Under Suspicion

The archives where cultures preserve what they deem important for collective memory are rightfully under 'media-ontological suspicion,' Boris Groys argues. If indeed the medium is now the message, the message is that the 'submedial space' beneath the signs comprising the archive remains infinitely inaccessible. So long as we can't understand this submedial space, 'the medium of all media,' we should be suspicious of the force that upholds our cultural archives. How such suspicion has become the new subject and space of subjectivity is the politically inflected story Groys tells with his unique blend of philosophical acumen and ironic expression. -- Michael Kelly, Department of Philosophy, University of North Carolina at Charlotte

The public generally regards the media with suspicion and distrust. Therefore, the media's primary concern is to regain that trust through the production of sincerity. Advancing the field of media studies in a truly innovative way, Boris Groys focuses on the media's affect of sincerity and its manufacture of trust to appease skeptics. Groys identifies forms of media sincerity and its effect on politics, culture, society, and conceptions of the self. He relies on different philosophical writings thematizing the gaze of the other, from the theories of Heidegger, Sartre, Mauss, and Bataille to the poststructuralist formulations of Lacan and Derrida. He also considers media "states of exception" and their creation of effects of sincerity-a strategy that feeds the media's predilection for the extraordinary and the sensational, further fueling the public's suspicions. Emphasizing the media's production of emotion over the presentation (or lack thereof) of "facts," Groys launches a timely study boldly challenging the presumed authenticity of the media's worldview.