Can Dialectics Make Bricks?
Description
Theorists of media and culture have increasingly turned to two critics to better understand the relationship between humans and technology: Karl Marx and Gilbert Simondon. Both thinkers offer powerful philosophical accounts of human alienation in the face of industrial technology. Both identify the embodied, thinking, active worker as a crucial force in artifactual production.
In an oft-cited passage from “Form and Matter,” Simondon narrates the making of a brick: the harvesting and preparation of clay, the preparation of the mold, the worker packing a form with wet clay, the heat of the kiln, the molecular change as something inchoate becomes “a definite being”: a brick drying on a board in front of our eyes. Both metaphor and example, the story argues that form is matter, matter is form, and the dynamic relation of the two is shaped by human labor. Simondon argues that the simplistic notion of form-matter relations that Western culture inherited from the Aristotelian theory of “hylomorphism” emerged in the context of the Greek slave economy: one in which the “free man” gave form and matter as commands without attending to “the process of taking form as operation.” In Marxian terms, we might say that the hylomorphic schema was an effect of the mode of production. Simondon evoked the Greeks, however, to announce a critique of Western civilization as a whole, and not of any particular mode of production. He described his theory of individuation as anti-dialectical, in explicit opposition to Marxist modes of explanation. In a moment when both Western metaphysics and modern capitalism demand rigorous critique, we ask: Can dialectics make bricks?
This ACLA seminar invites papers that bring historical and material specificity to the critique of technology. We are particularly interested in Marxist and other materialist modes for theorizing labor, alienation, individuation, and technological genesis in the context of historically rooted human experience. Scholars such as Muriel Combes argue that Simondon “never takes into account the specific experience of technics following from labor,” that is, he loses sight of the worker who “goes into the factory not as human but as part of mutilated humanity.” Reflecting on these criticisms, we ask: How does labor encounter technical knowledge alienated by the hylomorphic schema? What might detailed media historical accounts of craft, embodied, or technically skilled labor offer Simondon in return? As Thomas Lamarre inquires: “What would a nonservile knowledge of technics look like today?” Possible topics include:
Craft and the labor process
Ecological thinking and critique
Individuation and dialectics: can they get along?
“Transindividuality” as radical critique of bourgeois subjectivity
Human individuation as socially mediated (race, gender, class, and other mediations)
Materialist media histories
Alienation vis-a-vis the machine
Associated milieu and/as real subsumption
And more!
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Riley Gold is a Ph.D. student in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Southern California. He researches histories and theories of automation as they relate to media and environments. He holds a research master’s degree in Media Studies from the University of Amsterdam.
Speaker Bio
Yijun Sun is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Cinema and Media Studies at Wellesley College. She received her PhD from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research focuses on the history and theory of digital and visual media. Yijun’s work has appeared in Cultural Critique, Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies and Technics: Media in the Digital Age. She is working on a book that examines carrier vessels and their roles in media history.
Speaker Bio
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Papers
Speaker Bio
Jenny Gunn is Assistant Professor of Film and Theory in the School of Film, Media & Theatre at Georgia State University. Through a theory of free-indirect assemblage in genealogy to the cinema of poetry, her current monograph project explores how the cinematic persists in the 21st century regardless of its technical base. Jenny is affiliated faculty with the liquid blackness project, which was recently awarded a three-year Mellon Foundation Grant.
Speaker Bio
Thomas Patrick Pringle is an Assistant Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Southern California. With Gertrud Koch and Bernard Stiegler, he is the co-author of Machine (Meson and University of Minnesota Press, 2019). Pringle serves on the editorial boards of Film History: An International Journal and Journal of Environmental Media.
Speaker Bio
Xin Zhou is a PhD student in Film and Moving Image Studies at Concordia University. His research focuses on the history of scientific and educational films in socialist China, with an emphasis on collecting, cataloguing, digitizing, and critically writing about these materials. Most recently, he explores the residue of socialist media and their unexpected intersections with the circular economies of both analog film and agricultural production in China’s rural hinterlands.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Reinhold Martin is a historian of architecture, technology, and media, and Professor of Architecture at Columbia University. His most recent book is Knowledge Worlds: Media, Materiality, and the Making of the Modern University (Columbia, 2021). He is currently writing a book on “The Idea of Use,” or technology as symbolic form in the twentieth century American technosphere, from petroleum to photovoltaics, and another on philosophical aesthetics and modern architecture.
Speaker Bio
Robin Manley is a PhD candidate in the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley, with affiliations to the Program in Critical Theory and the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine, and Society. He is an editorial board member, and former Coeditor in Chief, of the journal Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences.
Speaker Bio
Tara Murray is a PhD student in Yale's Film and Media Studies program. She is broadly interested in the relationship between material and form. Her work bridges material and technological histories – attending specifically to optical devices and reproduction apparatuses and their systems of operation – with considerations of digital and experimental media production, labor, and aesthetics.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Mal Ahern is Assistant Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Washington. She is currently writing a book about image reproduction and industrial automation. She has published on air conditioning (in Discourse and e-flux architecture), automatic drawing (in diacritics and World Picture), and Andy Warhol (NECSUS and Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism) and has forthcoming work on materialism and infrastructure in JCMS.
Speaker Bio
Jason Q Han is a third-year PhD Student in the Literary and Cultural Studies program at UW-Madison. His work is focused on giving an account of a “solitude past the self” as it appears in 20th and 21st century literature and philosophy. His main theoretical interlocutors include Maurice Blanchot, Gilbert Simondon, and Gilles Deleuze.
Speaker Bio
Burc Kostem is Assistant Professor in Media and Technology Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Burc is a cultural theorist whose work investigates the political economy, political ecology and cultural studies of media and infrastructure, with a focus on Turkey and the Global South. His work has recently appeared in Rethinking Marxism, Cultural Politics and Cultural Studies.