Classics and Media Theory (Classical Presences)

✍ Scribed by Pantelis Michelakis (editor)

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Year: 2020
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 382
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Introducing a largely neglected area of existing interactions between Greco-Roman antiquity and media theory, this volume addresses the question of why interactions in this area matter and how they might be developed further. It aims not only to promote awareness of the presence of the classics in media theory but also to encourage more media attentiveness among scholars of Greece and Rome. By bringing together an international team of scholars with interdisciplinary expertise in areas ranging from classical literature and classical reception studies to art history, media theory and media history, film studies, philosophy, and cultural studies, the volume as a whole engages with numerous aspects of 'classical' Greece and Rome revolving around issues of philosophy, cultural history, literature, aesthetics, and epistemology. Each chapter provides its own definition of what constitutes mediality and how it operates, constructs different genealogies of the concept of the medium, and
engages with emergent fields within media studies that range from cultural techniques to media archaeology, diagrammatology, and intermediality. By seeking to foreground the persistency of Greco-Roman paradigms across the different strands of media theory the volume persuasively calls for a closer consideration of the conceptual underpinnings of the cultural practices around the transformation of ancient Greece and Rome into 'classics.'

✦ Table of Contents

Cover
Classics and Media Theory
Copyright
Preface
Contents
List of Figures
List of Contributors
Chapter 1: Introduction: Classical Antiquity, Media Histories, Media Theories
1.1. What Do Media Do
1.2. Transmission and Perception
1.3 Classical Studies and Media Studies
1.4 Classics in Media Theory
1.5. Media Theory in Classics
1.6. This Volume
Chapter 2: Friedrich Kittler’s Alphabetic Realism
2.1. Is Kittler Really a Media Materialist?
2.2. . . . or Is he not Rather a Realist?
2.3. The Changing Concept of Media
2.4. How Kittler’s Media Marginalism Came About
2.5 Reality Is in the Letters
2.6. The Alphabet: A ‘Pure’ Medium to ‘Sharpen our Senses’
2.7. The Perfect Telephone for Language
2.8. Kittler’s Realism and the ‘Reality’ of Greece
Chapter 3: The Seal of Polycrates: A Discourse on Discourse Channel Conditions
3.1. The Seal as Medium
3.2. Polycrates and the (Meta)physics of Seals
3.3. Sphragistic Recursions
Chapter 4: Metaphysics and the Mathematical Diagram: Geometry between History and Philosophy
4.1. Introduction: Geometry between History and Philosophy
4.2. Thinking through Diagrams with Socrates
4.3 Thinking with and about Diagrams
4.4. Netz Squares up to Plato
4.5. Historical Ontologies
4.6. Geometry ‘from Scratch'
Chapter 5: On the Beginnings of Media Theory in Hesiod and Plato
5.1. Preamble
5.2. Poetic Initiation or Dichterweihe
5.3. Muses and Media
5.4. The Medium Thought and its Media-Inventions: Number, Measure, Sound, and Writing (Plato)
5.5. How the Medium Thought Operates
5.6. Coda: Plato and Alan Turing
Chapter 6: Metaxy: Aristotle on Mediacy
6.1. Ethics: The Middle Way (mesotês)
6.2. Logic: The Middle Term of the Syllogism (meson)
6.3. Aisthesis: Sensible Media
6.4. What does ‘through another’ Mean?
6.5. Can Touch and Taste have a Medium?
6.6 Media as Field Transformers
6.7 Mediacy as the Capacity of Taking Form
Chapter 7: The Fable of Arachne: Underweavings of Tactile Mediality
7.1. Subtextilis
7.2. The Precarious Mediality of the Sense of Touch
7.3. Against an Anthropology of Capacity
7.4. Teletactility
7.5. Antennae
Chapter 8: The Shards of Zadar: A (Meta-)Archaeology of Cinema
8.1. Archaeologies
8.2. Ancient Cinema
8.3. Ein Stein on the Beach
8.4. Coda: The ‘Rationality’ of Capitalism
Chapter 9: Parrhasius’ Curtain, or, a Media Archaeology of a Metapainting
9.1. Ancient Tricks, Modern Gimmicks
9.2. Forms of Deception
9.3. Drawing a Blank
9.4. Angles of Vision
Chapter 10: White NoiseL Transmitting and Receiving Ancient Elegy
10.1. Introduction
10.2. In the Beginning: Greek and Hellenistic Elegy
10.3. In the Middle: Roman Elegy
10.4. In the End: White Noise
Chapter 11: Parmenides at his Typewriter: Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the Media of Philosophy
11.1. Philosophy’s Media
11.2. Nietzsche’s Bodies
11.3. Heidegger's Hanads
Chapter 12: Manteia, Mediality, Migration
12.1. ‘Go to Croton!’
12.2. Yes/No
12.3. Descent into the Black Box
12.4. X Marks the Spot
12.5. The Migrant is the Medium
Bibliography
General Index