Labors of Likeness: Photography and Labor in Marx’s “Capital.”

Daniel A. Novak, 2007. Labors of Likeness: Photography and Labor in Marx’s “Capital.” Criticism 49, 125–150.

p.125

This essay provides a new technological and discursive context for Karl Marx’s
theory of the laboring body and reproduction, and in doing so, seeks to change
the way we read Marx’s relationship to visuality, photographic reproduction, and
mechanical realism.

Advertisements

A Short History of Photography in Dark Times

Ariella Azoulay, ‘A Short History of Photography in Dark Times’, pp.22-xx, in:

Azoulay, A., Haran, T., 2014. Aïm Deüelle Lüski and horizontal photography, Lieven Gevaert Series. Leuven University Press, Leuven (Belgium).

p.22

Turning the camera obscura into museum display object was at least part of the effort to reduce the conditions that enabled this impractical dimension to shape the practice of photography. The camera appeared as a utilitarian device facilitating the production of referential pictures whose object is identifiable and detectable, while enabling the photographer to part with them and still remain their sovereign author.

Deülle Lüski’s cameras project is a junction of phenomenological, epistemological, material, conceptual and political questions.

Bodies of Water, Human Rights and the Hydrocommons

Astrida Neimanis, 2009. Bodies of Water, Human Rights and the Hydrocommons. TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies 21, 161–182. https://doi.org/10.3138/topia.21.161%5D

p.162

Our bodies thus reveal to us the problem with any  reductive dichotomization of water as natural or cultural. While the 60-90 per cent of ourselves that is comprised of water is undoubtedly biological, we nonetheless live our bodies of water as brimming with economic, cultural and otherwise semiotic potentiality.

The “nature” of our bodily water is meaningful and meaning-making, just as the porosity, fluidity and leakiness of our selves are no mere metaphors.

Tools for the Hand, Language for the Face

Ingold, Tim. 1999. ‘Tools for the Hand, Language for the Face’: An Appreciation of Leroi-Gourhan’s Gesture and Speech, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biology & Biomedical Science. 30: 4. 411–453

p.411

What might a more inclusive theory, that would accommodate the social and technical along with the zoological dimensions of human existence, look like?

p.412

To read Le Geste et la parole, however, is to realise that Leroi-Gourhan’s contribution extended far beyond questions of art and technology, to embrace a vision of human development of quite breathtaking scope.

Deleuze and Machines: A Politics of Technology?

William Bogard, ‘Deleuze and Machines: A Politics of Technology?’, pp.15-31, in:

Poster, M., Savat, D. (Eds.), 2009. Deleuze and new technology, Deleuze connections. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh.

p.15

Deleuze is not so much interested in questioning technology, like Heidegger, as in articulating, along with Guattari, a problem about machines.

Deleuze and Guattari’s problematisations of machines lead them, by contrast, to a concept of a multiplicity without an essence – or better, with a ‘nomadic’ essence1 – a complex configuration of machinic and enunciative elements called an ‘assemblage’.

The problem of machines is not Heidegger’s question of technology: Is there a possible escape from Enframing? Can technology save the world before it annihilates it? For Deleuze, there is neither an essential ‘saving power’ nor a nihilism of machines. Safety and danger are matters of experimenting with assemblages, with their compositional forms.

It is not a question of an essence of technology, but of what Deleuze and Guattari call an abstract machine, a machine immanent in assemblages that both integrates them and opens them to an outside, to counterforces that break them down.

According to Deleuze and Guattari, assemblages have a dual form: a ‘form of content’, that is, a machinic form composed of variably fixed matters and energetic components; and a ‘form of expression’ or ‘enunciation’ consisting of statements and articulated functions.

On the mode of existence of technical objects

Gilbert Simondon, ‘Introduction’, pp.15-21, in:

Simondon, G., 2016. On the mode of existence of technical objects. Univocal Pub, Minneapolis, MN.

p.15

Culture has constituted itself as a defense system against technics; yet this defense presents itself as a defense of man, and presumes that technical objects do not contain a human reality within them.

We would like to show that culture ignores a human reality within technical reality and that, in order to fully play its role, culture must incorporate technical beings in the form of knowledge and in the form of a sense of values

The opposition drawn between culture and technics, between man and machine, is false and has no foundation; it is merely a sign of ignorance or resentment.

Behind a facile humanism, it masks a reality rich in human efforts and natural forces, and which constitutes a world of technical objects as mediators between man and nature.

Beyond Machines (but Still within the Phenomenology of Gestures)

Vilém Flusser, “Beyond Machines (but Still within the Phenomenology of Gestures)”, pp.10-18, in:

Flusser, V., 2014. Gestures. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.

p.10

During its first phase (antiquity and the Middle Ages), history emphasizes the way the world should be; that is, people work to realize a value—ethical, political, religious, practical, in short, “in good faith.”

During its second phase (modernity), it emphasizes the discovery of being in the world; that is, people work epistemologically, scientifically, experimentally, and theoretically, in short, “without faith.”

Balance Sheet for Desiring Machines

Deleuze and Guattari, “Balance Sheet for Desiring Machines”, pp.90-115, in:

Guattari, F., Lotringer, S., 2009. Chaosophy: texts and interviews 1972-1977. Semiotext(e), Los Angeles, CA.

p.91

The object is no longer to compare humans and the machine in order to evaluate the correspondences, the extensions, the possible or impossible substitutions of the ones for the other, but bring them into communication in order to show how humans are a component part of the machine, or combined with something else to constitute a machine.  The other thing can be a tool, or even an animal, or other humans. We are not using a metaphor, however, when we speak of machines: humans constitute a machine as soon as this nature is communicated by recurrence to the ensemble of which they form a part under specific conditions.

MirrorCameraRoom: the gendered multi-(in)stabilities of the selfie

Warfield, K., 2017. MirrorCameraRoom: the gendered multi-(in)stabilities of the selfie. Feminist Media Studies 17, 77–92. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2017.1261843

p.77

Mark Deuze (2012) suggests that in our increasingly mediated lives, perhaps we are the medium. Theorists of Internet and social media studies have tackled similar befuddling questions where we’ve become at once producers and consumers—pro-sumers (Alvin Toffler 1980)—or simultaneously producers and users—produsers (Karl Fahringer and Axel Bruns 2008). Studying audiences at this period in history is like “wrestling with a jellyfish” (Justin Lewis 2013) because, among other things, audiences could be both always and everywhere (Peter Vorderer and Matthias Kohring 2013) or everywhere and nowhere (Elizabeth Bird 2003).

From Elephans Photographicus to the Hybronaut

Laura Beloff, ‘From Elephans Photographicus to the Hybronaut: An Artistic Approach to Human Enhancement’, pp.51-66, in:

Elo, M., Luoto, M., 2014. Senses of Embodiment: Art, Technics, Media. Peter Lang.

p.51

[Ref Bateson and von Uexküll on environment of the organism]

Uexkull’s research revealed that every species has its own constructed Umwelt because each species reacts in a distinctive way to the same signals it receives from the physical world. What is thus necessary for one’s biological survival, is included within one’s perception of the world; the Umwelt.