Rereading McLuhan’s “The Medium is the Message,” I found myself seeing a similar kind of determinism that one might find reading Marx. Where Marx sees an economic means of production as the determinate force in society, McLuhan sees technology as deterministic of social structures. Without parsing either writer’s politics, what is interesting is their shared materialism. This was a common thread throughout this week’s readings: that computer technologies are a material extension of the Archive (in the case of Bush’s “memex”) or an extension of racialized and gendered practices of capitalist exploitation (Nakamura).
With fascism on the rise, I have been thinking a lot lately about the means of production in our age of global capital and how one might even comprehend an attempt to seize it in revolution. Not that I am a card-carrying member of the Vanguard Party, but even imagining an attempt to seize the engines of production seems ludicrous these days. Do you occupy Wall Street? Or the many microchip factories in Southeast Asia? Do you launch a DDoS attack or mobilize a flash mob? And while I fundamentally disagree with virtually every historical reading that McLuhan offers—and he seems to shuffle through a playlist of the major hits in the political revolutions and colonial expeditions throughout modernity—somehow his observation that there is an intuitive linkage between communication technologies and the (re)creation of (post)modern subjectivities seems right to me.
Personally, I am very glad that we began our collective thought experiment on solid materialist grounds, as theories of the digital can often become unmoored into the realms of virtuality. But I also hope that we can refine what if anything needs to be rethought in a materialist metaphysical outlook given the technological changes of our age. We so often propose seeing computers as an extension of our brains and fetishize artificial intelligence, so how does this discourse reshape old conceptualizations of materialism and idealism, or the mind-body problem? So I guess I am proposing that we use these questions along with my first problematic, “What constitutes the means of production in our Digital Age?” as a heuristic to think about how digital technology functions materially, in both the Marxian and McLuhanian sense, to shape both the economic base and communication superstructure of our global society.
At least that is something that I am very interested in...
At least that is something that I am very interested in...
Is the means of production in a material-and-distributed/diffuse age some combination of tactics and tactile substances? Knowledge networks, drawing on the ethical and political power of humans with overlapping but varieties of skillsets, some of which are currently valued but many of which are overlooked? I tend to think it's also useful to bring materialism back in to draw on analog practices (like zine distribution) alongside digital ones, without creating a hierarchy between them—as you say reshaping binary of the mind-body, material-virtual problem.
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ReplyDeleteI think the key term here is the idea of "our" digital age, because contextualization has proven time and time again to be the driving force behind moments of new ideas. The attraction of technology determinism has been a persistent idea, from Francis Bacon asserting that mechanical inventions change history to Thomas Carlyle specifying that it was printing that gave us democracy. I can't help but wonder about the implications of technology situated within these moments; if printing had been invented at some other time, would it have had different effects? I am thinking about constructing technology as a necessary or sufficient condition here — if we agree with Carlyle, are we saying that we can't have democracy without the printing press? Or that once we have the printing press, we can have democracy? And finally, as you mention, what does that imply for "our" digital age?
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