Wolfgang Ernst’s notion of “media archaeology” is intended as a radical challenge to what he sees as the implicitly anthropocentric tendency of media studies toward historical narrative. As he posits, media archaeology is “both a method and an aesthetics of practicing media criticism, a kind of epistemological reverse engineering, and an awareness of moments when media themselves, not exclusively humans anymore, become active ‘archaeologists’ of knowledge” (55). In the broadest sense, I think this move is an important one, as it pushes for a more serious engagement with the “non-human” agencies implicated in the production of culture. As he describes, “[m]edia archaeology adds to the study of culture in an apparently paradoxical way by directing attention (perception, analysis) to non-cultural dimensions of the technological regime” (61). What’s important to note here is this notion of “non-cultural” aspects of technology, which for Ernst is intended to gesture toward the “purely technological” and radically non-human element inherent in modern technology: the so-called “generative matrix” of code and digital signal lurking below the surface of every technological interface.

Of course, what Ernst reveals over the course of the chapter is that this turn toward technology as a methodology for understanding cultural production is not paradoxical at all, and that, in fact, “[b]y applying technomathematical analysis, media archaeology accesses the subsemantic strata of culture” (59). The key points to grasp here are that for Ernst, culture exists somewhere downstream from technology, cultural history is fundamentally handcuffed to the technological medium through which it is articulated, and media archeology is thus being presented as a methodology through which that technology can be engaged with directly and on its own terms. For Ernst, media archeology is meant to go beyond metaphorical or narrative interpretation of cultural production and just get right down to the bare mechanics, the “subsemantic strata” of the cultural apparatus itself.

What I like to draw attention to, though, is the way in which Ernst’s particularly narrow focus on technology might foreclose on a more complex examination of its relationship to the production of culture. We can ask ourselves: what epistemological assumptions are implicit in Ernst’s characterization of technology as a radically non-human mode of agentive enactment? What kind of knowledge can be produced within the “the cold gaze of the machinic eye” (67)?We can begin to get a sense of what is at stake through this line of questioning by juxtaposing Ernst’s media collection, the Media Archaeological Fundus, with the Residual Media Depot:

Here’s Ernst’s Media Archaeological Fundus

and here’s the Residual Media Depot

When we look at the two collections in tandem, what becomes clear is that while they are both collections of the same basic type of object (i.e., “media”), their respective approaches to this set of objects is radically different: where the Media Archaeological Fundus collects only the bare technology, the Depot, through its retention of all of the not-strictly-technological paraphernalia that accompanies any given bit of technology, suggests an approach to media that is broad, entangled and polyvalent: the collection is structured to suggest that, while the objects in the collection are technological, they are not exclusively so, but rather serve as points of contact for a broad range of cultural, economic, technological and political concerns. The importance of this polyvalent approach can be demonstrated by considering a particular item from the Depot’s collection:

R.O.B., or the Robotic Operating Buddy, was a short-lived peripheral for the Nintendo Entertainment System. Like the forms of media that Ernst examines, R.O.B. is a kind of archeological agent, performatively preserving the coded signal of the cultural moment from which it emerged. It embodies both the “cold gaze of the machine,” but also a complex array of cultural and economic anxieties that characterized Nintendo and the video game industry more generally at the moment of its production. As Leonard Herman observes, “[a]lthough R.O.B. was used to play some games, its basic purpose was that of a Trojan horse. Since electronic retailers did not seem to want anything to do with video game systems any longer [following the video game crash of 1983], Nintendo promoted R.O.B. as a toy to get the system into toy stores” (116).  To put that a little differently, R.O.B. emerges as a technological solution to what we might call econo-semantic problem: in a market weary of products termed “video games,” R.O.B. could convincingly position Nintendo’s latest platform as something else entirely. With this in mind, it’s tempting to read R.O.B.’s limited range of performative gestures as a kind of ironic commentary on this status as “toy”: R.O.B. was only ever programmed to spin a pair of tops and stack a set of blocks, both rudimentary examples of “toys” that seem anachronistic in the plastic claws of a robot. The irony of the performance is compounded  by the fact that these rudimentary actions are mostly just an impediment to smooth gameplay on the N.E.S. itself, and in practice can be bypassed completely. As a 1987 TILT magazine review of Gyromite (one of only two R.O.B.-supported N.E.S. titles) points out, “[i]t is however regrettable that this robot is noisy, to the point that the player does without him and pushes, with his fingers, the coloured buttons” (translation mine).

On the one hand, this historical contextualization might seem to risk contaminating our analysis with historiography, which Ernst, following 18th-century proto-structuralist Giambattista Vico, writes off as “anthropocentric” (69). But as Jane Bennett posits in her book Vibrant Matter, “[i]t is futile to seek a pure nature unpolluted by humanity, and it is foolish to define the self as something purely human” (116). With that in mind, I want to conclude by suggesting that it might be similarly foolish to seek a “pure technology,” or a machinic agent that is not always already entangled within a polyvalent assemblage. In the case of  R.O.B., we see the “cold gaze” of the machine emerging alongside a turbulent moment in history of video games, a particular terminological taboo in the electronics marketplace, and shifting cultural expectations of what constitutes a “toy.”  Through R.O.B., we are in fact “dealing with the past as a form of delayed presence, preserved in a technological memory” (69), but it’s a memory that can only be fully understood through a broad, dynamic and polyvalent epistemological framework.

Works Cited

Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: a Political Ecology of Things. Duke UP, 2010.

Ernst, Wolfgang. Digital Memory and the Archive. Edited by Jussi Parikka, U Of Minnesota P, 2012.

“Gyromite.” TILT, December 1987, p. 105.

Herman, Leonard. “A New Generation of Home Video Game Systems.” The Video Game Explosion: a History from Pong to Playstation and Beyond, edited by Mark J. P. Wolf, Greenwood P, 2008, pp. 115–120.