Historicizing and Reframing Media Dispositives
Description
The term dispositif has been widely adapted in relation to assemblage and system as part of aesthetic, political, and social theories of power. It has also been used to refer to devices and processes of internal and external image production. In film and media studies, dispositif applies to objects that function both as material devices, and within discursive contexts.
Shifting away from its original emphasis on power/knowledge, we consider three epistemological polarities generated by the concept of dispositif. How can new approaches to dispositives be brought to bear on particular objects, e.g. devices of mediation, or ritual objects, involving their appropriation into self-reflective discourses of introspection?
1) Inner/outer. Mediation devices, ubiquitous in 19th-century culture, straddle the fields of science, technology, entertainment, and literature. Because these make viewers see the invisible or the impossible, they become endlessly serviceable as tropes for mental processes. In similar fashion, ritual objects from non-Western cultures are appropriated as self-reflective and introspective tropes, intersecting ethnography with autobiography, as in Michel Leiris's writings.
2) Archaic/modern. Modern technologies consistently overlay ancient mental formations. The convergence of archaic topoi with new technologies has attracted active media and literary scholarship in recent decades. The philosophical debates around artifacts collected during the colonial era express foundational anxieties about the persistence of magical thinking within cultures of modernity and secular modes of thinking.
3) Singularity/universality. Optical technologies tend to hybridize as well as move between science and entertainment. As Kember and Plunkett (2025) note, they borrow from each other in a “dense and tangled mixed media landscape.” In an analogous manner, severing ritual objects from their original context and repositioning them in a new relational system of viewing, experiencing, and representation, leads to a shift away from the culturally singular towards a universalizing form of symbolism.
We invite presenters to focus on one specific object or device, analyzing both its material uses and discursive properties, pairing objects with texts. Possible themes include:
- Optical mediation devices (magic lanterns, kaleidoscopes, microscopes, telescopes...) as both scientific instruments, toys, and tropes for introspective practices
- Power figures set in new networks of viewing practices (artist’s collections, anthropological museum, photography) and discursive contexts (introspection, self-construction)
- The convergence and “intermedial reciprocity” (Groth 2012) between viewing and reading facilitated by new forms of mediated viewing
- Medium and media: the convergence of spiritual practices (and/or magical thinking in general) and new media technologies.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Joe Kember is a Professor of Film and Media at the University of Exeter, UK. Co-author of Popular Visual Shows 1800–1914: Picturegoing from Peep Shows to Film (Oxford University Press, 2025), he has published extensively concerning nineteenth century media and early film.
Speaker Bio
Anna Hell works and teaches at the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Vienna. She studied Comparative Literature at the Universities of Augsburg (B.A.) and Vienna (MA) with semesters abroad at the Sorbonne Université and the Université Sorbonne nouvelle in Paris. Her doctoral research focuses on the magic lantern in 20th-century literature with a special interest in “inter-medial reciprocity” (Groth 2012), “lanternictiy” (Jones 2014) and “media nostalgia” (Böhn 2007).
Speaker Bio
Dominique Jullien is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature and French Studies at UC Santa Barbara. She has published widely on world literature, East-West dialogue, travel narratives and media studies. Her current projects look at technologies of optical mediation and illusionism in contemporary texts.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Peter J. Bloom is Professor of Film and Media Studies at UC-Santa Barbara. He has published widely on British, French, and Belgian colonial media including French Colonial Documentary, Frenchness and the African Diaspora (co-editor), and Modernization as Spectacle in Africa (co-editor), among other publications. He recently completed a co-edited volume with Dominique Jullien, entitled Screens and Illusionism, and is preparing a monograph entitled Radio-Cinema Modernity.
Speaker Bio
Naama Rotem is an M.A. student at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her thesis explores the intersection of science and literature through texts about the moon, from the 17th through the 20th century, focusing on Kepler, Verne, and Méliès. Her research interests include the history of science and technology, intellectual history, and literary theory. She holds a B.A. from the Hebrew University and has also participated in academic programs at St Andrews, Penn, and Harvard.
Speaker Bio
Brendan Lanctot is distinguished professor and chair of Hispanic Studies at University of Puget Sound. In 2019-2020, he was awarded an ACLS Burkhardt fellowship in support of his project "Specters of the Popular in Nineteenth-Century Latin American Visual Culture." His essay recent on civic festivals and public spectacles was awarded a first mention by the XIXth-century section of LASA and he has an article on the cosmorama in Latin America forthcoming.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Erkki Huhtamo is a pioneering media archaeologist. He is professor of Design Media
Arts and Film, Television, and Digital Media at UCLA. Fairy Engine: Media
Archaeology as Topos Study is forthcoming from The MIT Press.
Speaker Bio
Benjamin Goh is Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Law, National University of Singapore. He works in the field of law and literature, presently on topics in copyright history and postcolonial studies. His first monograph, The Materiality of Literature: Rereading Authorship and Copyright with Kant (Cambridge University Press), will be published by December 2025.
Speaker Bio
Bartlett is a philosopher, cultural historian, currently an independent scholar, who writes about the intersections of art, science, film and technology from 1840 to the present. He has taught at San Francisco Art Institute, California College of Art and University for the Creative Arts, UK.