Looking Back to Now: Book as Technology of Remembering the Present in Jatkosota-extra by Jaakko Yli-Juonikas

Abstract

This chapter analyzes how Jatkosota-extra (2017) by Jaakko Yli-Juonikas embeds and emulates various literary and other textual forms associated with the past and present mass media in the book object. Since book design activates various processes, practices, and affordances, I investigate the affective repercussions of embedding in the book object the forms described above. Drawing on Marshall McLuhan’s classic conception of the medium as the message, and Friedrich A. Kittler’s notions of writing tools as shaping and affecting the ways we think, I argue that the material body of the book here functions as a technology through which we can render the present into the past, and thus gain a critical distance to topical issues, the economies of affects, and the current forms of mass media.