| Sean Cubitt on Wed, 11 Jul 2001 05:43:41 +0200 (CEST) |
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| Re: <nettime> Where's Mumford? |
Good to see Mumford's name raised in brian carroll's post. To the list of significant works I would add The City in History. Mumford's humanism may come across a little outmoded, and we were instructed in the 1980s that large-scale history was not a viable occupation. But then works like de Landa's and the Anti-Oedipus point in exactly the opposite direction now. We are in some senses too slavishly involved in dragging old paradigms into the new situation, where they do not always fit. At te same time, we ignore several inspirational sources. I raise another spectre or two. Siegfried Giedion, Mechanisation Takes Command, A Contribution to Anonymous History, which has two enormous virtues. First, he is a meticulous historian of such vital processes as breadmaking and bathing, two chapters that stay with me (I now make all my own bread) as permanent additions to how it is possible to think such processes as globalsiation and the commodity form's evolution over the last several centuries. Harold Innis, who the Canadians are beginning to take up again, who was McLuhan's teacher; a brilliant and dedicated scholar who sought, after his experiences in Europe during WW1, to discover a motor of histiory that might be directed towards some bettering of the awefu lot of humanity. His understanding of colonialism is intyense, far more radical politically than McLuhan. At the same time he prefigures some reappropriations of Marx (notably by Feenberg and GA Cohen) as a technological historian, a reading that helps make sense of issues like the industrial design addressed by Innis, and which inspires recent writings like Terry Smnith's art-history of Ford Motor Co plants and associated spaces, places and practices in Making the Modern. Jody Berland among others has been doing wornderful work on Innis. Pierre Francastel. I reviewed a recent translation at Leonardo Digital Reviews, http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-journals/Leonardo/reviews/jun2001/bk_ARTTECH_cubitt.ht ml Francastel gives powerful arguments against Mumford and Giedion, or rather raises issues that are unthought in their work and require thinking. Harry Braverman. His Labour and Monopoly Capital was one of the first accounts of computerisation in the workplace and remains an outstanding analysis of the proletarianisation of retail and office trades Jacques Ellul. The Technoliogical Society. Save yourself the bother of reading Foucault. And among the more contemporary writers Leo Marx of course, Don Ihde, Bruce Mazlish for a popular take and Lorenzo Simpson for a technical philosophical one. In many ways, all of these can be read as attempts to get beyond Marx (Karl). Come to think of it, sociology and social history in general is the history of alternatives to Karl Marx. The history of Marxism is a history of alternative readings and the ocasional betrayal of Marx. There is still little to beat a reading of the first volume of Capital, which millions of workers the world over have undertaken for fun and profit over the last 150 years. The little flurry of comments on Hardt and Negri is a useful reminder: Empire is a contemporary classic. best sean Sean Cubitt Screen and Media Studies The University of Waikato Private Bag 3105 Hamilton New Zealand T (direct) +64 (0)7 856 2889 extension 8604 T/F (department) +64 (0)7 838 4543 [email protected] http://www.waikato.ac.nz/film/ Digital Aesthetics http://www.ucl.ac.uk/slade/digita The Dundee Seminars http://www.imaging.dundee.ac.uk/people/sean/index.html # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [email protected] and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [email protected]