Crowd Review Now LIVE: Becoming-Media Issue [postmedieval]

Figure 1. Reading Room, New York Public Library

by EILEEN JOY

I am excited to announce that the papers for the Crowd Review of postmedieval's special issue on Becoming-Media [slated for publication in March 2012] are now live and available for comment on the Crowd Review's website:

• Seeta Chaganti, "Danse Macabre in the Virtual Churchyard"
• Eddie Christie, "Writing in Wax, Writing in Water"
• Arne Flaten, "Reproducible Media(s) in the Early Fifteenth Century (Mostly Italian)"
• Julia Lupton, "Thinking with Things: Hannah Woolley to Hannah Arendt"
  
• Eugene Thacker, "The Wayless Abyss: Mysticism and Mediation"
• Whitney Trettien, "Becoming Plant: Magnifying a Microhistory of Media Circuits in Nehemiah Grew's Anatomy of Plants (1682)"

In step with the mission of the journal, this issue represents a wide range of fields and subjects, including performance studies (dance), architecture, art history, poetics, medieval literature, history of printing and engraving, the decorative arts, movement studies, history of taste and judgment, object-oriented studies, intellectual history, new media and technology studies, composition studies, mysticism, philosophy, botany, the history of books, history of science, the vegetal, the animal, theology, etc. What all of the essays have in common, in the words of the special issue's co-editors, Jen Boyle and Martin Foys, has something to do with

our dependence on the recursive circuitry and tangle of technologies, bodies, narratives, spaces, and mediating technics, across historical periods and across literary, scientific, philosophical, and theological modes of expression.

And in some sympathy with the aims of our own blog here [In The Middle] and with postmedieval's objective to trouble and complicate the supposed divides between past and present times, Jen and Martin also write, relative to the aims of this issue,

. . . the casting of new media studies as itself “new” raises troubling questions. To what extent is mediation ever “new”? Indeed, as the medhyo at the center of “medieval” would suggest, mediation appears as an always incomplete “middling” and “meddling” – always becoming, to itself and something other than itself; a troubling, meddling, unstable go-between. This second sense of becoming-media extends questions about the mediating artifact within its historical context to include issues of embodied and historical temporality; periodization as “meddling”; the feedback loop of technics-consciousness; the glance, glimpse, and touch of the mediated image as political and aesthetic affect; and the unstable registers of the trans/hyper-mediation of multiple past-present-futures.

We invite EVERYONE to join us in what is, for now, an EXPERIMENT in the crowd review of the papers listed above, and which will extend from today, July 16th, through Thursday, September 15th. We have set up the crowd review on a very user-friendly weblog-styled WordPress website, which allows you to comment as little or as much as you like, on one or more [or any portion] of the papers, and you can find everything you need to know to participate as a reviewer here:

• Crowd Review: How To Comment

Vive la Crowd Review!