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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.

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.

This introductory chapter situates the New Hollywood in the context of its times and provides an overview of the contributions to the volume. Although the term “New Hollywood” has been variously (and often vaguely) invoked – and of course, every generation can stake a claim to something suggestive of a New Hollywood – we situate the focus here on that subculture of personal, introspective, European-influenced and often auteur-driven films that thrived in the fleeting and tumultuous decade bookended by the collapse of Hollywood’s old self-censorship production code in 1966 and the birth of the blockbuster in 1977.

In 1969 a struggling Columbia Pictures, seeking to connect with a generation that the old studio hands little understood and seemed unable to reach, signed a contract with producers Bob Rafelson, Bert Schneider, and Steve Blauner. The six-picture deal with their newly-formed production company, BBS, which traded low budgets in exchange for no studio interference over content, represented the New Hollywood dream: the opportunity to make movies that aspired to be both commercially viable and serious expressions of a more personal cinema. The BBS deal yielded some of the landmarks of the New Hollywood—films that likely would not otherwise have been possible to produce. This chapter considers the BBS phenomenon through a close reading of its films and their contribution to the New Hollywood.

Robert Altman helped define New Hollywood cinema with the dark comedy film MASH in 1970 and helped close out the era with the surreal 3 Women in 1977. But Altman was an unlikely New Hollywood icon; New Hollywood auteurs were supposed to be young movie brats straight from film school, whereas Altman was a forty-something autodidact who had learned his craft making industrial and educational pictures. This chapter focuses on three of Altman’s most important and influential films: the 1971 western McCabe & Mrs. Miller, which builds extraordinary emotional power while radically revising both the myth of the frontier and a key Hollywood genre; the 1975 musical Nashville, a large-canvas portrait of modern-day American politics, patriotism, popular culture, and celebrity; and the oneiric 3 Women, a small-canvas dreamscape that marks the outer limits of New Hollywood iconoclasm.