Abstract

Siegfried Zielinski. […After the Media] News from the Slow-Fading Twentieth Century. Trans. Gloria Custance. Univocal, 2013. 276 pp.

Media theory has a problem with the new. The new is an obstacle, it is obsolete, it is yesterday’s news. Of the many responses to a late 20th century obsession with “new media,” current attempts to rethink the dominant historical narrative of media culture best encapsulate the problem. This disruptive set of methods and approaches has come to be known as media archaeology (Huhtamo and Parikka 2011). For figures associated with the emergent field, such as the

German theorist Siegfried Zielinski, conventional histories of media are too selective, too closely aligned to a restrictive linear progression from past to present. For Zielinski, the unquestioned authority of this narrative produces a problem with the term media itself. Media becomes aligned to the spectacle of progress, synonymous with the bright universal future (Zielinski 2006: 32). In […After the Media] News from the Slow-Fading Twentieth Century, Zielinski employs archaeological methods to reexamine media after the future. As he makes clear from the outset, this is not motivated by paradigmatic posturing but by the urgent need to redeem media criticism at a time of crisis.