The Horse Dies, the Medium Lives: Media Genealogies of the Anthropo-logical Difference

József Smid

IN: Partitúra Irodalomtudományi folyóirat, Volume XIII. , Issue 2, 2018, p. 69-90., ISSN 1336-7307

DOI: 10.17846/PA.2018.13.2.69-90

Abstract:

My paper argues that positioning the anthropological difference as an ontological foundation is an act already dependent on techniques that construct the binary opposition between the animal and the human. Firstly, I suggest that scholars studying cultural techniques always presuppose all institutionalized practices as anthropotechnics, and they have to exclude animal actions en total, accordingly. secondly, I argue that it is exactly the movement of animals, however, which anticipated mechanisms exploited later on, in constructing optical media. Thirdly, through these media, I retrace the prehistory of film as moving pictures, and execute a comparison between two opposing media genealogies: one of them is the textbook history of the moving image with galloping horses; the other is a more rhizomatic and technical genealogy with partial differential equations describing human movement. Fourthly, I conclude that these two
media histories of film suggest conflicting concepts of the very medium, namely, they position it either as an optical or a computing apparatus depending on which side of the anthropological difference they emphasize.

Keywords: cultural techniques, genealogy of film, Eadweard Muybridge, Weber brothers, anthropological machine, optical media

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Partitúra is a Hungarian literary journal published in Slovakia twice a year. The first edition was issued in 2006. From 2007 to 2014 its publishers were the Faculty of Central European Studies at The Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra in cooperation with Sambucus Literary Society. Since 2014 the Faculty of Central European Studies at the CPU in Nitra became the sole publisher.

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