Parikka 2015

Parikka, Jussi. Geology of Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015.

"The book argues that the world of thought, senses, sensation, per- ception, customs, practices, habits, and human embodiment is not unre- lated to the world of geological strata, climates, the earth, and the massive durations of change that seem to mock the timescales of our petty affairs." (vii)

"There is more mining than data mining in A Geology of Media. More specifically, it is interested in the connections of media technologies, their materiality, hardware, and energy, with the geophysical nature: nature affords and bears the weight of media culture, from metals and minerals to its waste load." (viii)

"Where do machines come from, what composes technology in its materiality and media after it be- comes disused, dysfunctional dead media that refuse to die? This book is structured around the argument that there is such a thing as geology of media: a different sort of temporal and spatial materialism of media cul- ture than the one that focuses solely on machines or even networks of technologies as nonhuman agencies." (3)

"Geology becomes a way to investigate materiality of the techno- logical media world. It becomes a conceptual trajectory, a creative inter- vention to the cultural history of the contemporary." (4)

"sound is one way to characterize the deep time media aesthetics and its epistemological background. The earth roars and has a sound." (9)

"there is a double bind between the relations of media technologies and the earth conceived as a dynamic sphere of life that cuts across the organic and the nonorganic." (12)

"Our relations with the earth are mediated through technologies and techniques of visualization, sonification, calculation, mapping, prediction, simulation, and so forth: it is through and in media that we grasp earth as an object for cognitive, practical, and affective relations." (12)

medianatures -- like Haraway's naturecultures; understanding the nature of two things separated in Cartesian ontology

drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's "Geology of Morals" -- "Notions of strata, sedimentations, double articulations, and an alternative to the signifier-signified-model are introduced as a way for a postanthropocentric theory. ... Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy maps the geology of thought, which moves from the geophilosophical territories in which thinking happens in relation to the grounds, undergrounds, and territories where the immaterial events of thinking and affect are always tied to stratified assemblages." (21)