![]() ![]() This essay examines crime boards that problematise rather than uphold the representational authority of ‘truth’, crime boards that mark an encounter with phenomena that exceed human powers of detection but also provoke a more speculative practice, a mode of detection in which the world might still remain aesthetically knowable. To adopt Steven Shaviro’s terms, there is a tendency for the crime board to confront ‘ what it feels like to live in the early twenty-first century’, when human subjectivity is conditioned and imperiled by neoliberal spacetime, by digital processes and procedures that render us ‘overstimulated and hypermediated’. These are crime boards that exemplify an aesthetic practice of detection, a practice that operates beyond the humanist category of reason, resonating with our contemporary experience in a manner that cannot be reduced to questions of genre. I want to draw attention to the tendency for crime boards to both express and perform conditions in which human knowledge of the world is in crisis. The typical crime board not only gathers together and arranges facts yielded by such technologies, it is also a technology of truth in itself, serving a meta-investigative function by visually rendering a theory of causality, association, and guilt. This is a mode in which ‘unique interpretive powers’ render crimes visible ‘only to the eyes of the detective’, powers that remain inseparable from the development of forensic technology. ![]() The crime board is, in this sense, what Ronald Thomas has called a ‘device of truth’, a representational technology that lends authority to a mode of detection long established in crime fiction. Over and above any particular crime, the practice of investigation has always supported a broader inquiry into how the world might be interpreted, into how different types of evidence might render the truth of this world knowable, and where the limits of certainty about this knowledge might lie. In its central concern with questions of epistemology and problems of knowing, detective fiction has, to some extent, always theorised itself. In this essay I offer one expression of this tendency: the crime board, also known variously as the ‘case board’ or ‘murder board’, a ubiquitous object in 21 st century television drama. In a digital culture, where media is frequently self-referential in both content and form, ‘media tends to theorise itself’. Yet in the 21 st century, the academy no longer has exclusive jurisdiction over this investigation. The study of media is then, like the philosophical traditions that underpin it, ‘a work of forensics’, a process of ‘establishing the modus operandi of the world by reconstructing the evidence it leaves behind from the crimes it commits’. Its established practices of analysis endeavour to solve the mystery of media objects and institutions. The critical project of media studies, in its conventional form, sets out to decipher, demystify, and disentangle.
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