Let There Be Irony: Cultural History and Media Archaeology in Parallel Lines

Stephen Bann is well known as an art critic, art historian, cultural historian and museologist, but his writings have yet to be discovered from the point of view of media theory. This article applies Bann's proposal of an ‘ironical museum’ to a self‐reflective media culture, while at the same time establishing the difference between a media‐archaeological and an art‐historical approach, particularly in accounts of new media in the first half of the nineteenth century and in the present. To what extent was the historical imagination developed in the romantic period an effect of new media and new media technologies? It is argued that although the discourse of history has always depended on the media of its representation (verbal and visual), its character changed dramatically with the arrival of mechanical means for recording historical evidence. The ‘antiquarian’ method of archival investigation of the past, with its almost haptic taste for the mouldy, decaying fragment, is considered and compared to narrative aesthetics. A key question is considered from different disciplinary perspectives: can we speak of a cultural transition or a radical break with the emergence of photography? The essay concludes that what we learn from Stephen Bann's analyses is the significance of an ever‐alert awareness of the intricate relations between cultural and technological phenomena, a kind of media self‐irony which, apparently, was present in the past to antiquaries and historiographers, to painters, engravers and to creators of historical museums.