Week 2
Video: Ryan Christopher Clarke, Nature’s Notifications, 2021.

Even though you have not read them yet, try to keep the texts listed below in mind. Try to memorize their titles, authors, the times at which they were written and the periods and geographies that they were writing about.

Part II
Week 3
Text: Georges Canguilhem, “Machine and Organism,” in Knowledge of Life, edited by Paola Marrati and Todd Meyers, translated by Stefanos Geroulanos and Daniela Ginsburg, 2008.

Canguilhem originally presented this as a lecture at Collège de France in 1947. He rigorously critiques a line of thought initiated by René Descartes in the 17th century in which animals are machines. Canguilhem’s central claim is to show that a distinction between machine and organism is misguided; all technique, in the machine or in the organism, is a function of life itself. 

Video: Donna Haraway Reads “The National Geographic” On Primates, 1987.

If you would like to follow Haraway in her analysis here go next to Primate Visions: Gender, Race and Nature in the World of Modern Science, 1990.

Part III
Week 4
Text: E.P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” 1967.
Text: W.J.T. Mitchell, “Dinosaurs and Modernity,” in From Energy to Information: Representation in Science and Technology, Art, and Literature, edited by Bruce Clarke and Linda Dalrymple Henderson, 2002.

Mitchell writes that for “​​most people, computers are simply speeded up extensions of the typewriter, the ledger book, the mailbox, and the filing cabinet.” The computer then is a machine that we can ask questions of in terms of time. While Mitchell draws a later picture of modernity from a different analytic altogether, try to bring in Thompson’s analysis of the relationship between machinery and labor and the entrance of leisure time in “the age of biocybernetic production.”

Part IV
Week 5
Text: Karl Marx, “The Compensation Theory, With Regard to the Workers Displaced by Machinery,” in Capital Volume 1, 1867.

This book is best read from start to finish in its entirety with a group of people and a companion reader or with someone who can provide their own reading of Marx as a guide for the group. However, for this syllabus we will only read pages 565-575, the sixth section in the chapter on machines.

Text: Ariel Yelen, “Revolution” and “Everything good? Yes. Everything?” in I Was Working: Poems, 2024.

Week 6

Text: Jessica Riskin, “Machines in the Garden,” in The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument over What Makes Living Things Tick, 2016.

In this chapter Riskin brings us beyond modernity and into the middle ages of Europe. We are given a different binary, God vs. Nature, rather than human vs. machine. What can we say so far about the emergence of the human-machine dyad under modernity?

Film: Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day, directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1972.

Part V
Week 7
Text: Mindy Seu, Cyberfeminism Index, filtered by “bio.”

Choose one reading from this list and read out loud with a friend. I recommend chapter 2 in Paul B. Preciado’s Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, And Biopolitics In The Pharmacopornographic Era. Preciado writes both historically, philosophically and from the self while taking testosterone in what he calls a “voluntary intoxication protocol.” The book is above all a theory of the self as a gathering of attachments to one’s body and its biological becomings and how those get stratified or codified or delimited into conceptions of sex and gender and how an attention to the microphysics of the biological causes those conceptions to break down.

Week 8

Text: Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, “Losing Manhood Plasticity, Animality, and Opacity in the (Neo)Slave Narrative” in Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World, 2020.

In step with Alexander Wehelye’s claim that the most important claim to critical black studies is taking on the category of human as a heuristic instead of a given ontology (35), Jackson’s produces a study of blackness through the concept of plasticity. She shows how the racialization of the human is necessary to the project of the liberal human subject. For Jackson, the concept of plasticity is both a praxis and a mode that undercuts the human-animal binarism which causes many posthumanist, new materialist, and animal studies scholars to stop short of seeing how racialization is not a symptom of the differentiation but a condition for it.

Part VI
Week 9
Video: “N comme Neurologie” in L’Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze, avec Claire Parnet, directed by Pierre-André Boutang, 1996.
Text: Catherine Malabou, “Epigenetic Mimesis: Natural Brains and Synaptic Chips,” in Critical Responses to the Anthropocene, edited by S.E. Wilmer and Audronė Žukauskaitė, 2023.

Malabou’s work on plasticity has a different frame from Jackson’s and it would be productive to discuss the differences. Both thinkers use plasticity to theorize the presuppositions of the categories of human and machine. 

Part VII
Week 11
Text: Ingrid Burrington “From War Crystals to Ordinary Sand: Excavating Silicon Supply Chains,” in IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, 2024.

Burrington’s work deconstructs technological artifacts and reveals the materials and the infrastructures that make them possible as objects. This article analyzes the narratives that have been constructed to blur the military-industrial demands which produce and maintain the movement of computing supply-chains and global-scale mining projects. 

Week 12
Video: President Bill Clinton’s Remarks on NetDay, at Ygnacio Valley High School in Concord, California, 1996.
Text: Charli Muller “Railroad Luxemburg: Rosa Luxemburg’s Theory of Infrastructure and its Consequences for a Public Service Internet,” in tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique. Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society, 2024.

As in last week, this week is meant to broaden the question of machine into a contemporary material analysis on a global scale. As you’ll remember from the Clinton video above, the expansion of communication technology has been framed by American empire as intrinsically good. In step with Luxemburg’s thought Muller incisively critiques this framing and shows how imperial projects of domination and theories of emancipation from them have been produced through varying analyses of networked infrastructures and their logics.