Machinology

I was asked to participate in this short online Q&A on “Three Questions on Media Criticality”. It is presented at transmediale 2015 on this Sunday (1/2/15).

The responses were to be very short and focused. As I cannot make it to the panel myself, here are my very short responses to questions posed by Jamie Allen and his team.

Submission Date 2015-01-05 10:28:47/Jussi Parikka

What are promising modes of critique today?
I am interested in critique that produces something. In other words, a critique that sets itself not merely as oppositional but alternative; it produces alternative worlds alongside the ones it wants to depart from. Critique is creative – critique creates; this is not meant as a fluffy “everything goes”-sort of an embracement of the world but as acknowledgement of the various modalities in which critique can work, across different media practices.

What is critical about media technologies?
Media technologies offer the critical situation in which issues of power and knowledge are constantly operationalized. In other words, while we have to learn to be critical of media in the sense of media literacy, we also have to see how media IS critical; it divides and differentiates; it grounds and processes distinctions that are fundamental to cultural formations even if not always anymore even perceptible to us. After phenomenology, media ontology.

What comes after critique?

While there are good reasons to move on from critique as automatically assumed primary method and rhetorical form of theory, we have to recognize that also “critique” is a historical, changing form of a cultural technique. It has to become mediatic, executed in different materials and modalities. Critique that distances in order to keep the world (humans or non-humans) at arms length does not interest me as much as critique entangled with the world