Miscommunications: Errors, Mistakes, Media

Description

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. 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