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!