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The Prison House of the Circuit
Politics of Control from Analog to Digital
Jeremy Packer (Author), Paula Nuñez de Villavicencio (Author), Alexander Monea (Author), Kathleen Oswald (Author), Kate Maddalena (Author), Joshua Reeves (Author)
9781517914165
Hardback, published 7 March 2023
328 pages, 48 black and white illustrations, 1 table
21.6 x 14 x 1.3 cm, 0.34 kg
"Alive to historical detail and punctuated by field-shifting provocations, this stunning book enlists media genealogy to excavate the science of signals trafficking through systems of command and control. The authors triage the pulse of electronic circuitry spanning the planet, hardwiring populations and perception into real time biotechnical conduits of power."-Ned Rossiter, author of Software, Infrastructure, Labor: A Media Theory of Logistical Nightmares
Has society ceded its self-governance to technogovernance? The authors, writing as a collective, provide a model for collective research and a genealogical framework that interrogates the rise of digital society through the lens of Foucault’s ideas of governance, circulation, and power. The book includes five in-depth case studies investigating the transition from analog media to electronic and digital forms: military telegraphy and human–machine incorporation, the establishment of national electronic biopolitical governance in World War I, media as the means of extending spatial and temporal policing, automobility as the mechanism uniting mobility and media, and visual augmentation from Middle Ages spectacles to digital heads-up displays. The Prison House of the Circuit ultimately demonstrates how contemporary media came to create frictionless circulation to maximize control, efficacy, and state power.
The Prison House of the Circuit presents a history of digital media using circuits and circuitry to understand how power operates in the contemporary era. Through the conceptual vocabulary of the circuit, it offers a provocative model for thinking about governance and media.