My PhD thesis examines a series of media artefacts produced in the late 60s and early 70s (during the early transition from analogue to digital-media technologies) in order to track the specific rhetorical vectors that were mapped onto these technologies, which in turn continue to actively shape the development of digital technologies today as well as our understandings of these emergent relationships.

This research argues that the choice of a rhetorical framework and its attendant metaphoric alliances is always deliberately selective. Privileging the continued ascendancy of certain assumptions and ideas relies in large part upon the ability to translate complexity (organic or inorganic) into comprehensible forms and cognitive systems. Through such a process of rhetorical transformation, digital technologies are able to maintain their genealogical purchase with not only the past, but also with the future yet to come. However, the digital filiation of media machines is not simply a problem of language that requires an empirical intervention, but as Isabelle Stengers makes explicit, involves a risk that in learning ‘how to ask the right or relevant questions’ we may need to abandon the very epistemological ground that produced the necessary conditions for such an inquiry.

“The possibility that it is not man but the material that “asks” the questions, that has a story to tell, which one has to learn to unravel.” (Power and Invention, 126)

The conceptual debate between the mechanistic and the vitalist model of techno-science that is being played out today within the domain of nanotechnology for example, points to the ambiguous and powerful role that metaphors can play in the constitution of a technological domain. While scientists working in the field no doubt view their work as an engagement with the real (whether data or molecules), the decision to locate micro-phenomena in the biological or mechanical realm is as much a function of the metaphors chosen as it is a consequence of the phenomena themselves.

Selecting the choice of metaphor is crucial because “it lays down a linguistic track that thought tends to follow and suggests connections that bind new ideas into networks of existing conceptual structures.” (N. Katherine Hayles)

Watson and Crick’s appropriation of the term “code” to describe the DNA molecule in the 1950s animated both the direction of molecular biology and made possible the linguistic transformation of an organism into an information system. In On Beyond Living, Richard Doyle argues that this rhetorical alignment actually enabled a radical re-conceptualization of the very definition of life itself. This is clearly evidenced in the formulation of the human genome project as a ‘blueprint” or code for scripting life in purely biogenetic terms.

Both Hayles and Doyle in addressing this problematic point to the absolutely extrinsic nature of a programme that overlays a rhetorical paradigm onto matter which it itself did not generate and upon close analysis might actually overturn. The question that Stengers asks: what other stories could emerge if the rhetoric that has knit language with matter into precise patterns could be conceptually unravelled and allowed to speak for itself becomes the fundamental starting point for my own research inquiries.

Working from the specifically ontological perspective of the machine, that is, neither as a discursive representation nor a social construction, but rather as a complex material assemblage, my research challenges the ways in which certain presuppositions and rhetorical configurations have produced highly particularized accounts and histories of media machines and technologies. Such an activity also demands a re-conceptualization of the ontological project itself, one that does not as Félix Guattari warns, “imply a rehabilitation of phenomenological analysis which views its objects in terms of pure intentional transparency.” Material facticity in Guattari’s view is inseparable from the expressive and enunciatory capacities that brought it into being in the first place. Studying media objects and events culled from the 60s and 70s is obviously a gesture anchored in retrospection; one that although plugged into the past, can also be creatively short-circuited and even flare out if wires are crossed which re-connect the present to the past in surprising and novel configurations.

In each case, the starting point for this research is an archive, a heterotopic baseline from which a singular media artefact will be conceptually extracted, in a Deleuzian sense de-territorialized and then re-introduced back into its machinic habitat with the intention of generating strange new couplings that call into question it’s particular ‘carnal mooring’ within the archive. In short, a kind of Darwinian gesture that re-opens the question of the future and the new [the digital] through the play of ‘repetition and difference’ with the old [the analogue]. In focusing upon the ontological status of the machine, in particular its latent potential towards other narratives, other versions of events, my research will activate processes of “unnatural” selection so that media genealogies of radical difference might emerge.