In his recent The World Beyond Your Head, Matthew Crawford (2015) argues for a reclaiming of the real against the solipsism of contemporary, technologically cocooned life. Opposing digitally induced distraction, he insists on confronting the contingencies of an obstinately material, nonhuman world, one that rudely insists beyond our representational schema and cognitive certainties. In this Crawford joins an increasingly vocal chorus of critics questioning the ongoing transformation of human subjectivity via digital mediation and online connectivity (see Turkle 2012 and Carr 2011). Yet to mount this critique Crawford turns to a surprising example: Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, the Disney Channel's first entirely computer animated television series, running from 2006 to the present. Given the proclaimed philosophical stakes of his book, which draws on Heidegger's concept of "Being-in-the-World" and critiques Kantian Aufklärung, what peeks Crawford's interest in Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, aimed at teaching pre-schoolers rudimentary concepts, facts and vocabulary? Specifically, it is the contrast between Clubhouse and Mickey's first adventures in Disney shorts of the twenties and thirties. In the latter, "the most prominent source of hilarity is the capacity of material stuff to generate frustration," thus offering to its viewers "a rich phenomenology of what it is like to be an embodied agent in a world of artifacts and inexorable physical laws" (70). Crawford emphasizes the importance of a specifically slapstick comedy as a unique reflection of the contumacy offered up by objects, bodies and worlds. Crawford also points to the "real physical grace" of a cartoon character's equally funny avoidance of disaster, his example the consternated yet triumphant Donald Duck (254). Donald

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"…the intelligence you're preparing to survive the solar explosion will have to carry [the force of desire] within it on its interstellar voyage. Your thinking machines will have to be nourished not just on radiation but on the irremediable differend of gender."-Jean-François Lyotard, "Can Thought go on without a Body?" In recent decades, the development of media archaeology has resulted in as many attempts to define this term as to deploy it as method. Across diverse disciplines and fields of study, scholars have sought out media archaeology as a means of, one the one hand, positioning so-called new media vis-à-vis earlier networks and older formats, which persist or recur in imaginary, undead or anachronistically analog modes. On the other hand, media archaeology is continuous with a broader turn to objects and things, as scholars seek to get a grip on the specific determinations of technical media beyond either anthropocentric end or hermeneutic frame. 1 In doing so, they have been encouraged by the growing sense that we are less user and more used if not supplanted altogether, as bodies and minds are exiled into a post-human realm of prosthetics, code and noise. What then is media archaeology, if it is defined by historical rupture and untimely return, human-made technology and post-human exile? Describing these historiographic and ontological challenges to its definition, Thomas Elsaesser has called media archaeology a "symptom" formed in "response to various kinds of crises," which include tensions between contingency and determinism, history and memory, representation and reality, all of which help define the conditions and limits of the media archaeologist's task. 2 Understood in these symptomatic terms, what are we to make of the scarcity of a feminist media archaeology? Or of media archaeologists' relative silence on matters of gender, desire or sexual difference when engaging the "crises" that have provoked its excavations of media old Flaig 2 and new? Indeed, in contrast to both recent and long-standing feminist materialisms, ontologies, and post-humanities, this silence cannot help but speak symptomatically about media archaeology's formation. 3 This symptomatic reading is, I would suggest, different from what Elsaesser means when he defines media archaeology "as symptom" or as a means of crisis management. Rather, the question concerning sexual difference has gone unasked for reasons never consciously articulated. Like any symptom, this silence at once dissimulates and betrays its source, an anxiety that asking this question is out of place when thinking technical media or tracking their iterations and precedents. This is all the more surprising considering the intersections of gendered body and technological means spanning epochs and cultures and analyzed by feminist philosophers and historians, including Rosi Braidotti, Donna Haraway, Karen Barad among many others. 4 By contrast, the most dominant strand of media archaeology would seem to posit sexual or gendered difference as trapped within a nar...

founded and edited by the Cologne-based painter Heinrich Hoerle as a venue for "progressive artists" to confront the political and economic crises of the day that would cease publication just after Adolf Hitler's election in January 1933. 1 An abridged version of the essay was published in French two months later in the June 1930 issue of a journal named after and published by Cercle et Carré [Circle and Square], a transnational collective of avant-garde artists, writers and architects from across Europe and which included among its contributors Constructivists, Futurists, members of the Bauhaus as well as Dadaists like Hausmann. 2Where might we locate the essay's author or argument within this assortment of avant-garde movements and at this fraught historical moment? Hausmann was and is still perhaps best known as the "Dadasoph" of Berlin Dada, famed especially for both his biting screeds and manifestos as well the extraordinary montage techniques he developed with his one-time partner, Hannah Höch. Yet this title barely scratches the surface of Hausmann's activities during both Berlin Dada's heyday in the tumultuous aftermath of World War I as well as later cultural shifts, within Germany's Weimar Republic, towards New Objectivity and political polarisation in the mid to late nineteen-twenties. Already in the first histories and reminiscences of Dadaism, Hausmann was singled out for the extraordinary range of his activities. In Dada:

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