What happens when communication breaks down? Is it the condition for mistakes and errors that is characteristic of digital culture? And if mistakes and errors have a certain power, what stands behind it?
To address these questions, this collection assembles a range of cutting-edge philosophical, socio-political, art historical and media theoretical inquiries that address contemporary culture as a terrain of miscommunication. If the period since the industrial revolution can be thought of as marked by the realisation of the possibilities for global communication, in terms of the telephone, telegraph, television, and finally the internet, Miscommunications shows that to think about the contemporary historical moment, a new history and theory of these devices needs to be written, one which illustrates the emergence of the current cultures of miscommunication and the powers of the false.
The essays in the book chart the new conditions for discourse in the 21st century and collectively show how studies of communication can be refigured when we focus on the capacity for errors, accidents, mistakes, malfunctions and both intentional and non-intentional miscommunications.
Author(s): Maria Korolkova, Timothy Barker
Series: Thinking Media
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Year: 2021
Language: English
Pages: 343
City: New York
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part One: Mis‐Theories
Chapter 1: Affirmative Imperfection Rhetoric and Aesthetics: A Genealogy
Chapter 2: Post-Communication Theory: The Non-Dialogical
Chapter 3: Miscommunication and Democratic Membership
Chapter 4: There Is No "Error" in Techno-logics: A Radically Media-Archaeological Approach
Part Two: Mis‐Sounds
Chapter 5: Quiet in the Forest
Chapter 6: The Guardians of the Possible
Chapter 7: Communicatiing the Incommunicable: Formalism and Noise in Michel Serres
Part Three: Mis‐Matters
Chapter 8: Objects Mis-taken: Towards the Aesthetics of Displaced Materiality
Chapter 9: Fai(lure): Encounter with the Unstable Medium in the Work of Art
Chapter 10: A Relational Materialist Approach to Errant Media Systems: The Case of Internet Video Producers
Chapter 11: Negotiating Two Models of Truth: Miscommunication, Aesthetics, and Democracy in Elle and Laruelle
Part Four: Mis‐Happenings
Chapter 12: Disastrous Communication: Walter Benjamin's "The Railway Disaster at the Firth of Tay"
Chapter 13: Accidental Recordings: Unintentional Media Aesthetics
Chapter 14: Desert Media: Glitches, Breakdowns, and Media Arrhythmia in the Sahara
Part Five: Mis‐Functions
Chapter 15: The Error at the End of the Internet
Chapter 16: From Bugs to Features: An Archaeology of Errors and/in/as Computer Games
Chapter 17: We Interrupt This Program: On the Cultural Techniques of "Technical Difficulties"
Chapter 18: Glitches as Fictional (Mis)Communication
Contributors
Index
