The term ‘technostalgia’ refers to a range of admittedly quirky and often collectible devices that frequently hit the market, promising customers the experience of past technology in the present. Using this marketing trend as a starting point, this article attempts to trace ‘other’ technostalgias in their plurality elsewhere in order to plump the philosophical dimensions of the concept. Upon unpacking the underlying structure of technostalgia (in terms of subject–object relations, as social practice, etc.), we may relocate the technological subject within the global–local horizon and rethink the social history of technology as a history of becoming-obsolete – i.e. a history of what we may do (or not do) with the fate of ‘becoming-obsolete’ other than being subjected to it. To this effect, the article describes the structure of technostalgia not once but thrice and from three different vantage points: the first being the most evident and ‘first’ market version of technostalgia, the second being technostalgia as contemporary art practice in the form of hand-drawn or graphic non-fiction narratives, and the third being technostalgia as a historical ‘incident’ of sorts related to the advent of photography against the colonial context.
This paper seeks to explore the complex negotiation between mesmerism (as unauthorised medical practice) and the State by analyzing the singular example of Dr. James E. Esdaile, a Scottish civil surgeon stationed in Hooghly, Calcutta, in the 1840-50s; one of the few known medical practitioners of mesmerism in colonial India. His diary titled Mesmerism in India, and its Practical Application in Surgery and Medicine contains a record of every patient who walked into Esdaile’s clinic in Hooghly complaining of pain, the subsequent interaction that took place between the doctor and the patient, usually in the form of a simple sequence of questions and answers, and a description of the procedure by which the patient was treated. The documentation of Esdaile’s controversial clinical practice offers several important insights into the practice of parrhesia (a theory of truth-telling proposed by Foucault) in conjunction with the practice of mesmerism as medicine. Within the annals of medical history, clinical egodocuments such as Esdaile’s surgical diary exemplify the emergence of a difficult relationship between the historical subject and the desire to speak the truth. It reveals how a unique moment in colonial medical history becomes emblematic of a negative relationship with the parrhesiastic act.
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