# Evil Media Studies



## somnambulist (Feb 22, 2011)

Towards an Evil Media Studies

Matthew Fuller, Andrew Goffey

Evil media studies is not a discipline, nor is it the description of a category of particularly unpleasant media objects. It is a manner of working with a set of informal practices and bodies of knowledge, characterised as stratagems, which pervade contemporary networked media and which straddle the distinction between the work of theory and of practice.

Evil media studies deliberately courts the accusation of anachronism so as to both counter and to enhance the often tacit deception and trickery within the precincts of both theory and practice.

stratagem one: bypass representation
The basic strategy is not to denounce, nor to advocate but rather to create a problem of a different order to that of representation and then follow through practically what it entails. Whilst it is quite plausible to analyse the developments in digital media in terms of a problematic of representation, with its associated postulates about meaning, truth and falsity and so on, a problematic of the accomplishment of representation is badly adapted to an understanding of the increasingly infrastructural nature of communications in a world of digital media. Whilst networked media may well be shaped by cultural forces they have a materiality which is refractory to meaning and to symbolism. At the same time, digital media work largely through the formal logic of programmed hardware and software, that is, as something which more closely approximates the order of language. Language here becomes object, in a number of senses: objectified by a range of practices which submit communication processes to the quantificational procedures of programming; invested as a crucial factor in the economy; and an element in the purely objective order of things in themselves, escaping from the complementarity of subject and object and the range of processes we normally think of as mediating between the two.

Όλο το κείμενο εδώ


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