Entangling Texts

I'm currently cross reading Jussi Parikka and Erkki Huhtamo's Media Archaeology reader with Diane Coole and Samantha Frost's New Materialisms reader. This is necessary action.

With the rising prominence of Ernstian "cold gazes", claims about "getting away from our subjectivity" hinged on early-mid writing by Foucault (I'm wondering how the "ethical Foucault" would respond to such provocations), and an insistent depth-probe of the media archaeological object that isolates it from content and meaning--well, I'm concerned about where this takes media archaeology, the troubling terms on which media archaeology engages concepts of "emotion" and "affect" as distractions from the primacy of the technological substrate (and how regularly, suspiciously, they are figured as "feminine"). There's something concerning that I just don't like happening here, but I can't quite put my finger on it.

I'm hoping that reading Grosz, Ahmed, Bennet and others against the grain of media archaeology will help me jack open the black box media archaeologists seem so keen on putting around us.