Untimely Media: Subversions of obsolescence in decolonial print

‘It will keep your secrets. Operate it yourself.’ A. B. Dick Mimeograph Company advertisement in Life magazine, circa 1940. How can we decolonise technics today within, against and beyond Eurocentric teleologies that separate rational humans from savage or inert nature and technological infrastructure assumed to be a ‘standing reserve’? 1 The provocative exhibition ‘Crafting Subversion: […]
Poster of a conference at SOAS called Crafting Subversion: DIY and Decolonial Print

Smart writing

Reivew of Sarah Kember, iMedia: The Gendering of Objects, Environments and Smart Materials
Sarah Kember, iMedia: The Gendering of Objects, Environments and Smart Materials (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). vi+122pp., £45.00 hb., 978 1 13737 484 4 Sarah Kember’s new book positions itself in a field of theory dominated by an often masculinist discourse that privileges conceptualisations of its research objects as things or environments in-themselves, instead of as […]

Noam Chomsky: Freedom and power

Interview noam chomsky Freedom and power Peter hallward I’d like to start by asking you about some of your basic philosophical principles, starting with your understanding of human freedom and creativity. In the modern European tradition I’m most familiar with, freedom is a dominant philosophical theme from Descartes through Rousseau to Kant. With Kant we […]

Subjectivity as medium of the media

Dossier: What is German Media Philosophy?

Contemporary, let us say ‘post-modern’, discourses on media, communication, information and so on are functioning in our society in at least two different – if interconnected – ways.* First, they describe scientifically the functioning of contemporary media and their growing role in our society. But the development of media theory during recent decades was, in […]

Ontogenetic machinery

Dossier: What is German Media Philosophy?

Media, as considered by media philosophy, are not what you expect them to be. In the first place, they have almost nothing to do with information, or transmission, or communication, or storage. They do not as such produce sense or distribute meanings. If they do so, it is as a side effect or a secondary […]

Jacques Derrida: The Deconstruction of Actuality

The Deconstruction of Actuality An Interview with Jacques Derrida This interview was conducted in Paris in August 1993, to mark the publication ofDerrida’ s Spectres de Marx (Paris, Galilee, 1993), and was published in the monthly review Passages in September. This English translation appears in Radical Philosophy with permission. Passages: From Bogota to Santiago, from […]

Television Fictions: Quality and Truth-Telling

Television Fictions Quality and Truth-Telling John Mepham There is now going on a debate about the future of British television broadcasting. This debate was sparked off by issues of broadcasting policy, by specific new proposals for the financing and regulation of television broadcasting. These proposals have seemed to many to threaten the quality of television […]

Revolution: The View From Paris; The View From Leeds; Dons Flunk Enterprise Test Despite Late Run; Ecology in Nicaragua

NEWS REVOLUTION THE VIEW FROM PARIS To discover the temper of a modem culture, it often pays to look at the advertising. Those guys spend an awful lot of money trying to find out about it. So, my first story from attending the World Congress on the French Revolution and other celebrations of the Bicentenary […]

Television Literacy: A Critique

Television Literacy: A Critique David Buckingham The term •television literacy’ has been increasingly widely used in recent years, both by researchers investigating the relationship between children and television and by educationalists arguingfor the formal study ofthe medium in schools. This paper discusses some of the theoretical issues which are at stake in the basic analogy […]

Ideology and the Media: A Response

COMMENT Ideology and the Media: A Response Martin Barker’s examination of problems and evasions discernible in the use made of the concept of ideology by major strands of media research (Radical Philosophy 46) is timely. Media analysis in Britain seems now to be well-launched into a phase in which empirically-based studies, including studies of audience […]

Media and Images

practice, or realism and idealism. Different forms of it are attacked in different books. In The Clue to History Macmurray looks at the split between the theory and practice of religion; in Reason and Emotion he argues that the real distinction should be intellect and emotion, and that both are capable of rationality or irrationality. […]

A Haitian boat disaster

News A Haitian boat disaster Every now and then something happens which serves to illuminate with particular clarity the way our newspapers distinguish between what counts as news and what does not. Consider the way the British press handled two very different disappearances, on the nights of 3 and 4 May 2007. In early May […]

People exposed, people as extras

Dossier: Undoing the aesthetic image

People exposed, people as extras Georges Didi-Huberman The title of the first film shown in history is La Sortie des usines Lumière – in English, ‘Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory’. On 22 March 1895, in the rue de Rennes in Paris, in front of about two hundred spectators, Auguste and Louis Lumière showed for the […]

Feminism did not fail

‘You nearly gave me a heart attack’, a friend told me, after my talk at the opening session of the event in London celebrating the fortieth anniversary of the first national Women’s Liberation Conference in the UK, at Ruskin College, in February 1970. Appropriately enough, the feminist publisher and cultural entrepreneur Ursula Owen had organized […]