Holmes’s conception (2010: 88) of Presocratic ‘physicality’ as a way of preserving the sense of peculiarly human perspective on materialism that is to be found in their work. ¹² For these metaphors in Parmenides, see Becker (1937: 139–43), Lesher (1994), Messimeri (2001: 126–44), Mourelatos (2008: 16–25) and Folit-Weinberg (forthcoming). See also Kohanski (1984: 38) for the contrast between Parmenides’ commitment to the ὅδος and Plato’s commitment to μέθοδος, not the way itself, but the way by which insight is obtained. See further Heidegger (1992: 66): ‘For the Greeks [ . . . ] the basic feature of the way—ἡ ὁδός, ἡ μέθοδος (“method”)—is that by conveying along the course, underway, it opens up a view and a perspective and hence provides the disclosure of something.’ ¹³ D4. 23–4; see n. 10. See also Furley (1989: 29): ‘The chief importance of all this lies in Parmenides’ destination.’ ¹⁴ See e.g. Palmer (2009: 51–63). ¹⁵ In earlier examples of divine inspiration from Greek literature, such as Hes. Th. 22–34, the Muses do not touch the initiated poet but simply give him a staff. In the Odyssey, Telemachus grasps the disguised goddess Athena by her right hand when she arrives in Ithaca, and it is Achilles’ hand that Athena stays from drawing his sword at the very beginning of the Iliad (though she intervenes by grabbing his hair). See Od. 1. 120–2; Il. 1. 188–222, esp. 194, 197, 219. See further Purves (2017b).

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and the Homeric epics to which it was indebted. Alexander Mourelatos argues that the line is a blend of different Homeric formulas, while A. H. Coxon suggests that this moment has been ‘phrased in language derived from that expressing divine welcome or comfort in the Iliad’.¹⁶ In this regard, the focus is on how Parmenides mediates his philosophy through the existing poetical tradition of ancient Greece.¹⁷ The second perspective, already visible in Coxon’s account, shifts attention away from the poetico-formal elements of the borrowing towards its ethical, emotional tinge. Shaul Tor has suggested that the goddess’s welcome, both πρόφρων and involving a handclasp, connotes ‘comforting reassurance’ to a human confronted by the divine majesty of philosophy and of truth.¹⁸ Similarly, Jaap Mansfeld gives the gesture a rhetorical power, arguing that ‘the goddess by pledging her good faith wants to convince the visitor (just as, in fact, the poet wants to guarantee his audience) that what is going to be said is both true and important, and that the poet wants his public to understand that his situation has been enhanced’.¹⁹ This is one way of understanding the media of philosophy: the metaphor of the road and the journey is for both Dostoyevsky and Parmenides a means by which the emergence of philosophical insight can be conceived through the mobilization of experiences and perceptions from everyday human life. While in Dostoyevsky we see a man alone and without a destination, in Parmenides we see a man on a journey; and not only does he travel purposefully, but he does so with technological and divine aid.²⁰ In one respect, therefore, the philosophical difference between travelling on foot and travelling by carriage is the difference between thought as a fundamentally solitary (and escapist) exercise of human consciousness, and thought as produced by the interaction between human beings and the various technologies, or media, through which thinking can take place. This is made all the clearer in the context of ancient Greek roads, which consisted of two ruts carved into the

¹⁶ Mourelatos (2008: 9); Coxon (2009: 10). See also Diels (2013: 53), who cites the encounter between Telemachus and Athena in Odyssey book 1 as comparison. ¹⁷ In terms of Parmenides’ chariot ride, literary links have also been drawn to the poetry of Pindar: see Fränkel (1975: 1–3). ¹⁸ Tor (2017: 259). ¹⁹ Mansfeld (2005: 555). ²⁰ See Lesher (1994: 8 n. 9): ‘Parmenides reference to “mares” also reflected current conditions [ . . . ] mares were the horses of choice for chariot racers.’ Lesher attributes this insight to Tarán (1965: 9).

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ground, often without any levelling of the surrounding surface, and which enabled chariots to travel safely and stably along steep and winding routes. The road is thus symbiotic with the technology that it conveys, and this is something that further inflects the philosophical texture of the argument. It is no mistake that scholars have marked Parmenides’ poem as the origins of deductive argumentation, leading inexorably from point to point, as opposed to the aphoristic assertions that characterize much of the extant work of the other Presocratics.²¹ Further examples of the use of creative metaphor to encapsulate the process of philosophical understanding in relation to the world proliferate in a philosophical writer such as Plato, in examples such as the description of the airborne chariot ride of souls in Phaedrus, the image of Socrates as midwife in Theaetetus, and the daimonic in-betweenness of erōs in Symposium. But it is the touch of the goddess that Parmenides weaves into his scene of philosophical initiation, a moment so absent from Dostoyevsky’s description of Stepan Trofimovich, that will set the tone of this chapter. Such a moment invokes two of the physical media that will thread through what follows: the hand and the body. We have seen hands earlier in Parmenides’ proem, when the daughters of the sun have ‘pushed back the veils from their heads with their hands’; the hand is a primary vehicle of disclosure in this passage, and Parmenides thus reflects poetically on how physical contact might influence the acquisition of philosophical understanding, and might mediate the abstract logic of his theories about the undying, immortal one of existence into the ephemeral realm of human action.²² But while the hand is a medium of communication, the body is a medium of presence: this moment of union is made possible by the physical movement that has transported the narrator, body and all, from the mortal to the immortal realm. As John Durham Peters has argued, the body ‘is the most basic of all media, and the richest with meaning, but its meanings are not principally those of language or signs, reaching instead into deep wells stocked with vaguer limbic fluids’.²³ For Parmenides, it is the encounter between a divine vision of being and the human media of the hand and the body that

²¹ These details are indebted to Folit-Weinberg (forthcoming: 20–34). ²² See Lesher (2008) and Tor (2017) for this opposition more generally. ²³ Peters (2015a: 6).

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creates the conditions for philosophical expression, co-created by an imperative to communicate and a doctrine of inexpressible truths. In the spirit of exploring further this dialectic between the world and philosophy, media and immediacy, I will focus on how Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger relate themselves to archaic Greek philosophy, including Parmenides, in order to consider one element of the interaction between philosophy and media.²⁴ In a collection that sits between the disciplines of classics and media studies, Nietzsche and Heidegger form a significant pair of thinkers. They are two of the main influences on the German media theorist Friedrich A. Kittler, and represent two of the main figures to take the significance of technology seriously as a philosophical issue. Friedrich Nietzsche appears in Kittler’s work as ‘The Mechanized Philosopher’ for his role as one of the first philosophers to write using a typewriter, thus becoming a prime example of how a consideration of mediality came to permeate philosophy.²⁵ As the eponymous medium of this chapter, the typewriter forms a constellation with the body and the hand in the primal scene of modern technological philosophy. Just as the encounter with the goddess reifies the human endeavour of philosophy of Parmenides’ narrator, I argue, so does the encounter with the typewriter reify elements of the human body for both Nietzsche and Heidegger (though the implications for both are very different). As Barbara Stiegler points out, Nietzsche’s life was contemporary to major technological developments such as the invention of the telegraph, and as a result he is ‘the first philosopher who strives to think the media’.²⁶ There are comments scattered across Nietzsche’s writings that testify to this description: for instance, as an 18-year-old in 1862, he wrote: ‘I love to think by writing, given that the machine that could imprint our thoughts into some material without their being spoken or written has yet to be invented.’²⁷ Eighteen years later in The Wanderer and his Shadow (1880), he would write the following aphorism (278) that illustrated his belief that technological developments could influence

²⁴ See Harman (2016: 8–13); see also Peters (2015a) and Krämer (2015) for treatments of the interactions between philosophy and media theory. ²⁵ See Kittler (1990a; 2013g: 17–30). ²⁶ Stiegler (2009: 125), emphasis in original. See also Fietz (1992). ²⁷ Cited in Waite (2004: 186).

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human action: ‘Premises of the machine age: The press, the machine, the railway, the telegraph are premises whose thousand-year conclusion no one has yet dared to draw.’²⁸ In similar fashion, Heidegger’s recognition that objects and technology can alter human experience once they cease to be considered as mere tools or equipment has become a Grundbegriff of media theory.²⁹ Many of Heidegger’s writings, in particular The Question Concerning Technology and The Age of the World Picture, represent seminal expressions of an attempt to understand the way that a person’s experience of the world is mediated through the structures of technology and medium that they encounter. Kittler’s work has deep affinities with Heidegger, the latter’s work offering both subject matter for Kittler’s writing and a Vorbild of his own procedure.³⁰ This is clear in an interview from the early 1990s, where Kittler commented on how, as a student, his ‘latent Heideggerianism’ led him to disagree with philosophy lecturers who discussed what ‘Hegel thought’. By contrast, said Kittler, ‘I always found [that Hegel] wrote, and that he wrote well’.³¹ In this declaration Kittler attributes his capacity to think about the technological media through which Hegel constituted his philosophy, and through which thought in general is made communicable, to the influence of Heidegger. Nietzsche and Heidegger are thus two examples of why Jens Schröter has claimed in his Handbuch Medienwissenschaft that ‘the concept of “medium” forms a basic category of the entire tradition of Western philosophy’.³² The reception of Presocratic philosophers like Parmenides by these two writers provides a new angle on their philosophical engagement with media. On the one hand, the Presocratics are often announced as the thinkers who invented a meaningful category of materiality, the very concept that is required for an opposition between medium and content. To give one example of this, James Porter begins his entry on ‘Materiality’ in the Oxford Classical Dictionary by suggesting that ‘matter

²⁸ Nietzsche (1986: 378). Cited in Waite (2004: 185) and Stiegler (2009: 124). From the same work, see further Nietzsche (1986: 366–7, 383), for aphorisms 220 and 288, entitled ‘Reactions against machine culture’ and ‘To what extent the machine abases us’ respectively. ²⁹ See Gunkel and Taylor (2014) for a helpful introduction. ³⁰ See Kittler (2006c), Winthrop-Young (2011b: 15–18), and Busch (2014). ³¹ Cited in Busch (2014: 167), my translation. ³² Schröter (2014: 45), my translation: ‘Der Begriff “Medium” bildet eine basale Kategorie der gesamten abendländischen philosophischen Tradition.’

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was first named’ by the Presocratics.³³ In this respect, their attempts to reduce the phenomena of the world to certain elemental substances, such as water for Thales or fire for Heraclitus, are early traces of a concern with how the objects and matter encountered in everyday experience might be media of other less immediately perceptible truths. Indeed, it is to this commitment to mediation that Parmenides’ understanding of being as essentially unchanging and unmediated, without physical or apparent qualities, acts as the obverse. The conjunction of Parmenides and the typewriter is thus a gesture towards a different type of mediation via matter than is usually considered in terms of the Presocratics: that is, the media of philosophy itself.³⁴ From a different perspective, the Presocratics are themselves signal examples of how the materiality of philosophy can influence its reception. In the following introductory description of the Presocratics, A. A. Long offers an account of their significance that plays with a vocabulary of materiality: Most of them wrote little, and the survival of what they wrote or thought is fragmentary, often mediated not by their own words but only by the testimony of Aristotle, Theophrastus, and other much later authors. These remains are exceptionally precious not only because of their intrinsic quality but also for what they reveal concerning the earliest history of western philosophy and science. The fascination of the material, notwithstanding or even because of its density and lacunar transmission, grips everyone who encounters it.³⁵

We find a litany of material mediations here: the staccato fragments that survive of their writings, the anthologizing tendency of later authors, and the way in which the Presocratics not only express their own ‘intrinsic qualities’ but also stand in a position of ‘revelation’ to ‘the earliest history of western philosophy and science’, a past lost but still dimly remembered. They are fleeting, ‘fragmentary’, and they exist as ‘remains’, but nevertheless they are a locus of ‘fascination’ that ‘grips everyone who encounters [them]’. Both the content of their thought and the mode of

³³ Porter (2012). See further Porter (2003; 2016: 415–32). Holmes (2010: 86–91) explores the difficulty of attributing a materialist worldview to the Presocratics. ³⁴ See Zielinski (2006a) and Bunt (2013); see further Burkert (2008) and Haase (2008, 2009, 2010). ³⁵ Long (1999: 1).

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their survival marks the Presocratics as emblematic of philosophical mediation.³⁶ The titular image of Parmenides at his typewriter makes explicit the transhistorical resonances of these mediations. The typewriter unsurprisingly figures heavily in Kittler’s work since, as Vilém Flusser declares, the typewriter is ‘a materialization of a whole dimension of Western existence in the twentieth century’.³⁷ It is a presencing of the previously invisible category of literacy, and that it still relies on the hand in its capacity as a vehicle of deictic gesturing rather than linear script is testimony to the basically digital continuities between different technologies of human expression (in typing we silently but forcefully point at the letters we want to appear in order to ensure their presence on the blank page before us). The hand thus functions as the common denominator in two practices that are significant to my discussion, handwriting and typewriting, and as the means by which body and machine come into collaboration. Handwriting is itself a technology of the body that can be taught, learned, and then practised more or less well and effectively. As described by Michel Foucault, it has a disciplinary function that stretches far beyond the immediate intervention of the hand: ‘Good handwriting [ . . . ] presupposes a gymnastics—a whole routine whose rigorous code invests the body in its entirety, from the points of the feet to the tip of the index finger.’³⁸ This is also the case for typewriting. As Don Ihde has argued, much of Heidegger’s antipathy towards typewriting can be attributed to the fact that he simply found it difficult, and not at all rewarding, to get used to the mechanics of typing after a lifetime of writing by hand (with a pen).³⁹ Bodies, hands, and typewriters: the encounter of these three symbols is the recurring constellation that I will explore, as we see how its intersection with the Presocratics represents a scene of diachronic affinity for Nietzsche and of synchronic impossibility for Heidegger in their consideration of how philosophy is constituted by the mediation of thought by writing.

³⁶ See n. 31; see also Barnes (1983), Kofman (1993), and Hahn (2001). ³⁷ Kittler (1999: 183–263 and Flusser (2014: 20). ³⁸ Foucault (1995: 152). See also the image of a ‘Handwriting model’ reproduced between pp. 169 and 170 of the same work. Cf. Leroi-Gourhan (1993: 254–5) and Flusser (2014: 25) for the growing obsolescence of handwriting-obsessed pedagogy, and Gardey (1999). ³⁹ Ihde (2010: 124–5).

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Considering the media of philosophy in this light requires a further meditation on the connection between philosopher, philosophy, and implied audience. Just as Shane Butler has used the hand of Cicero to conceive of Cicero the speaker as writer, and to understand the physical reality of the texts that led to his demise, so here I want to think about the implications of considering the Presocratics as embodied writers of philosophy.⁴⁰ As Seitter writes: Media are conditions, regulations, or even obstacles and in this sense ‘causes’ of presence of something or somebody to somebody. Media are means of presentation (and as such different from means of production—or from other things). They can be natural or artificial or even personal: the professor has to be a medium of something for somebody, and so does the actor or the priest.⁴¹

As, indeed, does the philosopher. When we read of the goddess grasping the hand of the travelling narrator in Parmenides’ proem, we can envisage both the encounter that allows successful philosophical teaching and the means by which Parmenides presents this to an audience. Unlike in Dostoyevsky, where we find a journey with no end, purpose, or insight, it is the passage from ignorance to knowledge that reveals the true implications of philosophy’s media.

11.2. Nietzsche’s Bodies As already mentioned, in spring 1882 Nietzsche worked briefly with an unusual form of typewriter, the Malling–Hansen Writing Ball. Kittler describes this machine as follows: ‘Fifty-four concentrically arranged key rods (no levers as yet) imprinted capital letters, numbers, and signs with a color ribbon onto a relatively small sheet of paper that was fastened cylindrically.’⁴² When Nietzsche typed, his hands were placed directly above the letters, and he typed as if he was a fortune teller divining the truth of his letters while massaging a head-like object. The typist could not see the letters that were being printed onto the page, nor could he or she verify how well the typing had been done until the sheet of paper was removed from its cylindrical fastening. In order to explain the ‘semispheric

⁴⁰ S. Butler (2002). ⁴¹ See Seitter (2015: 21), emphasis in original. ⁴² Kittler (1999: 202). See also Kittler (1990b: 192–6).

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arrangement of the keys’, Kittler cites the account of Otto Burghagen, a historian of the typewriter, who writes that it aided the blind, for whom this writing ball was primarily designed, to learn writing on it in a surprisingly short time. On the surface of a sphere each position is completely identifiable by its relative location [ . . . ] It is therefore possible to be guided solely by one’s sense of touch, which would be much more difficult in the case of flat keyboards.⁴³

In this respect, Kittler’s suggestion that Nietzsche was the mechanized philosopher takes on a specific importance. Nietzsche sought out the typewriter as part of an attempt to remedy his own acute shortsightedness, which made both reading and writing near impossible without help.⁴⁴ The typewriter thus helped Nietzsche overcome his own bodily limitations: and, as one of the first philosophers to use a typewriter, he was therefore one of the first to enact the triadic relationship of body, hand, and typing technology in the creation of philosophical thought. The machine did not work well, responding badly to the wet climate of Genoa, where Nietzsche was staying in the spring of 1882, and only fifteen letters survive that were written with it. Nevertheless, the experience was formational enough that Nietzsche was led to comment to his close friend Heinrich Köselitz (also known as Peter Gast) in a undated letter from the end of February that ‘unser Schreibzeug arbeitet mit an unseren Gedanken’.⁴⁵ This phrase has become a leitmotif of media-oriented thought, and it features heavily in Kittler’s work, though in different translations. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz, the English translators of Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, render the phrase as ‘our writing tools are also working on our thoughts’;⁴⁶ an unattributed translation in Kittler’s essay ‘Nietzsche, the Mechanized Philosopher’ runs ‘our writing instruments contribute to our thoughts’.⁴⁷ A further possible translation of the verbal construction ‘mitarbeiten an’ would be ‘to collaborate on’, making the sentence run something like ⁴³ Translated and cited in Kittler (1999: 202). ⁴⁴ See Kittler (1990a) and Emden (2005: 27–31). See also Shapiro (2003). ⁴⁵ Nietzsche (1981a: 172); for the postcard from Köselitz to which this was a response, dated 19 February 1882, see Nietzsche (1981b: 229). For further commentary on Nietzsche’s significance to media theory, see Eberwein (2005), Ernst (2008), and Rickels (2009). ⁴⁶ See Kittler (1999: pp. xxix, xxxi, 200, 201, 203, 204, 210). ⁴⁷ Kittler (1990a: 195).

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‘our writing tools collaborate on our thoughts’. This technological collaboration between man and machine is a way of understanding what Allan Watt has characterized as the contagious itinerary of Nietzschean writing: his is a philosophy always seeking the collaboration of metaphor, style, and reader in the construction of meaning.⁴⁸ This leitmotif of media theory is Nietzsche’s response to Köselitz’s comments that he had noticed a change of style in Nietzsche’s writing with the typewriter. Köselitz comments that he was astonished by the ‘Deutlichkeit der Lettern’, the ‘clarity of the letters’, and the ‘Kernigkeit der Sprüche’, the ‘robustness of the proverbs’, in the typewritten letter that Nietzsche had sent of his own poetry.⁴⁹ Furthermore, Köselitz asks how Nietzsche had achieved the ‘old German tone’, ‘der altdeutsche Ton’, in his writing, as if suggesting that the typewriter had enabled Nietzsche to remember a more archaic style of composition, or as if it had infected him with a style that was not his own. It is in this sense, I think, that, if we peer through the cloud of history, we can discern a hazy afterimage of the Parmenidean goddess, who, on this Nietzschean reading, by clasping the hand of the young philosopher and helping him to think, is perhaps not so very different from the machine that helped another philosopher achieve the clarity and the strength for which his writing is still read today. The particular form of philosophical mediation that I want to explore through Nietzsche’s writings about the ancient world is connected to his interest in the human being and particularly the human body as the central medium of philosophical enquiry.⁵⁰ At a first glance this may seem strange, since Nietzsche’s approach to classics in his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, out of the Spirit of Music (1872), is one predicated on recuperating the immaterial elements of antiquity with a vocabulary that seems mostly to do without human actors. This is the case both in terms of the elements of antiquity that Nietzsche wishes to take as his subject matter (specifically the artistic drives, the ‘Triebe’, that he associates with the deities Dionysus and Apollo) and in terms of the way in which he believes that these ideas are put forth in the contemporary world (as his

⁴⁸ See Watt (2009). ⁴⁹ For all these references to Köselitz’s postcard, see n. 44; for Nietzsche’s original letter, see Nietzsche (1981a: 171). ⁵⁰ See Blondel (1991) and Emden (2005: 61–87).

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title says, ‘out of the Spirit of Music’). Music, and in particular the music drama of the composer Richard Wagner, is supposed to offer the ideal medium by which the aesthetic impact of Greek tragedy and its perfect blending of Apollo and Dionysus can be achieved in the modern world, of ‘the incorporation of the flux in flesh’ that it enacts.⁵¹ Indeed, one of the central impacts of The Birth of Tragedy has been less the things it has to say about the extant material and textual evidence of the ancient world, and more the way that it delivers an imperative to understand the particular means and media by which those Realien might be best integrated into the concerns of the modern world. This is belied, however, by glimpses of human beings in the metaphysical narrative that Nietzsche tells in his exploration of the Apolline and the Dionysian foundations of ancient art. In his text, Euripides and Socrates are emblems of the very forces that bring an end to the tragic age in Greece, rather than representing it: they embody the death of tragedy in behaviour such as their attendance at tragic performances and in their interactions with each other (see especially sections 12–15 of The Birth of Tragedy). This is in direct contrast with Sophocles and Aeschylus, who are at best shadowy figures in the work, present only because of how their texts present characters such as Prometheus and Oedipus, who instantiate the blending of Apollo and Dionysus. (Wagner is similarly only dimly perceptible in the text.) Nietzsche’s concern in The Birth of Tragedy with the influence of writing on cultural legacy is also present in his comments on Plato: in sharp contrast to the virulent attacks he receives in Nietzsche’s later writings, Plato is represented positively in The Birth of Tragedy precisely because he was a writer of philosophy rather than a thinker. On Nietzsche’s early narrative, it is in Plato’s writings that some of the positive aesthetic elements of tragedy survive after the tragic form of drama has lost its pre-eminence, and while Socratic thought has not yet gained its nihilistic power.⁵² This focus on the power of human figures to instantiate cultural and philosophical legacies continues in some of Nietzsche’s subsequent work on the ancient world, and in particular in his writing on the Presocratics. Rather than existing as annihilators of the tragic worldview, as had Socrates and Euripides in The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche

⁵¹ Rickels (2009: 7).

⁵² See Lecznar (2017).

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uses the human bodies of the Presocratics as initiatory and preservatory objects. Nietzsche touched on the Presocratics across his early philological and philosophical work: he delivered lectures on the ‘Preplatonic’ philosophers, and also devoted some of his published scholarly work to the sources of Diogenes Laertius, a major source for ancient biographical material on the Presocratics.⁵³ In his freestanding work Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks (written in 1873–4 and unpublished during his lifetime), Nietzsche immediately stresses a similar position to the one at work in The Birth of Tragedy. Philosophy is only as significant as its affirmation of the human, and its expression of a particular human being’s attempt to understand the world. The difference between The Birth of Tragedy and Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks in some respects resides in their different attitudes towards the materiality of the ancient world. Tragedy is manifested differently in these works: in the former, it is as text that Nietzsche’s canonical descriptions of Apollo and Dionysus as gods and symbols are made visible in the world, while in the latter it is Nietzsche’s evocation of the Presocratic philosophers as once-living human agents that embodies a tragic sensibility. This distinction runs deep in Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks and comes out especially in his comparison of Parmenides and Heraclitus. Nietzsche highlights this concern with human types earlier in the essay: Many people disapprove of all philosophers because philosophers’ aims differ too much from their own. They are outsiders to one another. On the other hand, whoever rejoices in great human beings will also rejoice in philosophical systems, even if completely erroneous. They always have one wholly incontrovertible point: personal mood, colour.⁵⁴

Nietzsche’s idea of the personality of a philosophical system, its ‘personal mood, colour’, is then picked up in his selective choice of philosophers to describe in what follows. He focuses on five figures, Thales, Anaximander, Heraclitus, Parmenides and Anaxagoras, as representatives of the way that philosophy and the figure of the philosopher functioned in this age. While the focus of The Birth of Tragedy had been how tragedy was created under the influence of the different philosophies and worldviews ⁵³ For these lectures, see Nietzsche (2006); for his philological career, including his work on Diogenes Laertius, see Jensen and Heit (2014). ⁵⁴ Nietzsche (1987: 23).

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that dominated their specific eras of ancient Greek life, the focus of Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks is the philosophies themselves and how and why they gave birth to tragic forms. Nietzsche’s descriptions of Heraclitus and Parmenides demonstrate the different ways in which he understands the Presocratic possibilities of philosophy. A human approach is on view in the work of Heraclitus, not because of the way in which the human figure of Heraclitus is described: he is a ‘star devoid of atmosphere,’ and, as Nietzsche continues, ‘his eye, flaming toward its inward centre, looks outward dead and icy, with but the semblance of sight. All around him, to the very edge of the fortress of his pride beat the waves of illusion and of wrong-ness.’⁵⁵ Despite this solitary representation, the Nietzschean Heraclitus is a figure who views the world from the perspective of a human being. Nietzsche describes how, ‘even if he were seen observing the games of noisy children, what he was thinking was surely what no other man had thought on such an occasion’.⁵⁶ For Nietzsche, Heraclitus is tuned into the human reality of the world and is able to extrapolate philosophical speculations on matter and existence in the universe from that reality. Parmenides is then invoked as an opposing symbol: While each word of Heraclitus expresses the pride and the majesty of truth, but of truth grasped in intuitions rather than attained by the rope ladder of logic, while in Sibylline rapture Heraclitus gazes but does not peer, knows but does not calculate, his contemporary Parmenides stands beside him as counter-image, likewise expressing a type of truth-teller but one formed of ice rather than fire, pouring cold piercing light all around.⁵⁷

While Heraclitus resonates with the Dionysiac insight of the tragic poets, Parmenides is more akin to Socrates: Nietzsche contrasts the abstract logic and argumentation of Parmenides with the lived intuition of Heraclitus and makes of them two very different bodies, one cold and distant and one near to the hot, throbbing heart of things.⁵⁸ In this way Nietzsche believes Parmenidean thought to be outside of the tragic tradition of ancient Greece that he wants to trace: Once in his life Parmenides [ . . . ] had a moment of purest absolutely bloodless abstraction, unclouded by any reality. This moment—un-Greek as no other in

⁵⁵ Nietzsche (1987: 67). ⁵⁷ Nietzsche (1987: 69).

⁵⁶ Nietzsche (1987: 67). ⁵⁸ See Curd (1998: esp. 11–23) on these issues.

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the two centuries of the Tragic Age—whose product is the doctrine of Being— became for Parmenides’ own life the boundary stone that separates two periods.⁵⁹

For Nietzsche, Parmenides’ philosophy is non-Greek and thus nontragic: ‘unclouded by reality’, it ignores the realm of human experience that Heraclitus takes as his subject matter and creates an utterly different account of the world. It is the opposition between full-blooded and abstract, embodied and disembodied, philosophy: while the sayings of Heraclitus point towards a direct understanding of human existence, Parmenides gestures towards ‘such fearsome abstractions as “the existent” and “the nonexistent”’.⁶⁰ As Nietzsche suggests, ‘slowly, upon touching them, the blood congeals’.⁶¹ Further on, Nietzsche makes even clearer the way in which this approach demands a turning away from reality: ‘All the manifold colourful world known to experience, all the transformations of its qualities, all the orderliness of its ups and downs, are cast aside mercilessly as mere semblance and illusion.’⁶² Two recurring themes emerge from Nietzsche’s attempts to construe the significance of the Presocratics in his early writings. First, the Presocratics function as representatives of a type of philosophy, and a mode of doing philosophy, that is in direct contrast to the negative influence of Socrates. The personal colour of Nietzsche’s depiction of Heraclitus, with its focus on instincts and its full-blooded commitment to life, is in direct contrast to the bloodless ideals and intellectualism that he associates first with Socrates and then with Parmenides. The association between the Presocratics and the blossoming of the tragic age of ancient Greece suggests that their philosophical writings offer a counterpart to the tragic works of Aeschylus and Sophocles over and against the alliance of Euripides and Socrates that Nietzsche believes was so negative to ancient Greek culture. Alongside this particular quality of philosophy there is an implicit temporal assumption, and at the same time a strangely physical one: in philosophical terms, the Presocratics represent the closest possible prior instantiation of the cultural era to which Nietzsche desires his contemporary German culture to return. Unlike the counterexamples of Socrates and Euripides, the Presocratics thus represent a positive example of what contemporary human beings can hope to achieve in

⁵⁹ Nietzsche (1987: 69). ⁶¹ Nietzsche (1987: 74).

⁶⁰ Nietzsche (1987: 74). ⁶² Nietzsche (1987: 79).

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terms of the retrieval of the tragic: they advertise a different way of living in the present, a different way for eyes to see and hearts to feel, which, Nietzsche hopes, can be regained and thus relived. In several of Nietzsche’s later works he writes in a way that confirms this perspective on temporality, and he often locates it directly in a concern with the body. For example, in the fourth of the Untimely Meditations, ‘Richard Wagner at Bayreuth’, he writes that ‘there are between Kant and the Eleatics, Schopenhauer and Empedocles, Aeschylus and Richard Wagner such approximations and affinities that one is reminded almost palpably of the very relative nature of all time: it almost seems as though many things belong together and time is only a cloud which makes it hard for our eyes to perceive the fact’.⁶³ As John Durham Peters suggests, ‘clouds are often thought of as the thing par excellence without inherent meaning’; and, if time is ‘only a cloud’, then it forms transient concept that interposes between observers and events and blocks the apprehension of transhistorical concerns.⁶⁴ But when the clouds have parted for Nietzsche, it is the intricate synergy of human bodies, the ties of affinity that bind together Kant and Parmenides, Aeschylus and Wagner, that become apparent. Nietzsche urges his readers to draw on this sense of ahistorical commonality between the ancient and the modern to make sense of unspecified contemporary phenomena that themselves seem cloudy and insubstantial. (As he says earlier, ‘we experience phenomena which are so peculiar they would hang in the air incomprehensible to us if we could not look back over a tremendous space of time and connect them with their Greek counterparts’).⁶⁵ Perhaps most striking is Nietzsche’s later evocation of the physicality of the Presocratics in the influential notes that were posthumously published under the title of The Will to Power by his sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. This is a passage in which he considers, as he did in ‘Richard Wagner at Bayreuth’, the links between modern and ancient philosophy: ‘German philosophy as a whole—Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, to name the greatest—is the most fundamental form of

⁶³ Nietzsche (1997: 208–9). See Laks (2018: 24–8) on this passage and Nietzsche’s broader approach to the Presocratics. ⁶⁴ Peters (2015a: 254, see further 254–60). ⁶⁵ Nietzsche (1997: 209).

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romanticism and homesickness there has ever been: the longing for the best that ever existed.’⁶⁶ This homesickness is construed as connected not to physical absence from a geographical space, but to spiritual distance from a more intangible homeland: One is no longer at home anywhere; at last one longs back for that place in which alone one can be at home: the Greek world! But it is in precisely that direction that all bridges are broken—except the rainbow-bridges of concepts! To be sure, one must be very subtle, very light, very thin to step across these bridges! But what happiness there is already in this will to spirituality, to ghostliness almost! How far it takes one from ‘pressure and stress’, from the mechanistic awkwardness of the natural sciences, from the market hubbub of ‘modern ideas’!⁶⁷

While it is in the flesh and blood reality of mortal figures from the ancient and modern worlds that Nietzsche finds models of tragic ideas, it is in a ‘will to ghostliness’ that modern German philosophy finds its most appropriate symbol, in the will to consider engagement with classical literature and its authors as a form of communion with the dead akin to spiritualist techniques.⁶⁸ This ghostliness is manifestly contrasted to the stony reality of the Presocratics, whom Nietzsche describes as ‘the most deeply buried of all Greek temples’, and it is also troped as a ‘rainbow-bridge’, a fleeting meteorological phenomenon.⁶⁹ The archaeological metaphor is then elaborated in an ecstatic conclusion: A few centuries hence, perhaps, one will judge that all German philosophy derives its real dignity from being a gradual reclamation of the soil of antiquity, and that all claims to ‘originality’ must sound petty and ludicrous in relation to that higher claim of the Germans to have joined anew the bond that seemed to be broken, the bond with the Greeks, the hitherto highest type of man. Today we are again getting close to all those fundamental forms of world interpretation devised by the Greek spirit through Anaximander, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Empedocles, Democritus, and Anaxagoras—we are growing more Greek by the day; at first, as is only fair, in concepts and evaluations, as Hellenizing ghosts, as it were: but one day, let us hope, also in our bodies! Herein lies (and has always lain) my hope for the German character!⁷⁰

Nietzsche hereby invokes the constitutive opposition of idealism and materiality: not only in his physical invocation of ‘the soil of antiquity’

⁶⁶ Nietzsche (1968a: 225). See also Goldhill (2002: 294–9). ⁶⁷ Nietzsche (1968a: 225). ⁶⁸ See further Richardson (2013). ⁶⁹ Nietzsche (1968a: 225). ⁷⁰ Nietzsche (1968a: 225–6).

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that he hopes will be recaptured, but also in the sense that the process of reception will allow a gradual corporealization of the moderns, from ‘Hellenizing ghosts’ who can conceptually time-travel into the ancient Greek world, to fleshy bodies able to act and perform ‘fundamental forms of world interpretation’. For Nietzsche the status of the body as a primal medium of reception has consequences for understanding the constitutive value of modern philosophy: the category of originality no longer functions, but is replaced by the idea of re-embodiment, of reliving the insights of the past in order to regain some substance in a world increasingly dominated by ideas and abstract concerns. This note was written in 1885, three years after Nietzsche’s experiment with the Malling–Hansen Writing Ball: and in the intervening period we can see a changing attitude towards the medium of the body, perhaps as a result of his illnesses, perhaps as a result of his confrontation with the typewriter. Where Nietzsche had previously argued that the blossoming of the tragic worldview in ancient Greece was dependent on the bodies of the Presocratics, he now sees the bodies of modernity as the means of realizing the utmost philosophical revaluation, beyond the shadowy grasp of concepts. But while the first mechanized philosopher would dream of assuming a Greek body, Heidegger would gesture towards a very different approach to philosophical mediation.

11.3. Heidegger’s Hands Heidegger’s entire philosophy is deeply indebted to the dynamics of form and matter, and to his belief that a focus on material reality, on the obtrusive existence of things, denies access to the deeper truth of being. For Heidegger, this exploration of being is connected to a search for truth: his much-debated understanding of being as unconcealment is based on the etymological suggestion that the Greek term Ἀλήθεια, commonly translated as truth, consists of a negativized version of the word Λήθη, forgetfulness. That is, truth is found for Heidegger in unveiling and remembering deeper structures of human existence in the world that might otherwise be passed over, or forgotten, in everyday sensory experience. A similarly significant concept in Heideggerian thought is that of ‘Ent-fernung’, what Kittler translates in an essay on the subject as ‘de-severance’, whereby what is at stake is the possibility of

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lessening the gap between the human and the world.⁷¹ In this section I want to focus specifically on how Heidegger’s interest in the Presocratics manifests itself in a consideration of the media of writing, specifically of typing, and how he enjoins his reader to consider this in the terms of the privilege that he affords to the Presocratics, qua philosophers by hand, as witnesses to an originary and fundamentally unmediated set of philosophical concerns and modes of expression, when truth was unveiled and the human connected to the world.⁷² As we will see, Heidegger uses the Presocratics to combine the imperatives of the immediate and the mediate, and thereby reveals the horizon of archaic immediacy as the final, deeply rooted metaphysical concept of human thinking.⁷³ A central example of this appears in Being and Time (1927). Here, Heidegger approaches the figure of the hand as a cipher for the connection between the human being and the world around it. Throughout the work Heidegger elaborates a structure of human being, understood in his terms as Dasein, as being-there, that relies on the oppositional categories of things that are ‘ready-to-hand’ and things that are ‘present-to-hand’.⁷⁴ What is ‘ready-to-hand’ is complicit in the structure of human being, since it functions as a tool through which Dasein exists; what is merely ‘present-to-hand’ represents the obtrusion of a dehumanized objective reality into the working of the world.⁷⁵ Heidegger invokes these two categories since he is interested in what element of the objects that we encounter in the world comes first: their objectivity or their usefulness. This is well summed up in a pastoral passage on the human relationship to the natural world: nature must not be understood here as what is merely objectively present, nor as the power of nature. The forest is a forest of timber, the mountain a quarry of rock, the river is water power, the wind is wind ‘in the sails’. As the ‘surrounding world’ is discovered, ‘nature’ thus discovered is encountered along with it. We can abstract from nature’s kind of being as handiness [Zuhandenheit]; we can

⁷¹ See Kittler (2013b) and Zechner (2018). ⁷² See Krämer (2015) 144–53. ⁷³ See Gilson (2017: esp. p. xi): ‘The mediation of that which cannot be mediated is necessary to human nature, and it is in fact how we “see” Being; it is how the order of the world comes to the human person who confers by participatory mediation the meaning of things in the world within the ground of the eventfulness of Being.’ ⁷⁴ See Krell (2015: 49); see also Gunkel and Taylor (2014: 16). ⁷⁵ See Harman (2002) for an exciting discussion of these issues.

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discover and define it in its mere objective presence [Vorhandenheit]. But in this kind of discovery of nature, nature as what ‘stirs and strives’, what overcomes us, entrances us as landscape, remains hidden. The botanist’s plants are not the flowers of the hedgerow, the river’s ‘source’ ascertained by the geographer is not the ‘source in the ground’.⁷⁶

What Heidegger intimates here is a fundamental schism in terms of the human attitude towards materiality: nature can be represented as a landscape utterly dissimilar to the human only after the abstraction (or the subtraction) of its objective existence from the initial force of emotional cathexis. The meaningfulness of matter comes into being only as a result of human perception: a certain passionate subjectivity results from human existence that creates media of all things, and that imbues all objectivity with a certain quality of purpose. An earlier example in Being and Time of Heidegger’s explanation of the idea of the ‘ready-to-hand’, and its fundamental association with the existential structure of ‘inorder-to’, or ‘um-zu’, makes clear the relevance of this consideration to the issue of writing in philosophy: In accordance with their character of utility, useful things always are in terms of their belonging to other useful things: writing utensils, pen, ink, paper, desk blotter, table, lamp, furniture, windows, doors, room. These ‘things’ never show themselves initially by themselves, in order then to fill out a room as a sum of things [ . . . ] A totality of useful things is always already discovered before the individual useful thing.⁷⁷

In this case, the totality described by Heidegger seems to represent the totality of the experience of writing: it is a totality predicated on the pose of the author facing the things through which and in terms of which the act of writing becomes possible.⁷⁸ In Heidegger’s assumption of the role of philosopher through the publication of Being and Time, this scene of writing is of the utmost importance: the ‘um-zu’ that gives these particular objects their symphonic utility is the possibility of qualifying for a chair in philosophy at Freiburg, since he was told that he needed to write the book in order to replace Edmund Husserl.⁷⁹ ⁷⁶ Heidegger (2010a: 70). ⁷⁷ Heidegger (2010a: 68). ⁷⁸ Scharr (2006) provides photographs and discussion of the physical spaces in which Heidegger wrote his philosophy. ⁷⁹ See Sheehan (1997) and Safranski (1998: 142–4) for the way Heidegger’s eventual break with Husserl took place via handwritten comments in the margins of each other’s work.

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What this scene also betrays is the different place that Heidegger holds in media theory compared to Nietzsche. If Nietzsche is mechanized and alert to the possibilities of technology, then Heidegger is handwritten and wary. This is something noted by Jacques Derrida in ‘Geschlecht II: Heidegger’s Hands’, and by David Farrell Krell in a recollection of meeting Heidegger in the early 1970s (‘If I remember well, I admired him—at age eighty-five—for both his handwriting and his writing posture’).⁸⁰ It is also a central concern of his famous Gesamtausgabe, which is officially termed ‘an edition of the last hand’, ‘Eine Ausgabe letzter Hand’, for its commitment to preserving Heidegger’s final versions of the works in question rather than producing an academic historico-critical edition (as has been undertaken with Nietzsche). This designation presupposes a pledge of immediacy, promising works that have not been worked over by scholars in an attempt at historical veracity, but which still bear the marks of the philosopher’s pen.⁸¹ Heidegger’s association with the hand and not the machine, with the immediate and not the mediated, is also borne out in other elements of his philosophy. Some of the central and most influential concepts of his philosophy rely on a fundamental sense of immediacy: his ideas of the ‘clearing of being’ and of truth representing an ‘unconcealing’ stand as part of his commitment to unveiling an ontology of being from amidst the objects that make up the ‘ontic’ existence of beings in their everyday sensual commerce. When we turn to his seminars on Parmenides from 1942–3, we see that, in his discussion of this particular Presocratic, Heidegger echoes Nietzsche in his belief that the task of philosophy is not to declare different understandings of being and matter under the veil of the new, but rather to rearticulate essential truths: I am not saying anything new here, as no thinker at all may be the slave of the pleasure to say the new. To find new things and to search for them is a matter of ‘research’ and technology. Essential thinking must always say only the same, the old, the oldest, the beginning, and must say it primordially.⁸² ⁸⁰ See Derrida (1987: esp. 168–9): ‘Nietzsche was the first thinker of the West to have a typewriter, whose photograph we know. Heidegger himself could write only with the pen, with the hand of a craftsman and not a mechanic’, and Krell (2015: 52); see also Krell (2014). ⁸¹ See Kisiel (1995) for the controversies surrounding Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe. ⁸² Heidegger (1992: 77). See further Heidegger (2015: 80): ‘It has now become fashionable to refute my interpretation of earlier philosophers by saying, “That is Heidegger, but

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This seems to be fundamentally a pledge for the value of mediation: Heidegger is claiming that ‘essential thinking’ requires the re-presentation of certain essential things rather than the invention of new things. This immediacy of understanding is gained through the participation in the philosophical tradition and the extraction of its always-already-mediated truths. It requires an understanding of how the Presocratics (for example) are not simply the expression of a moment of original thinking, where historically dependent originality is what is significant, but rather the expression of a broader transhistorical significance that must be encountered again and again. Heidegger describes this metempsychotic philosophical statement as something constantly passing through human modes of articulation, and in particular, through a certain part of the body: Man himself acts through the hand; for the hand is, together with the word, the essential distinction of man. Only a being which, like man, ‘has’ the word (μῦθος, λόγος), can and must ‘have’ ‘the hand’. Through the hand occur both prayer and murder, greeting and thanks, oath and signal, and also the ‘work’ of the hand, the ‘hand-work’, and the tool. The handshake seals the covenant. The hand brings about the ‘work’ of destruction. The hand exists as hand only where there is disclosure and concealment. No animal has a hand, and a hand never originates from a paw or a claw or talon. Even the hand of one in desperation (it least of all) is never a talon, with which a person clutches wildly. The hand sprang forth only out of the word and together with the word. Man does not ‘have’ hands, but the hand holds the essence of man, because the word as the essential realm of the hand is the ground of the essence of man. The word as what is inscribed and what appears to the regard is the written word, i.e., script. And the word as script is handwriting.⁸³

This is a set of considerations that Heidegger repeats in his text ‘What is Called Thinking?’, where he uses it as a way of linking the act of thinking to a style of handicraft and thus as a uniquely human technology.⁸⁴ Whereas in the later discussion Heidegger makes the hand a mediating organ of thinking, in his lectures on Parmenides almost a decade earlier it is the means by which the word is inscribed and, fundamentally, by

not Hegel”, or “Heidegger, but not Kant”, etc. Certainly. But does it follow ipso facto that the interpretation is false?’ ⁸³ Heidegger (1992: 80). ⁸⁴ See Heidegger (1968: 16): ‘Only a being who can speak, that is, think, can have hands and can be handy in achieving works of handicraft.’ See also Capuano (2015).

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which language is concocted by human beings. The word is thus equated with writing, and the primordial philosophical thought that Heidegger wishes to rearticulate in this context is retrievable only through the re-creation of the original scratching of a writing mark (letter, line, symbol) on a writing substance (wax, papyrus, paper) by a writing (human) hand. As the lists of examples suggest, only one element of this nexus is constant in Heidegger’s account of philosophical production: and Heidegger suggests that the typewriter threatens to sever this umbilical connection between thinker and thought, writer and written, since it ‘tears writing from the essential realm of the hand, i.e., the realm of the word’.⁸⁵ The typewriter is a signless cloud, i.e., a withdrawing concealment in the midst of its very obtrusiveness, and through it the relation of Being to man is transformed. It is in fact signless, not showing itself as to its essence; perhaps that is why most of you, as is proven to me by your reaction, though well-intended, have not grasped what I have been trying to say.⁸⁶

As ‘a signless cloud’ the typewriter effects the concealment of being just as human beings embody the passing into unconcealment. It is also connected to Nietzsche’s description of time as a cloud in ‘Richard Wagner in Bayreuth’: the typewriter is something that makes transhistorical connections between human beings impossible, since it makes the rupturous differences between historical forms of technological mediation manifest and unavoidable. Parmenides’ proem seems to destabilize this account: hands appear here to inaugurate a process of communication that transcends the boundaries of the human as god and mortal converse, and which is itself created by the hand of a poet. By contrast, Heidegger fears that his audience have not understood what he has said, and feels compelled to defend his choice of material: ‘I have not been presenting a disquisition on the typewriter itself, regarding which it could justifiably be asked what in the world that has to do with Parmenides.’⁸⁷ He continues: A meditation on unconcealedness and on Being does not merely have something to do with the didactic poem of Parmenides, it has everything to do with it. In the typewriter the machine appears, i.e., technology appears, in an almost quotidian ⁸⁵ Heidegger (1992: 81). ⁸⁶ Heidegger (1992: 85). Heidegger takes the term ‘a signless cloud’ from Pindar’s seventh Olympian ode; see Heidegger (1992: 74). ⁸⁷ Heidegger (1992: 85).

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and hence unnoticed and hence signless relation to writing, i.e., to the word, i.e., to the distinguishing essence of man. A more penetrating consideration would have to recognize here that the typewriter is not really a machine in the strict sense of machine technology, but is an ‘intermediate’ thing, between a tool and a machine, a mechanism. Its production, however, is conditioned by machine technology.⁸⁸

What is concealed is mediated in a way that fails to reveal being: and what leads to the deleterious mediation of the typewriter is that it is not simply a machine but a mechanism, ‘an “intermediate” thing’. The implication is that the typewriter subtracts ‘the word’ from human beings and makes them into products and producers of a mechanized reality, without its ‘distinguishing essence’. Graham Harman has complained about Heidegger’s deadening approach to technological innovation in his writing, whereby ‘technology is a gloomy drama in which every invention merely strips the mystery from the world and turns all things into a manipulable stockpile of present-at-hand slag’.⁸⁹ But this does not seem to be the impulse of his last programmatic comments about the juxtaposition of Parmenides and the typewriter, where he explains clearly how introducing non-abstract thoughts into philosophy is a way of revealing the way in which life and thought engage in symbiotic contact with non-human forms of existence: People are generally inclined to consider philosophy an ‘abstract’ affair. If now, apparently all of a sudden and arbitrarily, we speak of the typewriter, that is taken to be a digression, a view attesting to the fact that people are precisely not truly disposed to ponder the ‘concrete’ they celebrate so much, i.e., to come within the proximity of the essence of things and to remove the concealment thrust upon things by mere use and consumption. Λήθη and the typewriter—this is indeed not a digression for anyone not submerged in the oblivion of Being.⁹⁰

In terms reminiscent of Socrates’ condemnation of the new technology of writing in Plato’s Phaedrus, Heidegger construes the technology of typing around the opposition of memory and forgetting, presence and absence. But just as the mediation of Plato as writer creates in Phaedrus a paradoxical Socrates who is complaining about the impact of the very media by which his thoughts are able to be remembered, the presence of Heidegger’s translated sentence in a printed book, at one point typed or ⁸⁸ Heidegger (1992: 85–6). ⁸⁹ Cited in Ihde (2010: 114). ⁹⁰ Heidegger (1992: 87). See further Harman (2002).

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at least typeset, makes of Heidegger a philosopher whose continued ‘use and consumption’ by his readers is deeply imbricated in the technological structures that, on his claim, put thinking at stake. This final passage from Heidegger’s Parmenides has a canonical place in media theory: it is a passage that, according to Friedrich Kittler, ‘was in front of my typewriter all these years [ . . . ] while I ran away from philosophy to write media histories (of the typewriter, amongst other things)’.⁹¹ For Kittler this passage allowed his departure from philosophy, and set him on a journey towards thinking about media. In comparison with Nietzsche’s comment already discussed where the typewriter is either working on, contributing to, or collaborating with the practice of thought, and thus involved in a process that creates philosophy, Heidegger’s dictum places the typewriter in an external relationship to thought, as an object by which philosophy proceeds (since it is always already created by the innate human capacity of thought via writing). Both approaches are underpinned by a sense of human immediacy, one that Nietzsche locates in the body and Heidegger in the hand; but it is an immediacy that is made possible by the encounter with the typewriter and the ensuing reflection on the developing tradition of philosophy, stretching all the way back to the Presocratics. I would like to conclude by turning to a moment in Heidegger’s writing in which he discusses the conjunction of media and the metaphor of the journey with which I began. Like Parmenides, Heidegger characterizes the process of thinking throughout his works in terms of journeys and paths.⁹² A short piece entitled ‘Der Feldweg’ (‘The Pathway’, 1947–8) includes the following resonant description of the dialectic of mediacy and immediacy that I have tried to draw out: But the call of the pathway speaks only as long as there are men, born in its atmosphere, who can hear it. They are servants of their origin, not slaves of machination [Knechte von Machenschaften]. Man’s attempts to bring order to the ⁹¹ See Kittler (2003: 503), my translation. ⁹² For the image of the journey in Parmenides, see n. 12. Of the few writings that Heidegger published in his lifetime, many made their connections to the act of travel clear with titles such as Holzwege, literally ‘wood-paths’ and translated as Off the Beaten Track, and Wegmarken, translated as Pathmarks; see Heidegger (1998, 2002). In the same vein, Heidegger would make clear that he intended later readers to read his Gesamtausgabe as a means of recreating his own Denkweg, or path of thought; see Kisiel (1995: 5, 8).

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world by his plans will remain futile as long as he is not ordered to the call of the pathway. The danger looms that men today cannot hear its language. The only thing they hear is the noise of the media [der Lärm der Apparate], which they almost take for the voice of God. So man becomes disoriented and loses his way.⁹³

‘An idea is contained in the high road; but what idea is contained in a series of post-horses?’: Heidegger’s distinction between the energising ‘call of the pathway’ and the distracting ‘noise of the media’ echoes the satire of Stepan Trofimovich by Dostoyevsky’s narrator, where a carriage would render his aporia impossible.⁹⁴ Heidegger invokes the movement of philosophy as something predicated on the sensory perception of its ‘call’, its ‘Zusprach’; for him, this is blocked out by the hubbub of the media and machines that interpose between person and path. But this is a narrative without touch, and which reifies the human being as something solitary, constantly encountering media but never in dialogue with them. I have looked at alternatives to this account of philosophy across the chapter: in Parmenides, the protagonist needs the technological aid of a chariot and mares to reach the enlightening handclasp of the goddess, while in Nietzsche, the philosopher needs the touch of the typewriter to overcome his blindness and to restore his thoughts to an active philosophical body. If the path is a metaphor for the human achievement (and creation) of philosophical insight, then media theory draws attention to what sort of journey each philosopher envisages and how this influences the insights themselves.⁹⁵ The difference between describing a journey on foot or in a chariot, of writing by hand or on a typewriter, represents the difference between envisaging philosophy as a purely human enterprise, wholly divorced from the world, and understanding it as a discourse that can take account of the enmeshment of subject and object, the encounter of body, hand, and typewriter, both as the subject matter of thought and as a spur to thinking itself.⁹⁶

⁹³ Heidegger (2010b: 70). ⁹⁴ Dostoyevsky (2008: 699). ⁹⁵ Cf. Nietzsche (1968b: 26): ‘On ne peut pas penser et écrire qu’assis (G. Flaubert).—Now I have you, nihilist! Assiduity is the sin against the holy spirit. Only ideas won by walking have any value.’ ⁹⁶ Firm handclasps of thanks are due to Benjamin Folit-Weinberg, Laurence Hemming, Tom Mackenzie, Camilla Temple, and, especially, Pantelis Michelakis for help and encouragement on the journey of this chapter.

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12 Manteia, Mediality, Migration Maria Oikonomou

12.1. ‘Go to Croton!’ When Odysseus, on his return to Ithaca disguised as a Cretan nobleman, meets the swineherd Eumaeus in Odyssey, book 14, the old man will not believe in his master’s ever coming home again. For him, the king has been long since dead—probably torn to pieces by birds or beasts, swallowed by fishes, buried deep in the sand of a foreign shore. Therefore, every ‘remarkable’ evidence or account from travellers who reach the island and bring news about Odysseus seems nothing but a very pretty story for ‘a cloak and a tunic’.¹ However, the ‘stranger’ provides yet another such story (and will, in fact, be rewarded by a cloak): Odysseus, he declares, will return in this self-same year, putting an end to his long time of exile; meanwhile he is off to Dodona ‘to hear the will of Zeus from the high-crested oak of the god, how he might return to the rich land of Ithaca after so long an absence, whether openly or in secret’.² The narrative does not explain whether Odysseus has really visited the oldest known oracle of ancient Greece, situated in a valley in the north-west of the country and indeed not too far away from his native island, and whether his present disguise follows divine counsel. Although Eumaeus does not believe a single word and asks reproachfully: ‘Why should you, who are in such a plight, lie to no purpose?,’³ the protagonist’s claim remains uncertain and—just like the stranger himself—on a threshold. His ‘fiction within a fiction’ may either be a reference to a preceding ¹ Odyssey, 14.132 (trans. A. T. Murray). ² Odyssey, 14.328 (trans. A. T. Murray). ³ Odyssey, 14.364–365 (trans. A. T. Murray). Maria Oikonomou, Manteia, Mediality, Migration In: Classics and Media Theory. Edited by: Pantelis Michelakis, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198846024.003.0012

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event that has gone untold or a tale conceived to obfuscate the identity of its teller. In any case, Odysseus’ report about ‘his’ visiting the sanctuary of Dodona establishes a connection between oracular practice and spatial movement, between a certain mode of decision-making and geographical transition. However precarious the ‘ontological’ status of the Odyssey’s hypodiegetic insert may be, its linking of augury and voyage is readopted and made manifest by the myth of the Argonauts. When Jason and his crew embark on their journey to Colchis—a movement that appears as ‘enantiomorph’ reflection of Odysseus, inasmuch as it leads from west to east and passes through many points that are evaded by the other—they fit a plank from Dodona’s oak tree into the keel of the Argo—‘a structural addition that had the useful feature of being able to speak, to guide, or warn the Argonauts, rather like a sort of early form of GPS’.⁴ In this manner, the Argonauts receive instructions about their position and course without having to read landmarks, weather conditions, wayward currents, or the stars in the night sky. In fact, visiting the oracle and seeking signs of destiny were not only necessary to prepare heroic feats, but rather common practice. At least since the eighth century  and until the rise of Christianity, Dodona drew visitors from all over the Mediterranean who sought to learn the will of the gods—especially with the social, cultural, and political reality of the oracle’s sphere of influence becoming increasingly mobile or mutable. It stood in the centre of widely dispersed colonizing expeditions and migrations, intercultural and technological exchange processes, circulations of goods, skills, and people, new forms of expansion and connection, new routes, lines, and paths.⁵ Driven by the promises and horrors of an unknown future in times of general unrest and longing for guidance, warning, and reassurance, many would turn to the oracle. They (or the scribes in a sacerdotal reception centre) would inscribe the questions, together with an occasional ‘identifying mark’, ‘initials’, or ‘reference to some aspect of the question’,⁶ on small leaden sheets, roll them up, and file them at the sanctuary. Those tablets that have survived from Dodona’s heyday and are now housed in the Archaeological Museum of Ioannina reveal a range of concerns, from communal and ⁴ Eidinow (2007: 67). ⁵ For a history of the oracle, see Eidinow (2007: 56–71). ⁶ Eidinow (2007: 71).

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professional matters to family life, from concrete trade issues to the delicacies of love. And, not least, they address the possibility of relocation, of diasporas and migration, to other parts of the Greek world or foreign places. The questions unfold both a discourse and a corresponding geographical space that, although its terrains are still in the making and its borders still fluid, spreads through several regions on the mainland, along the western shores of Greece, to Acroceraunia, Epidamnos and Orikos, then traverses the Adriatic Sea and reaches the coastal areas of the colonies in southern Italy: If I emigrate, will I succeed in my craft? Should I remain in my place of birth or move to Sicily? Ariston asks Zeus Naios and Dione whether it is better for me and if I will be able to sail to Syracuse, to the colony, later? Nikomachos asks Zeus Naios whether he will fare better by having moved his registration from Herakleia to Taras? God. Good Luck. About possessions and about a place to live: Is it better for myself, my children and my wife to settle in Croton?⁷

Not being Zeus, it certainly is difficult for us to gather in retrospect the reasons and full meaning of each enquiry—for instance, when a certain Ariston wishes to find out whether he should travel to Syracuse ‘later’ (the word may indicate, as Esther Eidinow suggests, ‘some anxiety about the dangers of being in a first wave of colonizers or, perhaps, that he will miss out if he is not in that initial group’), or when Nikomachos, presumably a metic or ‘resident alien without citizen rights’, seems concerned with the possible advantages of changing his ‘registration’.⁸ What we do know is that the high priest—that is, the medium that is responsible for encoding, transferring, receiving, and decoding the signals coming from god—is part of a highly complex assemblage of elements. This medium, this transmitter and high-fidelity receiver, conveys the message and interprets the reply in a setting of multiple human ⁷ ‘Ἐἀποδάμον τυχοιμίκα ἐπὶ τὰν τέχναν’, Exhibit at the Archaeological Museum of Ioannina; ‘[ . . . ] πότερον πλέω ἐς Σικ[ελίαν]’ (4154B), Dakaris, Vokotopoulou, and Christidis (2013: ii. 406); ‘Θεός· Ἀρίστων ἐρωτᾷ τὸν Δία τὸν Νάϊον καὶ τὴν Δηόνεν εἰ λόϊόν μοι καὶ ἄμενον καὶ δυνήομαι πλεν εἰς Συρακόσας πρὸς τὴν ἀποικίαν ὕστερον’; ‘Νικόμαχος ἐρωτῇι τὸν Δία [τ]ὸν Νάϊον ἦ ἀπογραψάμ[ε]ν[ο]ς κα ἐς Τάραντα ἐξ Ἡρακληΐας ἄμεινον’ (3111), Dakaris, Vokotopoulou, and Christidis (2013: ii. 195); ‘Θεός· τύχα ἀγαθά· περὶ πανπασίας καὶ περὶ Fοικέσιος ἰς Κρτονα ῏ε βέλτιον καὶ ἄμεινο αὐτοῖ καὶ γενεᾶι καὶ γυναικί’ (24A), Dakaris, Vokotopoulou, and Christidis (2013: i. 12), my translation. ⁸ Eidinow (2007: 74).

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as well as non-human components, the supplicant, the socio-economic background, the religious institution of the oracle, the landscape, overshadowed by Mount Tomaros, the leaden sheets, the aspect of literacy, the realm of the gods who make themselves heard through the rustling of oak leaves, the gurgling of water, cooing of doves, or tinkling of bronze objects hanging from the branches like wind chimes. All this, the whole composite and diffuse flow of sounds, would then be synthesized into signs (and sometimes even into well-worded hexameters). It therefore seems rather appropriate when Jordan Stein describes the oracle at Delphi as a ‘primitive game of telephone’ (even if this association of prophetic practice and technological device calls for elaboration), an ancient ‘Alexander Graham Bell System’ that spreads from ‘Apollo to the Pythia to the priests to the paying customer, where the holy word was translated into human speech, and then once again onto the receiver’s life’.⁹ Considering, however, the number of participating agents and materials in the booming industry of Delphi or Dodona, the manifold interconnected parts and their cultural significance, it is only in the narrowest sense of a history of ‘media-based communication’ that this well-run apparatus can be called ‘primitive’. On the contrary, it presents itself as highly effective: if the enquirer is prepared to call the beyond and the operator puts him or her through, the process can sometimes result in a surprisingly clear ‘yes’ or ‘no’, written down on the metal sheets’ flipside: ‘Μένε[τε’ Stay! Or: ‘Ἐν Κρότονι’ Go to Croton! (Figure 12.1).

Figure 12.1. Inscribed leaden tablet: front side with human question/back side with divine answer, Archaeological Museum of Ioannina, Greece. Reproduced from Dakaris, Vokotopoulou, Christidis (2013: i. 12–13), by permission of the Archaeological Society at Athens

⁹ Stein (2017: 4).

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Incidentally, this very consistent and unmistakable imperative from the other end of the telephone line demonstrates the sanctuary’s geopolitical function and significance. Especially with respect to the important issues of expansion and emigration, the oracle’s mediations between Zeus and a community of potential settlers and migrants encourage, initiate, command, prohibit, and control specific projects of colonization.¹⁰ To a certain degree at least, they regulate the flows, times, or destinations of migration.

12.2. Yes/No On the one hand, numerous current approaches think of migration as an explicitly undecidable and de-subjectivized process, as ‘becoming’ or directionless occupation of space.¹¹ While being well aware of this tendency to complicate or ‘manifold’ migratory formations—and also of Deleuze and Guattari’s even more fundamental cautionary notice that, ‘whenever a multiplicity is taken up in a structure, its growth is offset by a reduction in its laws of combination’,¹² I, on the other hand, want to suggest the binary and differential structure of the oracle’s yes or no as basic operation of both migration and the medium. (One will, however, realize that this seeming ‘reduction’ of migration’s complexities harbours many unexpected dynamics, inconsistencies, and points of friction: defining migration as well as its associated media as rather simple decision-machines will soon transcend the mere dichotomy and any attempt to create a poor image of multiplicity through the endless succession of pairs.) In the context of migration, a medium could then be determined as a device that prepares, supports, proclaims, documents, archives, and in some cases even makes a decision. In fact, media are connected to processes of decision on more than one level. First, they can serve as a tool that manages, deals with, or realizes a distinction/selection ¹⁰ See Malkin (2011: 55): ‘The Greek cities, especially in the Western Mediterranean, were often connected with the oracle of Delphi, who not only had provided them with a foundation prophecy, but also functioned as an ongoing mediator between Apollo, the sending communities, the settlers and further migrants. Delphi, emerging as a major Hellenic hub in tandem with the spread of Greek colonization (eighth–seventh centuries), was also in a position to place specific colonization projects within Panhellenic contexts. Delphi provides a colonization oracle in order to encourage further immigration.’ ¹¹ e.g. Tsianos and Papadopoulos (2007). ¹² Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 6).

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that itself appears as exterior to the medium and as its ‘object’. This is the case of Dodona, a map, or the Global Positioning System, which allows the user to decide without taking into account the instrument’s manner of functioning or ‘inner’ organization. Second, a medium can incorporate the distinction/selection between two or more elements on a structural level, resulting in an interface or mode of operation that is necessarily based on choice. Examples of that would be a coin toss to determine the next step of action, the sequence of mutually exclusive TV channels, or—even—the hyper-spatial possibilities of internet links. And, third, a medium might rely on distinction/selection on a technical level, as, for instance, the dots and dashes of binary Morse signals or the zero–one of digital code. It is obvious that these three levels are combinable; in any case, they support the proposition that a medium can essentially be seen as a selection complex. With respect to the ancient oracles of Dodona or Delphi, the decision process may of course seem somewhat erratic when, every once in a while, the gods do not provide a distinct imperative. One might even speculate that it is the very essence of a prophetic medium to develop a tendency of affirming and denying at the same time, or of neither affirming nor denying: Roland Barthes reminds us that the ancient soothsayer ‘speaks the locus of meaning but does not name it’,¹³ in other words, the medium confirms the production of meaning and delineates its course, but it does not exhibit or designate this meaning, thus creating the conflictual source of more than one Greek tragedy. Whether the product of a divine mindset colliding with the framework of earthly demands, or a result of that odd ventriloquism that places the voice of god into the mouth of a priest—the oracular media complex always seems to carry a strong element of ambiguity and obfuscation. It never says what it means, takes the form of riddles, programmatically disguises its data, and begrudges the truth, as Anne Carson would put it,¹⁴ thereby suspending any simple certitude. As a ‘double-entendre’ and shifting message that invites more than one way of reading, it forces a further translation on the side of the consultant, who, called or invoked by two voices or tongues at once, still has to make the choice of this rather than that. However, all this does not interfere with the basic binary

¹³ Barthes (1972: 219).

¹⁴ Carson (1999: 23).

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structure of distinction/selection (after all, we are still speaking of double meanings, of two sides, and there always exists a wrong way); and not every transmission generates a riddle; not every response includes ‘ambiguous, unclear, or conditioned commands, ambiguous prohibitions or warnings’.¹⁵ And what is more, even if and especially when the message becomes ambiguous instead of giving clear instructions regarding the alternatives of our destiny and destination, this incalculability attests to the medium’s basic differential essence. In his Organization and Decision, Niklas Luhmann defines the paradox of decisions as precisely their dependency on the undecidable. Citing Kurt Gödel, he maintains that we can decide only those questions that are in principle undecidable, that undecidability is in fact the fundamental presupposition for any decision, which, in turn, is the only way to dissolve a point of undecidability. What may appear like mere wordplay can in fact reveal that every decision ends a previous phase of undecidability¹⁶ (and what Luhmann thus reduces to a ‘problem of time’ will happily persist in deconstruction’s understanding of an undecidability that cannot be solved and will survive in the heart of every decision made). With a view to both system theory and deconstruction, the oracle’s equivocal answer is therefore closely interwoven with undecidability, but never does produce it; it is precisely its equivocality that enables and even forces a decision between yes and no, one and zero, casting the own son out of Thebes or being killed by him (Figure 12.2 (A)). Another aspect of the medium as a decision apparatus: its inner workings, the factors that determine the reply, the decision process itself remains impenetrable (the pilgrim in Dodona has no understanding of manteia; its machinations take place behind the curtain, on the other side of the perceptible). While we may certainly speak of ‘input’ or ‘output’, while previous and following events may suggest a detectable connection between cause and effect, which are linked or processed in the moment of decision, the divine computations that happen between the one and the other remain a mystery; the medium, the whole complex—including priest, nature, god, rules of communication, politics—can only be described as a ‘black box’. While something enters the box from one side, and something leaves the box in a certain

¹⁵ Fontenrose (1978: 22).

¹⁶ Luhmann (2000b: 132).

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Figure 12.2. Migration and media: a relay diagram

direction on the opposite side, the internal diversion is opaque and cannot be analysed (Figure 12.2 (B)). In summary, a ‘medium’ is a nodal point where a process reaches a bifurcation. Here, a complex set of factors (which all belong to the arrangement of the medium) participates in the distinction/selection between two or more possibilities, thus determining the further direction of the process (Figure 12.2 (C)). In Deleuzian terms, a medium would therefore be an assemblage that constantly transforms an indeterminate and uncountable set of potentialities into a concrete actuality. (The term ‘decision’ designates a ‘cutting-off ’ of choices, the elimination of all the other, not realized possibilities. Michel Serres translates this continuous process into a model of complexity reduction, when ‘the complication of possibility’ becomes ‘the resolved linearity of the actual’.¹⁷) And it is this concept of ‘decision’ that forms the link between medium and migration, transforms media into branching machines, and delineates migration as a tree diagram: when we think of Dodona (or Aleppo, or Tripoli), when we think of Zeus (or the smartphone or GPS), as locations and media of decision, it becomes obvious that migration is closely tied to the structure and use of media. In fact, migration can be conceptualized as a series of decisions concerning departure, the junctions that have to be passed, the entries and exits, the obstacles that have to be overcome, the roads that have to be taken or avoided, including all the possible detours and missed connections, and the places that can

¹⁷ Gibson (2005: 85).

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serve as future dwelling or home. Should I stay here or go to Croton? Should I take the land route or the inflatable dinghy? Via the Balkans or Lampedusa? Thus, in a very simplified and systematic way, one can conceive migration as drawing a path in a complex and multidimensional diagram whose every bifurcation is occupied by, or coupled to, a medium or decision apparatus. These media—the small metal sheet, the priest, the cell phone, the people trafficker—act as switch mechanisms that lead the migrant through the diagram. Its simultaneously technomorphic and phantasmatic structure, leading from a provisional point of ‘origin’ (which always turns out to be located not at the ‘beginning’ but deep inside the manifold net of possibilities) through a parcours of nodes to an equally provisional point of ‘arrival’, also motivates the surface movement of my own argument: it has already addressed the moment of departure, connected to the discursive machine of Dodona. The following part discusses the chain of decisions that constitutes the journey itself, left or right, by land or by sea, and unfolds inexorably into a broad manifoldness. And, finally, it will consider the moment of arrival, a refoundation or rather reinvention of a ‘position’, when Odysseus thrusts his oar into the dry ground and exclaims that here his journey will end, when Oedipus dies at Colonus and thus creates a political future. Meanwhile, since I myself am not enough of a ‘medium’ to decide or opt for only one structure, there will emerge a second structure or substructure. The argument does not only follow the stages of migration; it also moves through an array of material elements or agents that migration invests with a certain medial quality. While I speak about departure, I also speak about certain objects, small metal panels or smartphones. My remarks on routes and migratory movements will also touch on how the landscape and geographical spaces are transformed into media in their own right. And, with the ‘arrival’, I will also turn to the body of the migrant, to the peculiar medialization of his or her corporeality and to the ‘mediasomatic’ quality of migration. The text migrates along two closely entangled lines, along the spatial stages of migration and through its field of actors.

12.3. Descent into the Black Box The myth of Odysseus navigates through the labyrinth of the Mediterranean—not so much by merely following a prepared path

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(whose bifurcations would sporadically demand a decision) as by creating that very path with every turn in the course of its movements. It charts and simultaneously writes out Bronze Age space, foreign discoveries and exchanges, proximities and exclusions, encounters with the ‘Other’, the savage, and what the Latin will call the hostis (a figure who is both ‘guest’ and ‘enemy’). Meanwhile, and in a seemingly narrower geopolitical sense, the epos of the Odyssey can be considered the itinerary or map of all the routes, strategies, and events of migration that, in the eighth century of Homer, set in as an expansive colonizing movement in these same seas.¹⁸ In any case (or time), Odysseus, travelling through unknown lands, global wanderer, undocumented and shipwrecked alien, becomes the archetypical figure of the migrant and, therefore, an agent of distinction/ selection who begins to striate space and install ‘points’ of mediation. Once Troy has been taken, destroyed, and pillaged, says Michel Serres, he sets out for Ithaca after having, as far as possible, optimized his journey: ‘following this coast, then avoiding that area, taking advantage of this regular wind, entering that strait at a different point.’¹⁹ Deciding, however, which coast to follow and which area to avoid seems a complicated task when faced with an unknown multiplicity of perfectly disseminated, remote, impassable, unrelated places. He can hardly calculate or anticipate the dangers, landmarks, or boundaries, or look ahead into that expanse through which he has to journey and which presents itself as discontinuous and interrupted by splits and cracks: ‘inaccessible islands, and countries from which one cannot escape; the beach upon which the catastrophe casts you; the breaking of the waves; the shores from which one is hurled as one approaches.’²⁰ Here, threat and crisis always lurk. But, in accordance with the term ‘crisis’ designating crash or failure, but also a moment of judgement, discretion or choice, Odysseus performs the heroic deed of implementing selection in a terrain of indifference. He becomes the element that is thrown into a non-topographical space and causes it to form alternatives: one god prohibits his return home, whereas the other commands the opposite; Odysseus’ ship can be on the right or

¹⁸ Dougherty (2001) maintains that Odysseus’ travels can be read as the dangers and benefits of colonial ventures in the ‘New World’ of the colonies. Likewise, Foster (2017) interprets the Odyssey as a mirror of the colonial movements during the archaic period. ¹⁹ Serres (2016: 262). ²⁰ Serres (1982c: 48).

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wrong course; it ‘approaches Penelope and likewise moves away from her, sometimes it is on track but just as often it strays from the beaten path’.²¹ In short, the voyage may well appear erring, errant, and disordered, a voyage randonnée, a hardly predictable and nonlinear movement in ‘spaces that are [ . . . ] isolated, dangerous, and at times deadly to each other’. But, by sailing through this chaotic multiplicity, Odysseus must choose a passage and opens a ‘route’. He begins to ‘connect the crevices which run across the spatial chaos of disconnected varieties’; he produces intersections and junctions, turning into a ‘proto-worker of space, the prosopopeia of topology and nodes, the Weaver who works locally to join two worlds that are separated by a sudden stoppage’.²² In this manner, the precultural topology of seams and fissures constitutes the matrix for orientation and the context for the introduction of media. For instance, Odysseus descends to the underworld (Figure 12.2 (B)) to be instructed by the second-best medium of antiquity, Tiresias.²³ What is more, the blind seer, living in the darkness of Erebus, is the very epitome of the definition of mediality as decision—for Tiresias himself literally incorporates bifurcation, the Greek ‘X’, the ‘chi’ of chiasmus (Figure 12.2 (A)). While the Homeric Odyssey may not go further into this, the myth as retold by Hesiod or Ovid presents him as a transsexual, a man who becomes a woman who becomes a man;²⁴ he/ she embodies a liminal or mediating identity, a cross and a crossing of boundaries. And, apart from the duality that he is, Homer’s Tiresias does not merely offer a simple or stringent advice about how the hero shall operate in uncharted regions. Rather, he spreads out a plane of alternatives in front of Odysseus, a spatio-temporal zone of crossroads in the form of ‘either/or’. First he promises to answer all questions ‘truly’—that is, like a ²¹ Serres (2016: 262). ²² Serres (1982c: 52); see also Gibson (2005: 90). ²³ Odyssey, 11.90–149 (trans. A. T. Murray). ²⁴ Gantz (1996: 528–30) speculates that the myth of Tiresias’ transsexuality goes back to Hesiod. See also Ovid, Metamorphoses, book III (quoted from Innes 1955: 82): ‘Once, when two huge serpents were intertwining themselves in the depths of the green wood, he had struck them with his staff; from being a man he was miraculously changed into a woman, and had lived as such for seven years. In the eighth year he saw the same serpents again and said: “If there is such potent magic in the act of striking you that it changes the striker to the opposite sex, I shall now strike you again.” So, by striking the same snakes, he was restored to his former shape, and the nature with which he was born returned.’ According to Ptolemaeus Chennus, however, Tiresias’ sex oscillates constantly between male and female and makes him a liminal figure, androgynous and gynandrous. See Brisson (1997: 112–15). For the different versions of the myth, see Loraux (1995: 211–26).

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reliable decision-making machine, a well-functioning medium—and then he forecasts that Odysseus cannot escape the wrath of Poseidon, but may, after much suffering and hardship, nevertheless get home—if he can restrain himself and his companions from harming the cattle belonging to the god Helios. But, if he touches the flock, destruction of his ship and of his comrades will be the result. Either/or: either you commit a crime and never reach Ithaca or you comport yourself and return home. And, if you come home, you will kill the suitors either cunningly and in disguise or openly with your sharp bronze weapon. Tiresias looks at the future, not in terms of certainty or probability and likelihood, but in terms of ‘if . . . then’ occurrences. His selection mechanism excludes the unexpected; it works rather categorically than hypothetically, it operates like ‘the god at Delphi or Dodona [who] gives his oracles frequently in the form of “if . . . then” statements’.²⁵ This binary cause–effect structure is even more clearly demonstrated by the sorceress Circe.²⁶ A medium like Tiresias, she predicts a chain of upcoming decisions or intersections. A first bifurcation: Odysseus should stay on the Island of Aeaea and not leave for Ithaca, but, if he leaves—second bifurcation—his ship must either pass the wandering rocks ‘against which the deep blue waves of Amphitrite beat with terrific fury’, or it must pass between Scylla and Charybdis. Third bifurcation: should he decide to sail close to the rock of Scylla, he will lose six of his men; if he comes near Charybdis, he risks losing his entire crew and ship. In this manner, the medium Circe delineates a binary geography, putting the emphasis precisely on the moment of choice. Meanwhile, she is quite categorical in her assertion that she cannot decide for Odysseus: ‘At that point I shall no longer tell you fully on which side your course should lie, but you must yourself decide in your own heart, and I will tell you of both ways.’²⁷ Beyond this distinction of specific critical points or locations in the undifferentiated expanse of the Mediterranean, the subsequent insertion of a selective apparatus at each of these locations, and the overall reconceptualization of the entire topography as a series of such locations or coupling of apparatuses, the prophecies in the Odyssey demonstrate yet another fundamental feature of the medium. When Roland Barthes paraphrases the Heraclitian admonition that manteia ‘speaks the locus of ²⁵ Schutz (1959: 74). ²⁶ Odyssey, 12.21–152 (trans. A. T. Murray). ²⁷ Odyssey, 12.56–8 (trans. A. T. Murray).

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meaning but does not name it’,²⁸ this invokes the peculiar doublemeaning of Tiresias’ words regarding the hero’s old age and death: But when you have slain the suitors [ . . . ] then go abroad, taking a shapely oar, until you come to men that know nothing of the sea [ . . . ] When another wayfarer, on meeting you, shall say that you have a winnowing fan on your stout shoulder, then fix in the earth your shapely oar and make handsome offerings to the lord Poseidon—a ram, and a bull, and a boar that mates with sows—and depart for your home [ . . . ] And death shall come to you yourself away ἐξ ἁλὸς, the gentlest imaginable, that shall lay you low when you are overcome with sleek old age, and your people shall be dwelling in prosperity around you.²⁹

While most of this augury is unambiguous in its listing of potentialities, it suddenly reaches a point of vagueness with respect to the ultimate fate of Odysseus (which will happen not only after his personal journey has ended, but which also lies beyond the limits of the diegetic time of the Odyssey itself). This opacity is caused by the two possible meanings of the expression ἐξ ἁλὸς, ‘from the sea’ and ‘far from the sea’, a point of indecision that introduces ‘parasitic noise’ in the binary system and contaminates the transmitted information with the non-signifying and non-differentiated. Ἐξ ἁλὸς is the uninvited guest, the ultimate parasite, as Michel Serres would suggest. Aside from being an organism that lives off another organism, ‘that takes without giving and weakens without killing’, the parasite is also ‘the static in a system or the interference in a channel’.³⁰ It stops the system by introducing ‘an interruption, a corruption, a rupture of information’.³¹ It would, however, be an oversimplification to identify the parasite only with the loss of significance and ignore its function as operator, (thermal) exciter, producer of change and relations. The parasite marks and induces a beginning that may take the formless form of disorder or noise, but this ‘noise and this parasite produce a slope, a difference, a disequilibrium’³²—they act as a generalized clinamen, a minimal deviation that transforms entropic chaos into a process of potential distinction/selection. Thus, although the noise of ἐξ ἁλὸς appears as a malfunction or error, it is an integral part and

²⁸ ²⁹ ³¹ ³²

Heraclitus, fragment DK22B93; see Barthes (1972: 219). Odyssey, 11.115–37 (trans. A. T. Murray). ³⁰ Serres (1982: p. x). Serres (1982a: 3). ‘Noise’ or ‘static’ is rendered as ‘parasite’ in French. Serres (1982a: 188).

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ever-present feature of the medium. It is the condition of possibility of the system and has, according to Serres, ‘at least two values [ . . . ] a value of destruction and a value of construction’.³³ In this manner, Tiresias is an obstacle for communication, a perturbation, a parasite, and at the same time remains a decision machine. The more we look at the Odyssey as an epos of mediality and migration, the more we are confronted with an overall ‘infrastructure of connectivity’, a network of human and non-human media that are coupled to one another. On the one hand, this coupling of media programmes the narrative sequence or spatio-temporal chain of decisions that the migrant has to pass through. On the other hand, every node or station can be occupied by more than one medium (Figure 12.2 (C)): thus, Tiresias in the underworld and Circe on her island both provide overlapping, perhaps even conflicting, pieces of information about the very same point of Odysseus’ journey (Hermes, claims Serres, is a polytheist, is multicentered, a chain of hourglasses, a network of such chains. The angels that pass, be they gods or demons, occupy the crossroads: knots of exchange, changes, cuts, bifurcations of decision, spindles, bundles, where the many come in one single hand).³⁴ Whether linear, crosslinked, or manifold—it is the combination of various of such hourglasses, spindles, and ‘black boxes’ that enables Odysseus to stay mobile, collect information about routes and relays, learn the tactics for survival. The Odyssey seems to suggest that migration always relies on a multitude of other persons, objects, and media to take the necessary decisions and transmit the necessary knowledge. This takes up at least two aspects of what Dimitris Papadopoulos and Vassilis Tsianos in their ‘net(h)nographic analysis’ of cross-border mobility call mobile commons, the ‘organizational ontology’³⁵ of migratory forms. The first aspect is the ‘invisible knowledge of mobility’ that constantly circulates between those ‘subaltern people on the move’—that is, ‘knowledge about border crossings, routes, shelters, hubs, escape routes, resting places; knowledge about policing and surveillance, ways to defy control, strategies against bio surveillance, etc.’.³⁶ This experienced

³³ Serres (1982a: 67). ³⁴ Serres (1982a: 44), emphasis added. ³⁵ Papadopoulos and Tsianos (2013); see also Trimikliniotis, Parsanoglou, and Tsianos (2015: 16, 53). ³⁶ Trimikliniotis, Parsanoglou, and Tsianos (2015: 53).

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and exchanged knowledge functions as solidarity in praxis, as affective cooperation and mutual support among migrants. It brings forth informal economies of care, even of survival. The second aspect or connection between the Odyssey and mobile commons is even more closely linked to the question of mediality: for it regards the infrastructure of connectivity, ‘which is crucial to distributing these knowledges and for facilitating the circular logistics of support to stay mobile: collecting, updating and evaluating knowledge by using a wide range of platforms and media—from the embodied knowledge travelling from mouth to mouth to social networks sites, geolocation technologies and alternative databases and communication streams’.³⁷ Tiresias and Circe are precisely this: media that transmit and update knowledge—about the route between Scylla and Charybdis, about shelter or escape ways—which Odysseus, at the crossroads, has to collect and evaluate.

12.4. X Marks the Spot No one, however, is more familiar with this than Oedipus, since crossroads and media make up the very structure and topic of his tragedy. He travels from Corinth to consult the oracle of Apollo at Delphi, where, amidst hallucinogenic hydrocarbon emissions, Pythia repeats the fatal prophecy that she has already delivered to Oedipus’ father. On his return trip, at the junction of Phocis, the road divides, one way leading to Daulis, the other to the city of Thebes.³⁸ When he reaches the crossroads, Oedipus—obedient to what he considers the will of the gods as expressed through the oracle, and determined to avoid his alleged father and mother—intends to choose the latter direction, but momentarily halts in uncertainty. For he is well aware that a bifurcation, tripartition, triodos, crossroads, ‘a road across a ribbon that divides space’,³⁹ is always associated with a moment of crisis or decision; he realizes that at least two futures lie literally right before him, that this forking is the spatial or graphic form of the oracle itself, or, in other words, that it charts the medium as a decision-machine. (Not to let the variance between crossroads and bifurcation, between X and Y, go unnoticed: the two figures ³⁷ Papadopoulos and Tsianos (2013: 191). ³⁸ Sophocles, Oedipus the King 715–34, 800–1, 1398–9. ³⁹ Serres (1982c: 46).

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may well differ graphically and diagrammatically, and, while X seems connected to notions of intersection, entanglement, or undecidability, Y emphasizes separation or partition. However, as symbolic ‘maps’ or figures of spatial transition, they both feature a central point of con/ divergence, a node that arrests continuity or motion and marks a critical rupture: the crossroads and triodos (‘where three roads meet’) thus become variations on the same idea—illustrated by Michel Serres ‘superimposing’ the forking of the road (Y) with its crossing a barrier or crack (X) by passing ‘between two high rocks’.⁴⁰ The result is a figure that incorporates both decision and traverse, halfway between X and Y, perhaps Ψ.) In any case, Phocis is the place where topography and prophecy meet, where the terrain itself adopts properties of the medium. Even though it will turn out that Oedipus may be good at solving riddles, but extremely bad at reading oracular utterances, even though his projection of the Delphian X onto the Y of the landscape will prove to be far from congruent, he fully understands the principle that an oracle ‘is a form of words, and the fulfillment of an oracle consists in the match— some kind of match—between those words and an event, in the future or the present or the past’.⁴¹ Only because Oedipus matches the oracle’s warning with the ‘wrong truth’, can this mismatch generate unforeseen relations that escape the intended dissociations, distinctions, and decisions. Behind his back, the Y, the bifurcating path, enables the tragic connection of the formerly unconnected and disparate, Delphi, on the one hand, that is ‘knowledge, meaning, consciousness’, and Thebes, on the other, that is ‘ignorance, blindness, the unconscious’, as Michel Serres has it⁴²—but also past and present or father and son, giving rise to patricide, incest, death.⁴³ Moreover, crossroads lead on to other crossroads, other relations and media (‘a chain of hourglasses’). In fact, the series of bifurcations continues when Oedipus encounters the Sphinx who guards the entrance to the city of Thebes. Just like Tiresias, she is the bodily equivalent of chi, of X (Figure 12.2 (A)):

⁴⁰ Serres (1982c: 46). A similar, although probably unwanted, conflation or undecidability between X and Y is implied in S. I. Johnston’s statement (1991: 217) that Greeks and Romans conceived of ‘a crossroad’ as ‘part of neither road A nor road B nor road C. ⁴¹ Wood (2003: 99). ⁴² Serres (1982c: 46). ⁴³ Gibson (2005: 89).

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She is a chimera, half-lion and half-woman; half four-legged, also, and half twolegged, and perhaps partly bird. She is a body sewn back together, badly sewn: two parts related by dichotomy, joined in the form of a Chi crowned by wings; she is a crossroads, with wings that protrude for one who no longer needs feet. The Sphinx is a bifurcation. And the crossroads is a chimera.⁴⁴

This, then, is the drama of Oedipus: he repeatedly falls victim to the law of the crossroads. As honoured king of Thebes, he will turn to the seer Tiresias to rid the city of the plague—and the androgynous shaman X will point to him as the cause of ‘the pollution of the country’ and also to the crime scene—τριπλαῖς ἁμαξιτοῖς—sending the king once again to the crossroads. Oedipus seems condemned never to pass through the parcours of decisions, but to run in an eternal loop from one bifurcation to the previous, always to return to the junction of Megas. A central notion of this myth is the inseparable link between decision and topography, the translation of distinction/selection into the landscape itself: it transforms a territory into a field of choices, micro-ramifications, and tragic alternatives. And it is precisely this ‘medialization’ of the landscape through the protagonist’s movement and encounters that is visualized by George Hadjimichalis’s installation Schiste Odos—the crossroad where Oedipus killed Laius. A description and history of the journey from Thebes to Corinth, Delphi, and the return to Thebes, 1990–95/97 (Figure 12.3).⁴⁵ Having identified, with the help of archaeologist Yannis Picoulas, the site of the legendary crossroads, Hadjimichalis transforms it into a multimedia work; he designs a large-scale model of the landscape made of thin steel sheets, which he paints with brownish magnesium pigment. The steel panels are then engraved with Oedipus’ fatal route: one can see the shore of the Corinthian gulf, some rugged hills and the mass of Mount Parnassus (home of the oracle of Apollo), the road, the crossings. Afterwards, the artist takes numerous photographs of his sculptural work—as if from a satellite, the miniature hills bathed in artificial sunlight that is reflected by the surface of the ‘sea’—and places them around the table, mixing them with photographs not of the model but of the ‘real’ countryside (taken from a moving vehicle), ⁴⁴ Serres (1982c: 47). ⁴⁵ Hadjimichalis’ Crossroads belongs to the Collection of the National Museum of Contemporary Arts, Athens (EMST); it was last exhibited in the Documenta 14 art exhibition in 2017. See (accessed 30 January 2019).

Figure 12.3. George Hadjimichalis, Crossroad: The Crossroad where Oedipus Killed Laius. A Description and History of the Journey from Thebes to Corinth, Delphi and the Return to Thebes, 1990–1995/97, installation, variable dimensions. Collection of the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens (detail from the installation, photograph by the author)

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, , 



which results in a peculiar oscillation between different levels of representation and intermedia strategies. In addition, Hadjimichalis introduces aerial photographs from the archives of the Greek Army Geographical Department, maps of the terrain in which he marks the route of Oedipus, even a small oil painting, and, finally, a video display, on which the visitor can follow Oedipus along his path only to find out that the screen shows nothing but the model in extreme close-up— making the viewer experience ‘the deception that undid Oedipus [ . . . ] as a deception on the part of the medium’.⁴⁶ However, Hadjimichalis’s Schiste Odos does more than ‘apply’ media technology to a landscape or point to the rivalry or complicity between myth, ‘reality,’ painting, photography, and sculpture.⁴⁷ It medializes the landscape itself. It makes visible how decision processes contaminate physical space, how a decision finds itself inscribed in the forking of a path, how that forking is the decision. The tragedy of Oedipus is included in and conveyed by the landscape and its media qualities, by his and its spatial accidents, bifurcations, and catastrophes.

12.5. The Migrant is the Medium After a discussion of the media of departure, direction, and detour, after correlating metal sheets and smartphones, oracles and GPS, Odysseus and rubber dinghies on the Mediterranean, there are perhaps a few words to say about the migrant’s arrival (although always precarious and ‘in-definite’) and about her or his bodily self becoming a medium. To Vilém Flusser, the migrant is the one who throws off the ‘fluffy, muffling blanket of the habitually settled’, who sets a life of connections against those who ‘try to maintain the mysteries within which they are enshrouded’.⁴⁸ In this manner, Flusser conceives of the migrant as an issue of cultural as well as political perception; the migrant offers or, rather, is a disturbing window, a window on the world, and at the same time a mirror reflecting those who are enveloped by the self-perpetuating mysteries of ‘Heimat’: the migrant opens up a field of possibilities that includes new insights or new bonds. And not only can migration interconnect and modulate images of self and other; beyond that it presents ⁴⁶ Seemann (2001: 14).

⁴⁷ Gore (2001: 78).

⁴⁸ Finger (2015: 278).

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

 

their relation (and therefore itself ) as a decision between existential concepts; it is the fundamental alternative or ‘difference’—the migrant is a medium, too. I want to think further in this direction and point to the subjectivity and corporeality of the migrant, to the migratory body as something that does not so much depend on so many media as it is itself turned into an agent of transference. In his essay Of Hospitality, Jacques Derrida retells the story of that other Oedipus, Oedipus at Colonus, the central myth of migration and the absolute foreigner, as he claims. Shortly before his death, Oedipus— an alien and a sort of ‘illegal immigrant’⁴⁹—reaches the village of Colonus. Here, he enters the sacred ground of the Furies and recalls that this grove was indicated by the oracle as the ‘respite’ from all his misfortunes and location of his life’s final chapter. The citizens—the chorus— demand from the stranger to leave before he brings ruin to the city, but concede to wait for Theseus’ sovereign judgement. When he arrives, he not only welcomes the dethroned, blind, and half-mad Oedipus in full awareness of his crimes, but also suggests that this ξένος might teach him: ‘Teach me [δίδασκε]. For I know myself what it means to be raised in exile, like you, and in foreign lands, I wrestled with many hazards, more than any other man. So there is no stranger, as you are now, from whom I would turn away or fail to help.’⁵⁰ Oedipus agrees to give the desired lesson (διδάξω) to Theseus, who understands the experience of exile and willingly receives the ‘polluted’ man, and to reward him for his unconditional hospitality by revealing the location of his blessed final resting place—only, however, after enjoining the king to keep the secret, particularly from his sisters/daughters, for he wishes to remain forever unfindable. ‘Gift for gift,’ ‘protection in exchange for protection’.⁵¹ Yet, he does not tell the secret before his dying hour: instead Theseus ‘will find out for himself, and will thenceforth have to keep hidden, by accompanying him right to his last dwelling place, his last stay, his last habitat’.⁵² Indeed, knowing the place of the ‘ungrave’ with ‘no fixed address for death’ will oblige Theseus to guard that knowledge and hand it down. It is precisely this contract, the oath between two foreigners, that,

⁴⁹ Derrida (2000: 103). ⁵⁰ Sophocles, in the translation by McCoy (2013: 54–5). ⁵¹ McCoy (2013: 57–8). ⁵² Derrida (2000: 97).

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, , 



according to Derrida, becomes the founding act of the polis and the confirmation of its political community: Tradition will be guaranteed at this price: good tradition, the one that will rescue the city, the one that will guarantee the political safety of the city, it is said that it will be borne [ . . . ] through the transmission of a secret. Not just any living secret, but a secret concerning the clandestine site of a death, namely, the death of Oedipus. Secret knowledge [ . . . ] where dies the great transgressor, the outlaw, the blind anomos.⁵³

It would seem, then, that the stranger guarantees the existence of a political community through death and the secret of a grave; that she or he ‘is transformed into a positive power to the city’.⁵⁴ Obviously, this concept of mediation—the migrant becoming the possibility of communication, communing, and community by insisting specifically on the indistinct, undecided, withdrawn—deviates from the initial and rather straightforward notion of media as decision-machines. However, Oedipus—embodiment of decision and bifurcation—may carry this concept into the polis not to mark an ‘end’ of distinction/selection, but to reach its most foreign extreme in the relation of knowledge/location and ignorance/placelessness. Only on the ground of this ‘ungrave’ can a tradition and politics in the form of a branching continuum of generations, discourses, social claims, inclusions, and exclusions be instituted. Thus, concludes Derrida, any society might in fact begin with the secret absence/presence of the foreign. In this respect, the placelessness of the grave of Oedipus—just like the indelible uncertainty of ἐξ ἁλὸς, the reason and place of Odysseus’ death—constitutes the condition also of our politics. This, of course, does not imply a cynical necessity for the polis or state to condone the death of others; it does not ennoble or justify the shameful fact that we keep producing so many placeless bodies. On the contrary, it reinscribes the foreign and the other as a perpetual absence into our political founding acts. Theseus, for his part, understands the ‘lesson’ of Oedipus and conceives of the political community as a work of the other—as Plutarch claims: ‘Farther yet designing to enlarge his city, he invited all strangers to come and enjoy

⁵³ Derrida (2000: 99).

⁵⁴ McCoy (2013: 59).

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 

equal privileges with the natives, and it is said that the common form, “Come hither all ye people,” was the words that Theseus proclaimed when he thus set up a commonwealth, in a manner, for all nations.’⁵⁵ (And: with the help of the migrant’s X, one might in the end even be able to cross out these all too self-assured terms, the ‘commonwealth’, the ‘nation’, that seem to come from the Roman citizen Plutarch rather than the priest at Delphi. With X, one might be able to think not of admission, inclusion, ‘integration’, but of the uncircumventable ground of the foreign.)

⁵⁵ Plutarch, Lives, i. 23 (trans. J. Dryden).

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General Index Abbott, Edwin 105 abjad, Hebrew 42, 43 ablative 16, 88 abstraction 22–3, 41, 42, 60 n. 21, 68, 69, 85, 89, 92–3, 98, 112, 133, 164–5, 175, 177, 268, 278–9, 282, 283–4, 288 Adorno, Theodor 217 Aeschylus, 137, 232, 276, 279, 280 aesthetics vi, 4, 6, 7, 15, 19, 21, 23, 28, 48, 60–1, 64, 65, 99, 107, 209, 215–16, 217, 218, 231, 258, 259, 276 Agatharchus 232 agency 4, 6, 8, 20, 25, 28, 30, 70, 183, 212, 218, 277, 294, 299, 300, 310 air as medium 73, 111, 158, 159, 162, 172, 181, 185–6 aisthesis 75, 88, 154–7, 160, 161, 162, 172–3 Alcibiades 264 Alexandria, library of 50, 76 Allen, Danielle 86–7 alphabet, Greek 20, 22, 23, 29–51, 53–4, 63, 65, 115–29, 134, 246, 255 alphabet, Latin 38, 39 Amasis II 62, 67 Anacreon 75 analogue technologies 22, 55, 65, 76 anamnēsis, see remembering anarchaeology 195, 201, 203–4 Anaxagoras 232, 277, 281 Anaximander 281 angels 20, 304 animal perception 156, 160, 222–4, 230 animal studies 17, 211 anthropology 21, 80, 109, 110, 112, 175–8, 179, 185, 211 anthrōpos 109–10 Antimachus 247 n. 25, 249, 250 antiquarianism 189–94 aoidoi 119–20, 123–30 Apelles 226, 230 aphorisms 16, 224, 268, 269 apodeictic reasoning (apodeixis) 23, 89, 96, 97, 99, 107, 152–3

Apollo 274–6, 277, 294, 305, 307 Arachne 24, 167–71, 183 archaeology 8, 25, 56, 187–96, 206–7, 281 archaeology of knowledge 9, 25, 187–96, 205, 245 archē 101, 104, 110 Archimedes 96, 228 archive 11, 18, 35, 76, 188, 190, 192, 194, 238, 253, 295 Aristippus 77, 110 Aristotle 10, 15, 24–25, 36–37, 54, 71–2, 74, 78, 100, 101, 102, 108, 110, 112, 147–65, 172–8, 182, 185, 240, 271 Eudemian Ethics 156 Metaphysics 78, 88–9, 104, 147, 151, 156, 176–8 Meteorology 158 Nicomachean Ethics 150, 156 On Generation and Corruption 102 On the Heavens 147, 158 On the Senses 162 On the Soul 154, 156, 157, 158, 160, 162, 164–5, 172–3, 176 Parts of Animals 160 Physics 163 Poetics vi, 251 Posterior Analytics 152, 153 Prior Analytics 152 Protrepticus 155 Sense and Sensibilia 155 Topics 147–8 Atari 187–92 Athena 170, 266 Babylon 63, 66, 106 Balbi, Gabriele 199 Bann, Stephen 219 Barnum, P. T. 216 Barthes, Roland 14, 296, 302–3 Baudrillard, Jean 48, 207 Baxandall, Michael 224, 233 Bazin, André 55, 190 Belshazzar 43

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Benjamin, Walter 16, 183, 207 biopolitics 17 body 4, 21, 28, 66, 73, 93, 95, 148, 158, 160, 162, 177, 179–81, 184, 186, 190, 191, 226, 229, 260, 268, 269, 272, 274, 275, 280, 282, 286, 289, 290, 299, 307, 310; see also corporeality, embodiment Bolter, David 6 book 2, 3, 8, 17, 18, 20, 26, 34, 35, 74, 76, 238, 240–1, 249, 250, 288–9 Book of Daniel 43 Botticelli, Sandro 229 Bradford, Ernle 49 Broadie, Sarah 162 Bryson, Norman 218, 222 Burghagen, Otto 274 Burnyeat, Miles 162 Butler, Judith 174 Butler, Shane 189, 207, 273 Cadmus and Harmonia 50 calculability 4, 83, 91, 106, 111, 209, 278, 297, 300 Callimachus 248–9, 250, 259 Calvus 248, 250 camera obscura 148, 198 capitalism 208–10, 215, 217 Caravaggio, Michelangelo 223 Carson, Anne 26, 238–46, 251, 296 Carter, Brandon 105 Carter, Howard 191 Catullus 237, 238, 239, 240, 241, 242, 244, 248, 255–8 Chalmers, David 93 chance 8, 61–1, 67, 206–10 channel, of communication or transmission 4, 6, 10, 12, 22, 26, 30, 36 n. 38, 37, 38, 39, 46, 47, 50, 59, 64, 68, 75, 240, 242, 243, 244, 252, 253, 254, 255, 261, 303 Chaos 132 China 106, 204 choruses 20, 310 chrono-photography 192, 208 cinema 3, 25, 31, 48, 191, 196–210, 217; see also film, film projector Circe 302, 304, 305 Clark, Andy 93–5 classical, the 2, 6, 9, 205–8 classics, as discipline 2, 10–13, 17–21, 28, 29

clay 3, 4, 22, 30, 56, 59, 61, 196, 198 cloud as a medium 207, 280, 287 coding 39, 48, 54, 55, 60, 117, 293 cognition 17, 74, 82, 89, 93–4, 130, 135, 137–8, 162, 173, 176–7, 178, 199, 212 coins 61, 63, 68, 196, 198, 210 colonization 27, 190, 196, 292, 293, 295, 300 colour 48, 152, 154, 157, 163, 168, 184, 223, 229, 233, 253, 277, 279 coming-into-being (genesis) 1, 7, 8, 17, 20, 23, 38, 48, 77–113, 115, 185–6, 209, 211, 217, 227, 267; see also discovery, invention, origins common sense (koine aisthesis) 157, 160, 172 communication and communication systems 2, 5, 7–10, 12, 13, 14, 20, 21, 22, 26, 29–51, 54, 58–61, 65–76, 94, 96, 116, 175, 182, 189, 238–61, 268–9, 270, 287, 294, 297, 304, 305, 311 compact disc 48 computer 19, 24, 25, 31, 34, 39, 40, 41, 48, 53, 94, 143, 182, 190, 200 n. 35, 224, 238 n. 5 computer graphics 48, 53 computing 18, 22, 30, 36, 46, 48 concealing vi, 17, 36, 68, 71–2, 219, 222, 226 n. 41, 235, 282, 285, 286, 287–8, 303 Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de 176–7 connectivity and connectivity infrastructures 9, 11, 12, 19, 23, 55, 61, 69, 89–90, 110, 112, 116, 118, 123, 126, 127, 131–5, 152–3, 155, 169, 174, 186, 190, 198, 202, 239, 240, 243, 246, 248, 250, 251, 264, 273, 275, 280–3, 287, 292, 294–305 corporeality 10, 162, 174, 179, 181, 190, 282, 299, 310; see also body, embodiment Coxon, A H. 267 crossroads 27, 301–8 cultural techniques vi, 9, 13, 14, 21, 23, 27, 54, 73 n. 62, 79–80, 109, 112–13 cuneiform 42, 115, 116 cybernetics 181 Cynthia 257

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  Daniel 43 Danto, Arthur 224 Daston, Lorraine 102–4 Davis, Whitney 224–5, 230, 231 De Kerckhove, Derrick 13 Debray, Régis 9, 14 deception 43, 200–1, 212, 213, 215–6, 218–25, 226–7, 240, 309 deduction 10, 89, 96, 121, 152, 163, 196, 268 deictic language 81, 83, 84, 272 deleting 24, 144 Deleuze, Giles 14, 185–6, 188–9, 201, 202, 295 Delphi oracle 27, 65, 128, 294–6, 302, 305–6, 308, 312 Demaratus 71–2 Democritus 73, 158, 232, 281 Demodocus 121 Derrida, Jacques 14, 55 n. 9, 85 n. 14, 285, 310–1 Descartes, René 107 diagrammatology 13, 21, 23, 78–79, 90, 109 diagrams 23, 28, 36, 37, 46, 77–113, 149, 188, 209, 228, 234–5, 298–9, 306 diaphanous 10, 71–2, 158–9 Diderot, Denis 175, 177–8, 185 digital computing 4, 10, 11, 19, 22, 30, 31, 32, 34, 36, 39, 40, 41, 46, 48, 54, 188, 189, 190, 193, 204, 238, 253, 254, 261, 272, 296 Diogenes Laertius 108, 277 Dionysus, 50, 275–7 discourse network 20, 38, 47, 64, 68, 76 discovery 82, 87, 89, 101, 108–9, 137–8, 142, 186, 188, 191, 204, 206, 210, 216, 283–4; see also cominginto-being, invention, origins dispositif 26, 199, 200 n. 35, 209, 214, 236 distortion, optical 231, 253 Dodona oracle 27, 291–9, 302 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor 263–4, 267, 268, 273, 290 Dou, Gerrit 219 Duve, Thierry de 227 dynamis 118, 163, 164 ear 4, 57, 59, 128, 253, 261 Eco, Umberto 253

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ecology 13, 17, 25, 183, 185 Egypt 42, 61, 62, 106, 110 n. 99, 116, 137, 190, 233 Eidinow, Esther 293 ekphrasis 23, 74–6 elegy 26, 72, 237–61 embodiment 3, 9, 12, 17, 20, 25, 26, 27, 28, 60, 65, 92, 93–4, 95, 125, 131, 179, 236, 273, 277, 279, 282, 287, 301, 305, 311 Empedocles 70 n. 52, 280, 281 enargeia 74 energeia 163 epideictic persuasion (epideixis) 23, 97, 99 epigrams 74–5, 108, 246 n. 22, 259 n. 59, 261 n. 66 epiphany 208, 209; see also revealing, unconcealment epistemology vi, 1, 4, 13, 19, 21, 26, 28, 32, 33, 49, 54, 73, 74, 76, 91, 107, 148, 156, 178, 189, 191–2, 206–7, 214, 234 epistolary texts 59, 61–71, 240–4, 260–1, 274 Ernst, Wolfgang 7, 14, 26, 189–95, 203, 239, 246, 252, 253 Eros 21, 132 etymology 15, 91 n. 29, 110, 120, 219, 236, 239–40, 242, 244, 245–6, 255, 282 Eudemus of Rhodes 104 Eumaeus 291 Eupalinos 100 Euripides 276, 279 Europa 170, 171 Eurydice 247 excavation 187–96, 207 exchange 11, 12, 24, 63, 67, 68, 197, 241, 242, 292, 300, 304, 305, 310 eye as organ of sight 4, 23, 40, 59, 70, 73, 74, 82, 90, 92–3, 103, 157, 158, 172, 179, 180, 184, 212, 224, 228, 230, 231, 232, 233, 236, 261, 264, 278, 280 falseness 191, 201–2, 204, 205 n. 53, 286 n. 82 Farrell, Joseph 251 Feldherr, Andrew 261 film 22, 25, 37, 48, 55, 97, 175–7, 198, 199, 208; see also cinema, film projector

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film projector 25, 198, 210 flesh as organ or medium of touch 156 n. 34, 160, 173 Florenskij, Pavel 183 Flusser, Vilém 272, 309 Foley, Miles 20 footprints 61, 224 forgetting 40–1, 125, 132, 148, 282, 288 Förster-Nietzsche, Elisabeth 280 Foucault, Michel 9, 14, 25, 26, 35, 37, 64, 193–5, 206 n. 57, 214, 272 Freud, Sigmund 14, 55–6, 179, 191 Gaia 124, 130, 132–3 Galileo Galilei 214 Gallus 248, 249, 250, 259 Gardner, Martin 108 Gaston-Granger, Gilles 152 Gelb, Ignace J. 42 genealogy 10, 13, 15, 21, 35, 54 n. 2, 130, 195, 198, 199, 204, 208, 247, 248 genesis, see coming-into-being geometry 23, 77–113, 136, 205, 206, 215, 228, 230, 231, 232, 233, 236 gestalt theory 25, 179–82 gesture, physical 78, 82, 94–5, 105, 111, 170, 172, 174, 184, 267, 272 ghosts 20, 190, 249, 281–2 Gibson, Roy 251 gimmick, antinomies of 215–18 global positioning systems (GPS) 27, 292, 296, 298, 309 Gödel, Kurt 297 Gombrich, Ersnt 215–17, 229 Goodman, Nelson 215 Gorgo 71 Gowers, Timothy 105 gramophone 35, 37, 48, 55 n. 7 graph 90, 111 graphics, computer 48, 53 Greenberg, Clement 227, 230 Grusin, Richard 6 Guattari, Felix 14, 185–6, 295 Guillory, John 239–40 Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich 51 Hacking, Ian 79, 103–9, 111 Hadjimichalis, George 307–9 Hagen, Wolfgang 244–5 Hahn, Robert 100–2, 104, 106, 108

hand as a medium 4, 23, 27, 55, 59, 62, 67, 84, 90, 91–5, 110, 175, 179, 184–5, 225, 227, 228, 266–9, 272–5, 282–90 handwriting 19, 27, 238, 240, 253 n. 44 hardware 3, 12, 32, 189, 191, 194 Harman, Graham 288 Harnett, William 216 harp 56–8, 60 Harris, Neil 216 Hausmann, Raoul 183 Havelock, Eric 11, 13 Hayles, N. Katherine 19 hearing 154, 155, 156, 159, 185, 186 Hegel, Georg W. F. 42, 207, 270, 280, 286 Heidegger, Martin 14, 19, 27, 33, 36, 38, 40, 45, 51, 125, 184, 191–2, 263, 266 n. 12, 269–72, 282–90 Hennion, Antoine 184 Heraclitus 271, 277–9, 281 heralds, see messengers and heralds Hermes 12, 304 Hermesianax 247, 248, 250 Herodotus 22, 61–72, 75–6, 100, 110 n. 99 Heron of Alexandria 204 Hesiod 7, 23–4, 115–37, 301 Theogony 118, 119–35 hieroglyphs, Egyptian 42, 116 Hiller, Moritz 47 Hoffmann, Stefan 5 Holbein, Hans 231 Homer 5, 7, 16, 20, 27, 42, 43, 49, 119, 120, 130, 257, 267 Iliad 42, 119, 266, 267 Odyssey 16, 42, 49, 50, 119, 121, 257 n. 56, 266 n. 15, 267 n. 16, 291, 299–305 Horace 251 Horkheimer, Max 217 Horn, Eva 213 Hughes, Ted 26, 243–6 Huhtamo, Erkki 191, 195 Hunter, Richard 250 Husserl, Edmund 284 hypermediacy 6, 238 n. 3 hypotenuse 84, 97, 101, 108 Ihde, Don 272 illusion, techniques of 215–19, 223, 233, 236 images 4, 5, 14, 23, 41, 48, 55, 59, 60, 61, 65, 82, 83 n.11, 135, 137, 183, 198, 199, 201, 232, 252

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  imitation 83, 135, 136, 233, 238, 241, 248, 251 immediacy 7, 27, 29, 45, 50, 51, 153, 156, 161, 189, 269, 272, 283, 285, 289 impressing, techniques of 22–3, 53–6, 58, 59, 65, 69, 71, 73–6 incongruity, temporal 25 index 22, 53, 55, 60–1, 66, 69, 71, 76, 78, 92, 105, 111, 199, 200 n. 35, 219, 225, 228, 272 information systems and technologies 2, 3, 4, 7, 10, 11, 13, 21, 35, 36, 40, 46, 59, 65, 180, 243, 252–3, 255, 258, 303, 304 Ingold, Tim 109–13 Íñiguez, Diego Angulo 170 Innis, Harold 13 innovation, technological 22, 31, 39, 101, 191, 200, 209 inscribing and inscriptions 5, 23, 24, 26, 55 n. 9, 60, 64, 74 n. 70, 75, 76, 78 n. 3, 80 n. 7, 87, 92, 94, 111, 126, 145, 198, 241, 246, 255–60, 286, 292, 294 instrumentality 7, 11, 12, 13, 66, 67, 118, 120, 122, 124, 127, 131, 136, 137, 148, 158, 230 interface 10, 12, 56, 68, 123, 128, 135, 136, 182, 190, 193, 296 interference 8, 12, 59, 203, 252, 303; see also noise intermediality 13, 21, 56, 59, 60, 68, 70, 72, 75, 238, 248 internet 3, 8, 20, 191, 296 invention 23, 25, 53, 82, 92–3, 102, 109, 112, 115–18, 127, 128, 135–9, 142, 143, 144, 170, 177, 188, 195, 199, 200, 201, 202, 206, 208, 209, 216, 227 n. 46, 244, 246, 247, 255, 269, 270, 286, 288, 299; see also coming-into-being, discovery, origins, Theuth irony 201–3, 204, 210 irrationality 207–10 Jaeger, Werner 150 Jesionka, Henry 196–210 Jones, Alexander 235 Kant, Immanuel 158, 280 Katz, David 180–2 Kirschenbaum, Matthew 19

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Kittler, Friedrich 1, 2, 9, 13, 14, 16, 20, 22, 29–51, 53–5, 59, 60, 63, 64, 65, 213, 239, 240 n. 9, 254, 269–70, 272, 273–4, 282, 289 knowledge vi, 1, 2, 4, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 21, 23, 26, 27, 28, 30, 33, 37, 40, 72, 73, 82, 84–5, 87–8, 91–2, 93, 94, 96, 99, 107–9, 111, 130 n. 32, 135, 151, 152, 153, 156, 164, 169, 179, 191, 193, 194, 195, 201, 205, 206, 207, 214, 217, 273, 304, 305, 306, 310, 311; see also archaeology of knowledge, epistemology, information systems and technologies koine aisthesis, see common sense Köselitz, Heinrich 274–5 Koselleck, Reinhart 102 Krämer, Sybille 9 Krell, David Farrell 285 Kubler, George 184 Kulturtechniken, see cultural techniques Kurke, Leslie 68 labelling 11, 30, 32, 44, 94–5, 96, 104, 159, 188, 192, 201, 210 Lacan, Jacques 14, 223–2 Laertes 50 lament 26, 245–7, 249, 250, 251, 254–60 language 4, 5, 6, 7, 15, 21, 22, 35, 39, 42–7, 50–1, 60, 64, 74, 78, 81, 83–4, 89, 90, 95, 97, 108–9, 116, 122, 129, 143, 177, 214, 224, 240, 254, 268, 287, 290 Largier, Niklaus 174 laterna magica 48 Latour, Bruno 14, 19, 89, 98–100, 183 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 107, 108, 174, 185, 201, 202, 280 Leja, Michael 216–17 Lepidus, Aemelius Paulus 222 Leroi-Gourhan, André 111, 272 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 3 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 205 Levinas, Emmanuel 9 lines (drawn) 81–2, 83–4, 86–7, 88, 90, 95, 109, 110–12, 226–30, 287; see also thread, trace linteum 225–6, 229 literacy 11, 15, 18, 20, 38, 272, 294 lithography 48

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Liu, Alan 12 Long, A. A. 271 Lotze, Rudolf Hermann 178–81 Luhmann, Niklas 49, 63, 297 lyre 56–8, 75, 128, 152 machine 12, 14, 19, 24, 36, 40, 48, 143–5, 181–2, 195, 200 n. 35, 204, 261, 269–70, 272–5, 285, 287–8, 290, 291–312 Maecenas 257–8 Mansfeld, Jaap 267 maps 11, 90, 296, 300, 306, 309 Marcus, Ernst 183 Marg, Walter 132 Margulis, Lynn 186 materialism 14–5, 17, 29–31, 32, 189, 195, 266 n. 11 materiality 3, 5, 11, 18, 25, 68, 74, 76, 128, 162 mathematics 22, 23, 36, 40, 46, 48, 77–113, 115, 123 n. 19, 145, 192, 193, 228 matter 6, 10, 12, 16, 20, 24, 56, 70, 164, 189, 205, 271, 278, 282, 284, 285 McLuhan, Marshall 13, 16, 33, 34, 44, 45, 58, 183, 238, 251, 253, 254 media archaeology 7, 13, 21, 25, 26–7, 29, 55, 64, 187–210, 211–14, 235, 239, 243, 249, 250, 252–5, 261 media as decision-making machines 27–8, 291–312 media generativism 32–3, 37, 41, 45, 50 media history and historiography 1, 11, 18, 20–1, 25, 35, 36, 39, 40, 42, 46, 48, 193, 198–202 media marginalism 32–3, 37–9, 45, 47, 48, 50 media studies 2, 10–17, 21–2, 29, 32, 33, 37, 50, 51, 80, 183 media, imaginary 187–209 media, old and new 1, 11, 34–5, 200, 238, 239 medium, etymologies of 15, 239–40, 244–5 medius 6, 239–40, 245 memory 5, 9, 14, 18, 20, 21, 23, 24, 53, 55, 73, 82, 119, 121, 121–5, 127, 131, 179, 185, 238, 252, 254, 288 Menelaos 50 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 179, 183

Mersch, Dieter 16 meson 24, 147–9, 151–4, 161, 163 Mesopotamia 115 mesotēs 24, 148–51 message 16, 26, 30, 33, 36, 37, 44, 46, 47, 60, 61, 63, 67, 69–72, 75, 130 n. 32, 167, 203, 243, 247, 249, 251, 252–4, 257, 261, 293, 296–7 messengers and heralds 12, 20, 63, 67 n. 44, 68 metabolê 151–2 metal 22, 56, 66, 196, 294, 299, 309 metapainting 25, 213, 236 metaphors, conceptual 4–5, 6, 8, 27, 53–6, 60, 70 n. 52, 74 n. 66, 96, 164, 174, 189, 192, 206 n. 57, 243, 266, 268, 281, 289–90 metaphysics, 7, 12, 15, 21, 23, 41, 61–72, 77–113, 117, 118, 135, 145, 183, 283 metaxy 6, 10, 24, 72 n. 58, 88, 147–65, 239–40 methexis 136 method 2, 13, 17, 21, 35, 88, 89, 98, 102, 117, 188–93, 195, 204–5, 266 n. 12 metre 254–5 Mieris, Frans van 220 migration 27, 291–312 Mimnermus 247 mind, conceptualizations of 53–6, 74, 93–4, 107, 135 mirror 198, 234–6 Mnemosyne 124–5, 127, 131, 134 modelling 87, 112 modernity 2, 8, 12, 14, 21, 22, 24, 25, 31, 55, 217, 282 Molholt, Rebecca 218 Morales, Helen 225–6, 229 Mourelatos, Alexander 267 mummy, Egyptian 190–1 Musaeus 247, 250 Muses 20, 118–32, 136 music 3, 14, 22, 39–40, 41, 42, 48, 51, 54, 57–60, 61, 75, 111, 123 n. 19, 128, 152, 153, 171, 253, 276 mythology 16, 118, 131–2, 135, 213, 247 Nagy, Gregory 20 Napier, John 50 Natale, Simone 199 naturalism 218, 222, 236 Netz, Reviel 78–9, 88–90, 95–109

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  Newman, Barnett 226 Ngai, Sianne 215–16 Nietzsche, Friedrich 7, 14, 16, 18, 19, 27, 195, 202, 211, 254, 269–90 Nightingale, Andrea 99–100, 102, 104, 108 Nimrud 204 nodal points 28, 37, 199, 214, 298–309 noise 12, 14, 26, 46–7, 50, 59, 237, 239, 242, 244, 252–7, 261, 290, 303; see also interference notation systems and scripts 4, 15, 29–51, 55, 59, 65, 68, 112, 116–21, 125–6, 128, 129, 131, 215, 272, 286 Novalis 203 numbers 4, 22, 39, 40, 41, 54, 88, 90, 91, 109, 118, 135–8, 142–3, 148, 273 nymphs 51 Odysseus 27, 49, 50, 121, 257, 291–2, 299–305, 309, 311 Oedipus 27, 28, 276, 299, 305–11 Ong, Walter 11, 13 ontology 3, 23, 24, 25, 32, 33, 34, 36, 37, 40, 41, 49, 53, 55, 56, 61, 63 n. 26, 73, 78–80, 88, 97–104, 106 n. 82, 147, 165, 189, 213, 214, 285, 292, 304 operational chains 9 optics 48, 171, 183, 198, 200 n. 35, 215, 230, 231, 232–4, 236 oracle 27, 70, 123, 291–310; see also Pythia orality 11, 15, 18, 20, 38–9, 42, 63, 67, 72, 92, 119, 121, 122, 127, 137, 246, 249, 254–5, 260 n. 64 organs, sensory 4, 24–5, 73, 155, 157, 159–63, 172–3, 178, 185, 186 origins 6, 15, 22, 72 n. 58, 74, 100, 130, 137, 195, 198, 232, 239, 245, 248, 249, 251, 254, 268; see also archē, coming-into-being, discovery, invention Oroites 68 Orpheus 247, 250 ousia 6, 78, 79, 84, 97, 99, 103 Ovid 26, 170, 239, 245–6, 248, 249–51, 259–60, 301 painting 3, 4, 25–6, 48, 137, 167–71, 204, 211–36, 309 Panofsky, Erwin 226 Papaconstantinou, Nina vi

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Papadopoulos, Dimitris 304 paper vi, 85, 94, 105, 111 n. 106, 188, 238, 241, 273, 284, 287 papyrus 3, 26, 55, 63, 65 n. 33, 74, 249, 287 parasite 20, 303–4 Parikka, Jussi 188, 189, 191, 200, 252, 261 Parmenides 27, 135, 263–73, 277–9, 281, 285–9 Parrhasius 25–6, 211–36 Parry, Milman 20 Parthenius 247 Peirce, Charles Sanders 61, 92 Penelope 49, 301 Penrose, Roger 105 Pentheus 50 perception 2, 5, 7–10, 14, 15, 18, 20, 21, 23, 24–5, 28, 30, 33, 53–5, 68, 71–4, 93, 94, 97, 149–65, 171–85, 211–14, 222, 224, 232–3, 267, 284, 290, 309 performance and theatre 5, 7, 18, 20, 26, 58–60, 168, 170, 215, 219, 231–2, 236, 246, 276 perspective 53, 169, 232 Peters, John Durham 9, 14, 16, 88, 268, 280 phantasia 74 phantasmagoria 235 n. 65 phenomenology 3, 21, 48, 163, 179, 180, 212, 232 Philitas 247, 248, 249, 250–1 Phocis 306 Phoenician alphabet 116–17 phoneme 42–3, 117 phonography 20, 22, 31, 45, 48, 55, 56, 253–4 photography 3, 22, 35, 45, 48, 55, 61, 190, 192, 199–200, 203, 208, 213, 240, 284, 285, 307, 309 Picoulas, Yannis 307 pictoriality 43, 212, 224–5, 230 Pino, Paolo 226 plaster 22, 56, 57, 58 Plate, Liedeke 243 Plath, Sylvia 244 Plato 7, 10, 15, 16, 21, 23–4, 40, 41, 53–6, 74, 78–113, 115–18, 124, 126, 128, 135–45, 155–6, 158, 175, 202, 207, 209, 231, 264, 266, 268, 276, 288 Cratylus 88 Ion 69, 124, 126, 128, 135

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Plato (cont.) Meno 78, 80–93, 98, 107 Phaedo 109 Phaedrus 56, 116, 118, 136–7, 268, 288 Philebus 117, 155 Republic 78, 80, 82–8, 92, 100, 135, 137 Sophist 86, 99, 231 Symposium 264, 268 Theaetetus 53–4, 74, 268 Pliny the Elder 25, 66, 196, 212–13, 217–30, 236 Plutarch 128, 311–12 poet as medium 118–35 poiēsis 122–3 Polycrates 22, 53, 61–76 Pontos 132–3 Porter, James 6, 270 Poseidon 302, 303 Posidippus, Lithika 74–6 posthumanism 14, 17 potentiality 149, 164, 165 Powell, Barry 41–2, 127 presence 1, 2, 7, 9, 12, 20, 27, 36, 38, 40–1, 51, 65, 70, 71, 140, 163, 189, 200, 203, 208, 225, 227, 228, 231, 244, 264, 268, 272, 273, 284, 288, 311 Presocratics 7, 16, 27, 51, 73, 118, 136, 155, 159, 232, 263–89 Priam 50 printing 20, 22, 34, 35, 55 Prometheus 137, 276 proof, demonstrative 23, 107 Propertius 26, 239, 247–51, 257–60 prophets 20, 43, 294, 296; see also oracle, Pythia prosthetic technology 25, 160, 180–2 Protogenes 226, 230 Pseudo-Ptolemy, De speculis 234–5 psychê 53, 56, 69, 72, 76 Ptolemy 232–3 Pulcher, Claudius 222 Pythagoreans 97, 102, 111 Pythia 294, 305; see also oracle Quintilian, Marcus Fabius 223 radio 3, 20, 36, 46, 48, 242, 243, 244, 252, 253 rationality 25, 208–10

reading practices 4, 5, 9, 11, 16, 18, 19, 24, 38, 47, 107, 119–23, 127, 129, 131–2, 144, 161, 162, 186, 223, 230, 238 n. 5, 246 n. 24, 249, 259, 261, 264, 274, 275, 296, 306 realism 7, 20, 22, 29–51, 213–4, 218, 222–3, 231, 236 reality 22, 29–33, 36–51, 101, 117, 148, 174, 208, 218, 221, 222, 228, 230, 273, 278, 279, 281, 282, 283, 288, 292, 309 recognition 9, 66, 77, 82, 89, 106, 111, 119, 121–2, 127, 131, 137, 139, 140–1, 143, 212, 224–5, 233, 270 recollection, see remembering recording (of data) 7, 22, 31, 42, 43, 53, 55, 65, 90, 92, 112, 116, 119, 122, 127, 129, 137, 188, 192, 193, 203, 213, 225, 238, 241, 242, 243, 246, 249, 253, 254, 255, 256, 260 recursion 3, 13, 39, 40, 41, 46, 72–6 Reinhard, Andrew 187 remediation 238, 239, 241, 243, 244, 246, 247, 249, 251, 256, 260, 261 remembering 54, 82, 85, 98, 125–7, 131–2, 139, 140, 141–5, 248, 256, 257, 282, 288 repetition and repeatability 24, 76, 96, 132, 137, 139, 140–5, 210, 216, 241, 245–6, 248, 249, 250, 255, 307 representation 4, 7, 15, 22, 25, 29–51, 59, 61, 76, 87, 117, 121, 137, 155, 162, 170, 192, 202, 213, 223, 231, 232, 234, 235, 247, 251 n. 36, 252, 276, 283, 284, 309 reproduction 5, 6, 22, 26, 46, 48, 55 n. 7, 57, 59, 60, 69, 96, 202, 223, 231, 238, 240, 241, 242, 252, 261 revealing 4, 7, 17, 20, 36, 38, 40, 51, 71, 75, 131, 137–8, 139, 142, 143, 169, 191, 192 n. 19, 207, 219–20, 225, 271, 273, 283, 288, 297, 310; see also epiphany, unconcealment Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg 184 rhetoric 12, 15, 16, 17 n. 54, 97, 99, 191, 202, 203, 204, 228 n. 48, 234 n. 64, 256, 267 Riegl, Alois 183 ring, finger 54–70, 164

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  Sagan, Dorion 186 Salignac, Mélanie de 177 sard 56–7 Saxl, Fritz 169, 171, 183 Schopenhauer, Arthur 280 Schröter, Jens 270 scribe vi, 68 n. 46, 115, 119–20, 122, 125–7, 129, 131, 292 scripts, see notation systems and scripts scroll 3, 65, 121–2, 125–7, 240 Scylla and Charybdis 302, 305 sea as elemental medium 62, 63, 66–7, 69, 70, 76 sealing, technology of 60–1 seals 22, 53–76, 164 self-referencing 124, 130–4, 137, 141, 173, 177, 178 semiotic systems 3, 5, 57, 60–1, 117, 120–3, 127, 128, 131, 137, 253 senses 4, 17, 22, 24, 41, 43–4, 51, 53, 59, 60, 73 n.65, 88, 110, 136, 154–61, 170–3, 178, 182, 183 n. 38, 185, 186 Serres, Michel 14, 91, 183, 207, 298, 300, 303–4, 306 Setton, Dirk 177–8 Sextus Empiricus 223, 232 Shannon, Claude 26, 36, 37, 46–7, 252–3 shoreline, as epistemological metaphor 205–10 Shorey, Paul 83 Siegert, Bernhard 14, 63 sight 23, 71, 73, 83, 93, 155–7, 159, 163 n. 54, 177, 263, 278; see also vision sign 9, 24, 27, 42, 43, 44, 59, 69, 117, 118, 132, 142–4, 183, 223, 224, 230, 268, 273, 292, 294 signal 12, 37, 38, 46, 67, 192, 202, 239, 250, 252–5, 259, 286 signature 57, 59, 60, 65, 241 n. 13 signification 5, 57, 59, 68, 71 Simonides 3 singing 5, 26, 31, 40, 42, 43, 49, 50, 51, 59, 75, 119–31, 136, 249, 250 Sirens 16, 49, 50, 51 Sisyphus 50 skills 4, 6, 9, 12, 16, 20, 23, 79, 80, 96, 292 skin 24, 173, 175, 182, 185, 186, 222 slate, wax 53 slaves 20, 80–107, 259, 285, 289 smartphone 27, 298, 299, 309

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smell 155, 156, 159, 185 social media 8, 11, 20, 174 Socrates 21, 40, 41, 53, 54, 78, 80–100, 136, 137, 152, 153, 268, 276, 279, 288 software 4, 12, 33, 189, 191 Sony Walkman 50 Sophocles 276, 279 Oedipus at Colonus 27–8, 310–11 Oedipus the King 305–7 Sorabji, Richard 162 soul 20, 21, 53–4, 56, 62, 66, 69, 82, 84–7, 95, 154, 162, 164, 172 n. 8, 268 sound 3, 10, 16, 22, 31, 35, 39, 41, 42, 43, 45, 47, 48, 50, 51, 55, 113, 116, 117, 121, 124, 126, 128, 129, 142, 143, 154, 199, 242, 247, 251–4, 294 sound recording 22, 31, 55, 116, 242, 243, 253 Spelt, Adriaen van der 220 Sphinx 306–7 stamp 22, 55, 58, 59, 66, 72, 74, 75 stasis of writing 118 Stein, Jordan 294 Stiegler, Barbara 269 Stielger, Bernard 14 stone 4, 22, 26, 55, 56, 57, 59, 61, 68–70, 74–76, 206, 220, 240, 241, 246, 253, 255–61, 279; see also tombs and tombstones structuralism 32, 44, 46, 101, 118, 123, 131, 136, 137, 138, 141, 192, 199, 206 n. 57, 292 Suárez, Francisco 160–1 subjectivity 4, 9, 16, 30, 73, 174, 179, 183–4, 186, 192 n.19, 223, 230, 235, 284, 290, 295, 310 Sumer 42, 115 Summers, David 230 Svenbro, Jesper 121–2 switch mechanisms 28, 185, 299 syllogism 148, 151–4, 155, 161, 163, 196 symbol 12, 22, 24, 39, 42, 43, 60, 64, 65, 67 n. 41, 68, 69, 71, 76, 87, 135, 144, 145, 192, 198, 272, 277, 278, 281, 287, 306 tablet, clay 30, 59 tablet, glass 197 tablet, leaden 292–5

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tablet, wax 53, 55, 60, 65, 71–2 tactility 24–5, 155, 156, 167–86, 240; see also teletactility, touch Talbot, Henry Fox 48, 55 taste 154, 155, 156, 157, 159–61, 185, 186 techne 15, 20, 38 techniques, see cultural techniques, illusion, impressing telecommunications 35, 243, 252, 254, 261 teleology 25, 36, 104, 110, 112, 178, 195, 198, 203, 204 n. 47 telephone 44, 46, 47, 50, 94, 24–2, 240, 253, 294, 295 teletactility 178–82 television 3, 48, 244, 253, 296 Telléz, Javier 175–7 temporality 8, 61 n. 22, 140, 201, 280 textiles 3, 168, 169, 170, 226 texture 158, 168, 171, 182, 190, 220, 230 Thales 101, 104, 108, 271, 277 Thamos, king of Egypt 137 theatre, see performance and theatre Themistius 159, 162 Theodorakopoulos, Elena 255 Theodorus of Samos 62, 65, 66, 69 Theognis 70, 72, 75 theorem 101–2, 108, 109 theōria 99, 102, 108, 155 Theseus 310, 311–12 Theuth 117, 136–8 thinking, modes and conceptualizations of 2, 6, 9, 14–15, 18, 21, 23, 24, 80–95, 103–4, 107, 111–13, 116–18, 125, 135, 138–43, 155, 175, 176, 177, 191, 199, 200, 203, 207, 240, 267, 283, 285–6, 289, 290 Thomas Aquinas 174 thread 110–12, 167, 169, 171, 229; see also lines (drawn), trace Tibullus 26, 239, 246, 247, 248, 249, 251, 256–60 Tiresias 301–7 Titans 133–4 Titian 171 tombs and tombstones 190, 240, 246, 253, 255–61; see also stone tools vi, 4, 9, 11, 13, 18, 20, 23, 54, 66, 74, 79, 89, 90, 92, 94, 96, 110 n. 99, 111, 148, 180, 190, 250, 270, 274, 275, 283, 286, 288, 295

topography 219, 221, 302, 306, 307 Tor, Shaul 267 touch 24–5, 71 n. 54, 73, 75, 155–61, 169, 171, 172–86, 190, 225, 266, 268, 274, 290, 299 trace 5, 6, 9, 15, 22, 49, 50, 55, 61, 109–12, 206, 227, 228, 238, 243, 250; see also line, thread Tracy, T. J. 150 tradition 3, 7, 8, 14, 15, 26, 27, 30, 32, 63, 72, 79, 95, 97, 100, 101, 107–109, 121, 175, 176, 202, 209 n. 63, 218, 227, 238–40, 243–6, 248–51, 254–6, 258, 261, 267, 270, 278, 286, 289, 311 translation 8, 18, 79, 128–9, 238, 246 n. 24, 274–5, 296, 307 transmission vi, 1, 2, 7–10, 13, 14, 17–23, 26–8, 36, 37, 42–4, 46, 47, 50, 53–7, 59–61, 65, 67, 68, 70–6, 96, 97, 131, 162, 163, 237, 239, 243, 244, 246, 247, 250–5, 258, 260, 261, 271, 293, 297, 303–5, 311 transparency 6, 7, 10, 50, 66 n. 39, 72, 149, 158–60, 163 n. 54, 165, 172, 188, 218, 226 n. 41; see also diaphanous, metaxy travelling 5, 27–8, 49, 87, 99, 257, 263–73, 282, 289–90, 291–312 Trofimovich, Stepan 263, 264, 268, 290 trompe l’oeil 25, 211, 212, 214–21, 226, 230, 231, 234 Troy 50, 300 truth 15, 21, 23, 40, 85, 98, 99, 105 n. 77, 119–20, 128, 132, 175, 191–2, 201–3, 230 n. 55, 267, 269, 271, 273, 278, 282–3, 285–6, 296, 306 Tsianos, Vassilis 304 Turing, Alan 24, 36, 54, 143–5 Tutankhamun 190 typewriter 27, 33–5, 37, 48, 263, 269, 271–5, 282, 285, 287–90 typewriting 19, 241, 242, 243, 272, 273, 275, 283, 288, 289 unconcealment 33, 36–8, 40, 51, 128 n. 29, 282, 285; see also epiphany, revealing Uranos 124, 132, 133 Valerius Maximus 228 variantology 195

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  Velázquez, Diego 167–72 verisimilitude 26, 218, 223, 231 video 48, 77, 187, 192, 203 Virilio, Paul 14 vision 25–6, 73, 75, 87, 97, 99, 154, 155, 157, 158, 176, 185, 199, 202, 213, 218, 223–5, 230–6; see also sight Vismann, Cornelia 14, 16 visualization 86, 87, 88, 93; see also representation Vitruvius 77, 110, 231, 232 Vogl, Joseph 214 voice 7, 10, 31, 43, 47, 51, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 242, 243, 244, 253, 256, 257, 261, 290, 296 Wagner, Richard 276, 280, 287 wall-painting 218, 221 Warburg, Aby 170, 183 Watt, Allan 275 wax 4, 22, 53–6, 59, 60, 61, 65, 71, 72, 73, 164, 287

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Weaver, Warren 26, 252, 253 weaving 169–70 Weber, Ernst Heinrich 178, 179 Wehrli, Fritz 150, 151 white noise 26, 244, 252–3, 255, 257, 261 White, Hayden 202, 203 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 229 Winthrop-Young, Geoffrey 34, 56, 64, 68, 79, 274 witnessing 20, 58, 99 writing systems; see notation systems and scripts Wutz, Michael 274 Zadar (Roman Iader) 25, 187, 196, 198, 200, 203 Zanki, Josip 196, 197 Zeus 120, 124–7, 130–4, 170, 291, 293, 295, 298 Zeuxis 25, 212, 213, 215–26, 229, 230, 231 Zielinski, Siegfried 14, 195, 199, 200, 204, 209 zoetrope 198