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Glossary

Summary: One-line definitions of the recurring theoretical vocabulary in cinema-of-marbles. Terms with their own wiki page are linked. Citations point to the section in the source files in raw/ where the term is most explicitly introduced.

Sources: cinema-of-marbles-draft-2026-06-10.txt, introduction-2026-06.txt, prologue-2026-06.txt (passim).

Last updated: 2026-06-10.

Mademli's own coinages and signature terms

  • film-archaeology — the framing discipline name; an amalgam of media archaeology and film heritage. (Introduction §0.1.)
  • marmarization — the metamorphic process by which film stock is fixed into national-cultural monument; explicitly extended to digital restoration. (Section 1.1.1.)
  • Marble vs marbles — singular as monument, plural as decentered/playful object; the titular wordplay. Most extended exposition in the introduction §0.2. (Also section 1.1.1 and the dissertation's closing paragraphs.)
  • boundary-archive — extension of Star/Bowker's boundary objects into archival practice; an archive that maintains interpretive flexibility across overlapping social worlds. (Section 1.1.4.)
  • double-structure — the holding-open of binary pairs (analog/digital, black box/white cube, etc.) without resolution. (Section 2.1.0 onward; also named explicitly in the introduction §0.3.)
  • viewser — viewer + user, the addressed subject of the new database-driven film archive. (Section 2.2.2; the prologue names the author's own autobiographical arc as civilian → spectator → viewser.)
  • Critical archival dispositif — Mademli's extension of Baudry's appareil de base — a framework attentive to how cinemas, museums, festivals, and digital platforms configure not only films but also the bodies, gazes, and discourses that meet them. (Introduction §0.2.)
  • Interoperability (in the wide sense) — used not as the narrow technical-metadata sense but as a metaphor for transmission, collision, and the performance of knowledge across boundaries (national, institutional, media-technological). (Introduction §0.2.)

Borrowed: from Bruno Latour and Actor-Network Theory

  • Immutable mobile — objects "produced by inscription and transported back to the center" that retain their internal state across travel. The dissertation treats the marmorized digital Manakia archive as the paradigmatic case. (Section 1.1.1.)
  • Inscription devices — non-human infrastructures that produce documents and therefore discourses (Latour and Woolgar, Laboratory Life, 1979). (Section 3.0.)
  • Depunctualization — opening of technological / cultural black boxes through dynamic negotiation. Used to read LabA's film-laboratory practice. (Section 3.1.3.)

Borrowed: from Susan Leigh Star and Geoffrey Bowker

  • Boundary objects — objects that maintain interpretive flexibility across multiple social worlds while remaining recognizable across them. The base for the boundary-archive concept. (Section 1.1.4.)
  • Standardization — "a recursive practice, necessarily historical and embedded in a series of complex events and social structures" (Lampland and Star 2009). (Section 2.1.3.)

Borrowed: from John Law

  • Fractiverse — partial participation in multiple realities, not a single "container universe." Used in section 3 (genre as collective assemblage) and section 4.1.1 (the Prism's subjects). (Lines 2152–2174 and 3751.)

Borrowed: from Andrew Pickering

  • Mangle of practice — the open-ended, evolutionary, performative interplay of human and non-human agency in the production of knowledge. Used to read LabA. (Section 3.1.3.)
  • Resistance and accommodation — the dialectic that drives the mangle. (Section 1.1.1.)

Borrowed: from Jacques Derrida

  • Archive fever — the death drive built into the preservation drive; "the archive always works, and a priori, against itself." (Section 2.1.2 footnote and 3.2.2.)
  • Touch of language — the colonial inheritance of the mother tongue; used in the Spectres reading. (Section 3.2.3.)

Borrowed: from Mark Fisher

  • Weird — presence of what does not belong.
  • Eerie — failure of absence or failure of presence. Used to pivot Lanthimos's vlihi from the weird-wave label. (Section 3.2.4.)

Borrowed: from Édouard Glissant

  • archipelagic-thinking — the archipelago, not the continent, as the model of relational ethics. (Sections 4.2.1–4.2.2.)
  • The right to opacity — "subsistence within an irreducible singularity"; used in the spectres-are-haunting-europe reading. (Section 3.2.3.)

Borrowed: from Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

  • Scalability / non-scalability — scalability "allows us to see only uniform blocks, ready for further expansion"; non-scalability attends to "the mounting pile of ruins that scalability leaves behind." Used in the archipelago-network reading. (Section 4.2.1.)

Borrowed: from Sean Cubitt

  • Eco-mediation — "ecology as mediation," recognizing dependence among polity, technology, and nature. (Section 4.2.1.)
  • Enclosure vs environment — enclosure is hegemonic; environment is constituted by being alienated from a communicative community. (Section 4.2.2.)
  • Finite media — finitude rather than sustainability as the emancipatory archival logic.

Borrowed: from Dimitris Papanikolaou

  • Archive trouble — the modality that defines public sphere and cultural milieu in crisis-stricken Greece; "history in the present." (Section 4.1.1.)

Borrowed: from Donna Haraway

  • Situated knowledges — "all drawings of inside-outside boundaries ... are theorized as power moves, not moves toward truth." (Section 1.1.4.)
  • Staying with the trouble — used to read vlihi's inter-species "making kin." (Section 3.2.4.)

Borrowed: from Mark Nunes

  • Poetics of noise — strategies of misdirection that "serve as both cultural and artistic interventions." (Section 3.2.3.)
  • Error / glitch as critical opening — "ways in which failure, glitch, and miscommunication provide creative openings and lines of flight." (Section 1.1.2.)

Other recurring terms

  • Crystallogy in the making (Arianna Borrelli) — exposing the deep time of media in non-Western contexts. (Section 1.0.)
  • Auto-theory (after Lauren Fournier) — the autotheorist "shuttles between self and theory using firsthand experience" as ground for theoretical argument. (Section 3.2.1; reinforced in the introduction §0.4.)
  • Synchronicity (after Carl Jung) — meaningful coincidence between events that cannot be linked through causality; used methodologically to read 23 April 2010 (Dogtooth premiere / Papandreou bailout). (Section 3.1.2.)
  • Hauntology / spectrality (after Derrida and Mark Fisher) — see hauntology.
  • Photogénie (Jean Epstein) — a medium-specific phenomenon that exists only en passant. (Section 3.2.3 footnote.)
  • Hypervisible invisibility (Sophie Arrivé) / carceral visuality (Nicole Fleetwood) — refugees as both visible and unseen. (Section 3.2.3.)
  • Curatorial crisis (Roya Rastegar) — the impossibility of curatorial filtering under digital abundance. (Section 3.1.3 and Section 2.2.2.)
  • Programmed vision (Wendy Chun) — shifter-laden machine address that fabricates user autonomy. (Section 2.2.2.)
  • Polycrisis / multicrisis — the current discursive frame, which the dissertation pushes back against; the prologue argues that "neither crisis nor the archive has been first singular and intact and later multiple and brought into pieces."
  • Archaeopolitics (Dimitris Plantzos 2023) — Foucauldian-biopolitics-inflected variant of state governance operating through public investment in past materialities. The Greek-archaeology analogue of biopolitics. (Introduction §0.1.)
  • Dream nation (Stathis Gourgouris 2021) — the social imaginary of modernity as a mangle of universality and cultural idealism; in the Greek case, archaeology is the medium of the dream-work. (Introduction §0.1.)
  • Archival impulse (Hal Foster 2004) — the post-2000s artistic urge to "unearth and share films, information, and processes with a wider public." Names what drives the wave of post-crisis Greek institutional archival projects. (Introduction §0.1.)
  • Archiveology (Catherine Russell 2018) — found-footage as critical method; the operative concept for chapter-3-branding-greek-crisis's readings of Amnesia Diaries and spectres-are-haunting-europe. (Introduction §0.3.)
  • Tacit narratives (Eric Ketelaar 2002) — smaller-scale archival endeavors whose hidden power structures complicate their stated scope; what Mademli's research focuses on, next to rather than within the larger institutional projects. (Introduction §0.1.)
  • Desire lines (Sara Ahmed, after landscape architecture; via Nasha Hassen 2026) — "unofficial paths" where people deviate from prescribed routes. The introduction's name for the dissertation's autotheoretical-peripatetic method. (Introduction §0.4.)
  • Variantology (Siegfried Zielinski 2005) — the operative concept for chapter-2-center-periphery's reading of the Thessaloniki Cinema Museum as layered historical inscription across technological formats. (Introduction §0.3.)