Matt Tierney
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781501746413
- eISBN:
- 9781501746567
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9781501746413.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
“For the master's tools,” the poet Audre Lorde wrote, “will never dismantle the master's house.” This book is a study of literary, political, and philosophical critiques of the utopian claims about ...
More
“For the master's tools,” the poet Audre Lorde wrote, “will never dismantle the master's house.” This book is a study of literary, political, and philosophical critiques of the utopian claims about technology in the Long Seventies, the decade and a half before 1980. Following Alice Hilton's 1963 admonition that the coming years would bring humanity to a crossroads, the book explores wide-ranging ideas from science fiction, avant-garde literatures, feminist and anti-racist activism, and indigenous eco-philosophy that may yet challenge machines of war, control, and oppression. It opposes the language of technological idealism with radical thought of the Long Seventies. This counter-lexicon retrieves seven terms for the contemporary critique of technology: Luddism, a verbal and material combat against exploitative machines; communion, a kind of togetherness that stands apart from communication networks; cyberculture, a historical conjunction of automation with racist and militarist machines; distortion, a transformative mode of reading and writing; revolutionary suicide, a willful submission to the risk of political engagement; liberation technology, a synthesis of appropriate technology and liberation theology; and thanatopography, a mapping of planetary technological ethics after Auschwitz and Hiroshima. The book restores revolutionary language of the radical Long Seventies for reuse in the digital present against emergent technologies of exploitation, subjugation, and death.Less
“For the master's tools,” the poet Audre Lorde wrote, “will never dismantle the master's house.” This book is a study of literary, political, and philosophical critiques of the utopian claims about technology in the Long Seventies, the decade and a half before 1980. Following Alice Hilton's 1963 admonition that the coming years would bring humanity to a crossroads, the book explores wide-ranging ideas from science fiction, avant-garde literatures, feminist and anti-racist activism, and indigenous eco-philosophy that may yet challenge machines of war, control, and oppression. It opposes the language of technological idealism with radical thought of the Long Seventies. This counter-lexicon retrieves seven terms for the contemporary critique of technology: Luddism, a verbal and material combat against exploitative machines; communion, a kind of togetherness that stands apart from communication networks; cyberculture, a historical conjunction of automation with racist and militarist machines; distortion, a transformative mode of reading and writing; revolutionary suicide, a willful submission to the risk of political engagement; liberation technology, a synthesis of appropriate technology and liberation theology; and thanatopography, a mapping of planetary technological ethics after Auschwitz and Hiroshima. The book restores revolutionary language of the radical Long Seventies for reuse in the digital present against emergent technologies of exploitation, subjugation, and death.
Matt Tierney
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781501746413
- eISBN:
- 9781501746567
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9781501746413.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
This chapter introduces critical and literary tools for prying apart presumptions about the centrality of technology to culture. It talks about what thinking can do and what it tried to do in order ...
More
This chapter introduces critical and literary tools for prying apart presumptions about the centrality of technology to culture. It talks about what thinking can do and what it tried to do in order to enrich and enable the emancipatory critique of technology. It describes what spoken and written language have contributed to the transformation or destruction of reactionary institutions and ideas. The chapter emphasizes against the forms of exploitation identified with machines, or with some machines but not all, or with machinic thought and the becoming-machine of laboring bodies. It explains why “dismantling” is used to describe a way of reading with roots in a particular period of literary and theoretical production, the decade and a half before 1980, which historians of labor call the Long Seventies.Less
This chapter introduces critical and literary tools for prying apart presumptions about the centrality of technology to culture. It talks about what thinking can do and what it tried to do in order to enrich and enable the emancipatory critique of technology. It describes what spoken and written language have contributed to the transformation or destruction of reactionary institutions and ideas. The chapter emphasizes against the forms of exploitation identified with machines, or with some machines but not all, or with machinic thought and the becoming-machine of laboring bodies. It explains why “dismantling” is used to describe a way of reading with roots in a particular period of literary and theoretical production, the decade and a half before 1980, which historians of labor call the Long Seventies.
Matt Tierney
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781501746413
- eISBN:
- 9781501746567
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9781501746413.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
This chapter explains why Luddism is a metaphor that threads through the Long Seventies in the work of poets, activists, and thinkers, each of whom applies literature to the task of dismantling the ...
More
This chapter explains why Luddism is a metaphor that threads through the Long Seventies in the work of poets, activists, and thinkers, each of whom applies literature to the task of dismantling the technocentric world. It includes Édouard Glissant who offers an optimistic promise of literature's power to break systems, writing poetry that can “thicken” the “machine that the world is.” Audre Lorde is more skeptical, opening the possibility that even literature may be one among the “master's tools” that are inapposite to the task of dismantling. Joanna Russ is more skeptical still, in her insistence that scholars and science-fiction writers should “give up talking about technology” and W.S. Merwin imagines an intelligent machine that is fated to be relinquished. Such literary and theoretical practices do not oppose technology as such, but instead oppose large-scale forms of exploitation by dismantling the machines at their disposal. The chapter also talks about Epistemological Luddism, a specific form of Luddism that provides a critical defense against late-twentieth century technological politics and a dedramatization of the false choice for or against technology.Less
This chapter explains why Luddism is a metaphor that threads through the Long Seventies in the work of poets, activists, and thinkers, each of whom applies literature to the task of dismantling the technocentric world. It includes Édouard Glissant who offers an optimistic promise of literature's power to break systems, writing poetry that can “thicken” the “machine that the world is.” Audre Lorde is more skeptical, opening the possibility that even literature may be one among the “master's tools” that are inapposite to the task of dismantling. Joanna Russ is more skeptical still, in her insistence that scholars and science-fiction writers should “give up talking about technology” and W.S. Merwin imagines an intelligent machine that is fated to be relinquished. Such literary and theoretical practices do not oppose technology as such, but instead oppose large-scale forms of exploitation by dismantling the machines at their disposal. The chapter also talks about Epistemological Luddism, a specific form of Luddism that provides a critical defense against late-twentieth century technological politics and a dedramatization of the false choice for or against technology.
