FCJ-123 The Transversal Generic: Media-Archaeology and Network Culture

Kristoffer Gansing. transmediale – festival for art and digital culture School of Arts and Communication, Malmö University The generic no doubt cuts across the contemporary operators of thought, like the transversality of Deleuze-Guattari, or Foucault’s diagonality.—Francois Laruelle (2011: 252) ‘Take, for instance, an overhead projector’ as Bruno Latour wrote in a 1994 article (36). And why not? Introduced as a non-human actant by John Law in 1992 (3), Latour further employs this standardised piece of presentation equipment as an example of a generic black-box technology whose operation is hidden from the user. Most likely drawing on his own immediate experience as a lecturer, Latour described a situation where the technological complexity of the overhead projector only reveals itself in breaking down, when technicians come to the rescue and open up the machine, revealing components in a seemingly never-ending network. Today, one may assume that Law and Latour have long since […]