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The chapter focuses on the institutional and processual aspects of the collection and highlights practices associated with this particular collection such as assessing, identifying, inscribing, ranking, cataloguing, labelling and storing of objects. These actions constituted part of the institutional scheme of managing the objects retained at the Qing imperial household. Through the process of selection, which was a collective effort of various specialists, collectibles were separated from other objects and boundaries for determining what could enter the collection were drawn. Rather than being personally engaged with individual objects, the emperor was more concerned with how the collection as a whole was managed, preserved and interpreted. In addition, the selecting and assembling process is the act of forming a collection. Ranking, cataloguing, labelling and storing of objects are not merely activities of organising and documenting a pre-existing collection but an on-going process of creating the collection.

This chapter considers what it means to attend to the dynamics and aesthetics of sonic mediation in modern writing, acoustic, and cinematic forms produced from the 1890s through to the mid-twentieth century. Tracking the various transformations of the rhythmic or metrical patterning of sound across a range of forms opens up a space for new ways of understanding both the specific sonorous qualities that different modern media are capable of registering, and how sonic transpositions and transferences across media affect the techniques with which human subjects respond to modern soundscapes. We begin with some methodological groundwork for the analysis of literature’s historically complex relationship to extra-literary sounds, and by identifying parallels and divergences with other media, such as the phonograph, radio and cinema. The challenges facing any correlation between modernist technique and the specific soundscapes of modernity are particularly demanding, not least because entirely new storage devices emerged simultaneously to do what literature could not, namely, record them. And yet, it was precisely this challenge that drove writers to engage as never before with what the symbolic apparatus of written language had never yet properly grasped: the vocal textures, rhythmic mechanizations, and stochastic accidents of real, socially embodied sound.

This chapter devotes close empirical attention to the social and material achievement of proofs, theorems, and other mathematical constructions. Mathematics is often treated as the most abstract and idealized of human practices, so that mathematicians’ words, gestures, handwriting, and chalkboard marking appear to be merely incidental and secondary ways of expressing and conveying mathematical truths. In contrast to that view, the chapter argues that mathematical concepts do not speak for themselves, and that mundane communicative practices and tools provide carefully circumscribed surrogates for idealized mathematical phenomena. Though blackboards are primarily used for teaching and seminars, their material, visual, and narrative features extend across all areas of mathematics pedagogy and research. These features, in many ways analogous to inscriptions and demonstrations in the natural science, also permit an account of the distinctive uses and meanings of formal representations in the mathematical sciences.

This chapter explores Nietzsche's archived posthumous papers (Nachlaß), characterizing the primal impetus of Nietzsche's writing and relating this to the discipline of philology and the institution of the university. Walter Benjamin's ambivalent relation to philological discipline and its scholarly embodiment is shown in the development of One Way Street, the book that formally explodes his academic treatise on Trauerspiel. The chapter concludes by examining the undisciplined rift in Nietzsche's humanism that renders his philosophy a powerfully destructive transhistorical procedure.

The film and video works of Harun Farocki exemplify a critical media practice that pose the questions: What is an Image?, or better, What is a human image? Much of Farocki’s mature work examines in fascinating ways the proliferation of nonhuman perspectives and spaces in the contemporary image environment, and in each case, Farocki asks viewers to reconsider how images provoke both an intelligence and ethics of seeing. Examples are drawn from three of Farocki’s best known works, Inextinguishable Fire, Images of the World and the Inscription of War, and the four-part video installation, Serious Games. The account then turns to the late writing of T. W. Adorno to argue that a deep engagement with the variety of Farocki’s work retroactively gives force and clarity to the style of emancipated cinema that Adorno was trying to imagine in essays like “Transparencies on Film.” The claim here is that Farocki’s work was an ongoing and open-ended experimentation of what a critical writing in images could look like under different media conditions, both historically and formally, especially in relation to his strategies of dissociative and recombinatory montage.

Focusing on “Science in Action,” published in 1987, this chapter discusses the key concepts of Bruno Latour’s anthropology of science, e.g. “technoscience,” “inscription device,” “immutable mobiles,” and “centres of calculation.” It points out connections between Latour’s interest in scientific imagery and similar interests in media studies and the history of art. At the same time, it draws attention to important role played in this context by the criticism of linguistics in authors such as Jean-François Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.

This chapter considers the relationship of Early Buddhism to Chinese thought during the Warring States period (ca. 450 BC–221 BC). Chinese thought was in a nearly constant state of flux, if not turmoil, during the Warring States period, which began shortly after the death of Confucius. Ideas related to the Early Buddhism attested in the fragments of Pyrrho and Megasthenes are clearly present in Warring States writings, especially Early Taoist texts, including the Laotzu, the Chuangtzu, as well as the anonymous Jade Yoga Inscription. Some of the Early Taoist material is approximately contemporaneous with Pyrrho and Megasthenes. It seems that this material's appearance in China is connected to the fact that Central Asia, including Bactria and Gandhāra, was part of the Achaemenid Persian Empire down to Alexander's invasion and conquest of the region in 330–325 BC.

This chapter discusses interpretative possibilities and contexts for Herodotus' Homeric reputation. The appellation ‘Prose Homer of History’ in the second century Salmakis Inscription proves to be a useful focus of reflection on the place of Herodotus in a variety of ongoing debates in antiquity about how to record the past. Herodotus' connection with Homer seems to reflect his perceived cultural importance: Herodotus' main subject matter of the Persian Wars was as proud and important a moment in the cultural memory of the Greeks as the Trojan War itself. The chapter argues that Herodotus' Homeric reputation is also related to (overlapping) interests in his prose style and Ionic dialect, in the relationship between poetry and history, and in the appropriateness of truth and ‘fiction’ in different types of literary works.

Drawing upon research from the field of genocide studies, this chapter argues that there is a connection between the genocidal violence described in some biblical texts and the marked population increases that occurred in Iron Age Palestine and the surrounding regions. It uses the Rwandan genocide as a case study for understanding multicausal frameworks for explicating genocide, demonstrating that a combination of factors is necessary for genocidal violence to occur. In both Rwanda and the ancient Levant, population increases, land scarcities, and the particular realities of ethnic identity formation were catalysts for extreme interethnic violence. The chapter examines archaeological evidence for population increases, as well as evidence from such texts as the Mesha Inscription, Deuteronomy, Joshua, and Amos, paying special attention to passages discussing the practice of ḥērem and concludes with a reflection on materialist approaches to ritual violence.

This chapter shows how Persian kings used temple renovation to distance themselves from recent turmoil and to associate their reigns with more illustrious past traditions. The renovation was also the beginning of a larger program of cultic and/or economic restoration. This rhetoric of renovation sheds light on texts relating to the rebuilding of the Jerusalem temple, especially Ezra 5:7–6:12, which employs similar rhetoric. For the Jewish elders in this passage, the renovation of the Jerusalem temple is the symbol through which they express religious continuity as well as discontinuity.