Toward a Media Archaeology of Inscription, Temporality and Experience

The inscribing of history through the medium of historiography received a thoroughgoing rhetorical critique in the work of Hayden White. His meta-historical critique argued that "linguistic determinism" (1975, 66) of "the conditions of representability" of history enabled non-relativist comparative analyses of historiography. Mary Ann Doane comparative analyses of time-consciousness in the late nineteenth century also looks at inscriptions and representations. Doane's analyses across the disciplines however, looks at cinema as "a crucial participant in the ongoing thinking of temporality in modernity"(2002, 20) rather than the linguistically determined writing of history. Cinema's inscriptions of temporality are placed within a nexus of larger practices of inscription by objects, technologies and discourses (e.g. Marey's fusil photographique, Freud's Mystic Writing Pad, and the principles of thermo-dynamics) A focus on inscription joins White's meta-history and Doane's cinema archaeology through their focus on history as writing, and cinema as the representation of time. Yet History-writing and Time-writing separate. Inscription is divided along linguistic determinism (White) of the writing of history, and object and discipline-oriented analyses of the "representability of time" (Doane).
Miriam Hansen's Cinema and Experience (2012) offers the opportunity to move through the division between historical inscription and temporal representation. Undoing the division between inscription as either linguistic (White) or object-driven and discursive (Doane), the concept of experience includes, reformulates and moves questions of history and temporality beyond matters of writing. Language, objects and discourses are part of the experiential registrations of time-consciousness in history. The concept of experience broadens the archaeological comparisons of objects and disciplinary discourses as "representations" by thinking temporality in modernity as a qualitative experience (Adorno, Osborne). The registration of time-consciousness through the theorization of experience of cinema in history deepens and expands the specific critique of history which was inaugurated by media archaeology. Experience mediates between history and temporality as the registration of the politics of time in the present.