Media & Materiality
ENGL 236 - Fall 2007, Rita Raley
The overarching premise of this course is that the dematerialization theses of the network, computer, information and/or post-industrial ages – those that tell us that money capital has lost its material weight and become pure image, that information is equally spectral, and that bodies are mere containers to be transcended – have less to tell us about actually existing media and socio-cultural systems than we might otherwise believe. There is a certain allure to totalizing theses of structural change: to say that we have entered an era of liquid modernity, for example, is to suggest a temporal rather than spatial logic of power, a shift away from the management of material things to the management of mobility and speed. But any critical paradigm, however useful, that posits a radical epistemological shift from materiality to immateriality must necessarily be untenable. To manage a network, after all, is to regulate both speed and a material entity. Discussions of computational media tend primarily to focus on issues of affect – an important area of research but not one that should preclude investigations of materiality, as we will see in our discussions of embodiment. After all, a virtual environment is not simply a product of conceptual machinery but also a product of machinery with fundamentally material properties. In our reading and discussions this term, we will engage overt matters (waste, objects, the apparatus, framed & unframed media, bodies) and covert ones as well (optical surveillance).
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Rita Raley