You are currently browsing the monthly archive for May 2009.
The introduction of new media … is never entirely revolutionary: new media are less points of epistemic rupture than they are socially embedded sites for the ongoing negotiation of meaning as such.
Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New. The MIT Press, 2006. p. 6.
Music betrays the very paucity of the words its sets, or, rather it makes emphatic the severe limitations of a reason that valorizes a rationality divorced from embodiment. Reason’s poverty is unmasked. (And it can be no accident that wordless music rises in importance in western history, apart from the special and important exception of dance, which by definition privileges the body’s relation to music over that of the mind itself, at the precise moment in early modernity that language itself is more and more systematically institutionalized as the bureaucratic tool of would-be corporate and state power, beginning with the slow rise of the literate classes from the ranks of the monastic clergy, and ending in the modern boardroom).
Richard Leppert, ‘Social Order and the Domestic Consumption of Music’ in The Consumption of Culture 1600-1800, eds. A. Bermingham and J. Brewer. London: Routledge. p.529.
The eighteenth century saw a media explosion, an explosion of print and literacy rates. Resulting in the birth of the modern novel and the newspaper, other printed forms saw their popularity likewise increase; of these forms, my favorite is the manual. And of these manuals, such as The Pleasant Art of Money Catching (1737), a must-read has to be the intriguingly titled Every man his Own Vermin Killer (c. 1771).
Will add more to this list as I come across them ….
RSS Feed