http://thing.desk.nl/bilwet/adilkno/TheMediaArchive/01.

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Writing in the Media "The archive! It cannot count on my wholehearted support. The A. is a philological and dusty thing, that interests no-one; even the Nietzsche-A.: - who knows of it, who ever visited it, whom has it impressed?" - Gottfried Benn To write about media is to raise the question of what gives writing the presumption to speak for other media. Language presents itself as the metamedium to contain all past and future media. In Western textual culture, phenomena are only considered understood once they have been included in a final story. Theory is believed to possess an extraordinary gift, lacking in audio and video, to solve the mysteries that drive the phenomenal universe. Whereas the word still maintains that the question of the world is in writing, the symbol has long since assumed it is a geometrically representable master plan. Once, the harmony of the spheres was a musical program. Preaching, drama, cinema, television, museum, sports, and concerts all unite their audience in a collective ceremony. Conversely, solitary reading creates a distance from the receptive ritual's shared experience, so that the reader feels as if he or she were the only one receiving this medial transmission. The immanent silence in reading creates an imaginary space where language appears to soar above the immediate tumult of the mass media. The idea of order, which gives language its charm, is a medial effect that is abruptly disturbed when someone reads over your shoulder. Insight is as much the technological circuit's noise as it is an authentic source of information unique to primates. Writing is no exception to the rule. Media constitute a closed system which sends off sparks into the cosmic void every once in a while. Amidst the media landscape, we are never more than tourists who keep stubbornly looking for landmarks. Media writing ought to situate itself within the media network. Even those who believe they can place themselves outside it in some heroic gesture and deny the omnipotence of the media remain just one among many media figures. This puritanical, old-fashioned ambition, as surely as any other, will result in an end product to be included in the universal media archives. The consistent response to this is to destroy one's complete oeuvre, which will not only serve to create a legend but a mountain of waste as well, at the disposal of many an inquisitive generation to come. The halfway approach - to merely shut down all links to normality for a time, in order to lead the personal medium to ecstasy within an artificial desert - is to dream of conquering all other modes of expression on one's return. All that the outsiders ever notice of this totalitarian claim by certain media tribes is a brilliant book, a good film, or a pleasant evening. No matter how one-dimensional the talented presentation, in the media sphere the unique commodity is always and instantly classifiable as part of a genre, period or development. The figure of the alien who grazes on history and deposits its droppings in it may be real enough - at the end of the day, it's just another modern artist who realizes the state of its art and acts accordingly. The media text is not concerned with the secret intentions lurking behind an information transmission. Media are not carriers of cultural or ideological values. Rather than transporting messages from A to B, they form a parallel world of their own which never touches on classical reality. Media see the world as raw material for their own project, nothing else. Writing in the media does not seek the media's internal logic within their processed material, but within their ecstatic strategies. Media are forced to constant development, since all their ecstatic routes can be taken only once, after which the technique used becomes obsolete. Media never mature past the trial stage. Every medium must, time and again, discover its own dynamics in order to bring itself to a new conclusion.

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The path followed by the various media thus far is the subject of textual-materialist media theory. The way in which media suck up material from reality is the theme of communication studies, while the field of cultural studies sides with the viewers. The media text, on the other hand, forgets about dialectics and strives for ecstasy, having understood itself to be part of the media. The media text, like the media themselves, can never produce a final understanding that might be established in a dissertation or magnum opus. Caught in the stage of experiment, it carries on in its own irresponsible but methodical way. The media text looks for trajectories, models of thought, tactical maneuvers, and magic words that will help it spell itself out to the point of exhaustion. The media text describes no reality or ideas beyond the text. Its material are the media themselves - not their equipment or programs, but their possibilities. The electrosphere is full of potential media and media forms. Their present or future being is uncertain, but nonetheless open to examination. The media text offers an irresponsibly rash insight into them. It speculates on chance, danger, dream, nightmare. It challenges potential media to get real, starting with the media text itself. It provokes language to take on these forms. Potential media exist only as options, but once they are described, you run into them everywhere. Liquid theory does not aim at an overall text, to be constructed chapter by chapter. The media text is no rhizomatic elaboration on schizoid currents, nor is it about stretching difference yet further. It focuses on the vaguest possible contours with the utmost sharpness. In its compelling will to text, it treats any concept or info that breezes by with systematic arbitrariness. It does not need to categorize its subjects - the magic words just cling to the media text, refusing to let go until they've crystallized. A media overview is by definition unfeasible. The media text enables the potential media field to download on the level of language, so as to condense the mega data package which scrolls by as the limited, but (to us) comprehensible, Compact Text format. Generation, manipulation and recording are no longer sequential stages in data handling, but always take place simultaneously. Preservation does not take place after the fact, in the service of history, but is a technological a priori (F10). The unlocking of the media archives does not take place in the post-medial world, though they anticipate it will. The archives wish neither to raise an ode to transience and its traces nor to unleash protest against it. The construction of a new freeway attracts previously immobile traffic. To switch on a medium is to conjure up previously unregistered data. To establish a media archive is to attract files that would otherwise never have been compiled. To compile is no less to generate, than to generate is to compel to compilation; simultaneity works both ways. Starting an archive is sufficient to have it fill up with new material. There exists no more gratifying task than to write for the desk drawer. Passive storage is not enough; data must be retrievable as quickly and efficiently as possible. While it is relatively easy to optimize access to one's personal archives, the real trouble starts with visits to other people's datasheds. On the other hand, this inaccessibility is an essential condition for amazing discoveries. Permanence is the hallmark of all structured attempts at preservation. The media archives will prove to be modernity's Alexandria, and likewise go up in smoke. Once the bookshelf has fallen over, it may be a small disaster to the author, but a giant step for the readers. The greater the gibberish beheld by the writer, the more clarity is gained by the audience. The media archives are open to any unsuspected cross-connections, and generously invite misreadings. They do not strive for the ultimate aha-experience, but anticipate the metamorphosis of their own content. To read books = to destroy books.

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The Media Archive presents computer-aided theory (CAT) from the era of word processing (WP 4.2). The empty screen is an essential feature of word perfection, an electronic tabula rasa whose only known factors are the coordinates of the theory-to-come (Doc Pg Ln Pos). The soft page has not yet supplanted the letter-size thinking of the typewriting era ("to the end of the page and no further"), a poor use of computing capacity that shifts the computer into suspension gear: The PC processes nothing, the LCD screen's restricted parking area leaves all options open. Menu bars, sidekicks, windows next to or behind the text, even simple subscreens: They were either missing or remained unused. CAT is as flat as a pancake. No hidden codes, no footnotes, no registers. The keyboard's greatest literary achievement is the delete key. The computer serves as an unprecedented text compression tool, and this is where it comes in handy in media archiving. Compact hermeneutics rears its head as a compressed file, unzipped by the reader when requesting a book into an overall text, suddenly rich in slanted distinctions. The theoretical signal has been divested of its superfluous profundity. Even with 70 percent of the argument omitted, discourse still comes through loud and clear. There is no question of clandestine advertising for other registered authors. Our subliminal discomfort, which would like to have the diagonal text related to something at least, is not rewarded with specific clues. Those in dataland who believe they have the hang of pattern recognition soon embark on a quest for the exclusive keyword to disclose new universes. Such magic words, however, may also settle in from outside, and start to suck up charged particles of theory, factoids and semi-quotes. The massive assault on keywords continues until the inevitable overload occurs: time to reset. Unidentified Theoretical Objects (UTOs) are chance theoretical field compressions. Their vocabulary is discovered on desert islands in the web of scanned-in text. UTOs are crystal balls gleaming with the dim light of a yet nonexistent theorem. The peremptory essay ends the discussion before it has even begun. The arguments surrounding a given problem area are surveyable and refutable from the start. This fact lies at the basis of theoretical modesty, of its hope that all existing problems seem so familiar because they are never more than extensions of the twentieth century. To take debates never held to their logical conclusion holds a promise that beyond every existing issue there lies a hinterland, the "world after the media," in which the eve of destruction will not be repeated again, but we will end up way beyond World War IV instead. Deconstruction, like semiotics, is a traditional method of reading. It is not an intellectual project to dismantle culture as a whole, but a faculty which - provided it is exercised a little - enables you to get your own show on the road. Once everything has been analyzed, it's time to think through the non-deconstructible remainder. Text destruction launches word processing. Critical casuistry test drills a promising topos, taking a maniacal interest in paradigmatic splinters. It tries to say as much as it can about the smallest imaginable clues, without paying much attention to the entire exegetic field that surrounds them. It provides precision arguments about the how, not the why, of phenomena breezing by. By contrast, the study of disciplines - with its expanded-theory toolkit - carries out full-time research of the overall outline and places miscellaneous partial issues within a framework that provides insight as to why things are experienced as problematic in the first place. It seeks an arbitrary methodology that will suggest hitherto nonexistent relations. Since it claims no truths, it is dismissed as pseudo-science by the schools of thought analyzed by it. A negative thinking which denies all claims to unicity and the universality of actually existing attempts to interpret the world, is itself the gay science par excellence. Media theory cracks up over the determination

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whereby movie theory, art history, or dramaturgy defend their specific "extensions of man" and challenge their rivals by accusing them of cultural deterioration. The media archives contain all the data in the world. The adilkno branch is a scant and paltry thing; all this archive contains is instructions on the impressionability of the media, and proposals as to how to get rid of them. It was unpremeditatedly compiled in the period between 1988 and 1995, in response to the short summer of the media. Now that autumn is on its way and permanent tourism is likewise coming to an end, the question of the media is becoming more urgent. Both the global and alternative use of media have become stuck in perfect professionalism. Even without a Gulf War, infotainment is just no fun. The reality effects are superseded more quickly than technology can produce them. Now that it becomes clear that the media have no answer to their own global questions, we see a revival of premedial affairs, so that after a period of liberating breakdown and decline there threatens a dismal stage of reconstruction. The archives, on the other hand, stumble blindly into the postmedial world's state of uncertainty. It is only from that future that they can look back with pleasure on the media, without bitterness or nostalgia. ??

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