Viewing Technology: Perspectives in Theoretical
Analysis
Fall 2004, Mondays 16:00-18:00.
Dr. Steve Kennedy
Office: 236 King William
Tel.: 020 8331 8943
Email: s.kennedy@gre.ac.uk
Dr. Gauti Sigthorsson
Office: 236 King William
Tel.: 020 8331 8942
Email: g.sigthorsson@gre.ac.uk
Many competing discourses on technology currently proliferate. The opening part of
the course will engage in an archaeology of cause and effect in relation to such
discourses, linking current received notions of utility to specific political programmes,
the examination of which might usefully serve to inform and/or influence creative
practitioners.
To "view technology" one must already possess a number of instruments, or
"viewing-technologies". Thus, when Heidegger posed his "Question Concerning
Technology" it was not only to ask what technology is, but what it means to think
technologically - to ask what the conditions of possibility are for thinking in, with, or
through technology. In this seminar we will take Heidegger seriously, and pursue his,
and others' questions further. For example, are technologies (of power, of the self) not
themselves conditions of possibility for thought, as Foucault argues? Indeed, why
should we seek to separate thought and the thinking/viewing subject from the
technologies that constitute them - the multitude of little machines caught up in the
swirl of language, society, and politics? Ultimately these are practical, concrete
questions. All technologies are material, all viewing assumes that some thing is
viewed, that some "thinking thing" does even the "purest", abstract, rational thinking.
Or, to return to Heidegger, both technology and thinking have a "being-in-the world"
(Dasein) - down to those electrons of the digital age that seem so fast and weightless
until you walk past a power station.
Aims:
 To gain an understanding of the debates in/around technology, media and the
arts.
 To be able to use theoretical concepts and texts, and to frame practice in
relation to them.
 To apply that understanding to artistic practice in the form of a digital media
project, to be presented to the seminar at the end of the term.
Assessment:
1. Digital media project (50%, due end of term): Done over the course of the
term, engaging with the themes of the seminar (and should be coordinated
from the outset with the lecturers). Although you won't be asked to present
your project until the last two weeks of the seminar, we expect you to develop
it from the start. By "digital media" we mean that the outcome should either be
a digital media object, or engage substantially with digital media. All
participants will be required to present the project at the end of the semester.
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2. Final essay of 2500+ words (50%, due final class meeting): This is your
opportunity to link the theories and debates discussed in the seminar to your
own interests, in the form of a research paper.
Required Texts:
Photocopied handouts.
Lev Manovich. 2001. The Language of New Media. Cambridge/London: MIT Press.
Schedule (subject to change):
Wk.
Lect.
1
2
SK
3
SK
4
SK
5
SK
6
GS
7
GS
8
GS
9
GS
10
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Fall term starts 27/9/04.
Welcome session.
What is the importance of perspective in relation to viewing technology?
Moving away from fixed material positions.
Read: Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’.
The importance of discourses in their numerous forms in an analysis of the
contemporary technological environment.
Read: Hoy, ‘Foucault: A Critical Reader – Introduction’.
The relationship between specific political programmes and the development
of technologies with which we become familiar.
Read: Hutchison, ‘Technology – Chance, Fate & Choice’.
If the medium is the message what can we conclude, if anything, from our
investigations up to this point?
Read: Melody, ‘Electronic Networks, Social Relations and the Changing
Structure of Knowledge’.
What are we thinking about when we think with computers?
Kittler, preface and "Introduction" to Gramophone, Film, Typewriter; Kittler
"Protected Mode".
New media theory.
Read: Manovich, The Language of New Media, "Introduction", "What is New
Media?" and "The Interface" (2-115).
Diagrams, knowledge, power and technology.
Manovich, "The Database" (218-243); Deleuze, "A New Cartographer" from
Foucault.
Simulation and surveillance: Mapping the empire on a 1:1 scale.
Hacking, "Making up People"; Sigthorsson, "Intimate Data: Anonymity and
Mundane Surveillance" [manuscript].
Presentations
Presentations
Fall term ends Fri 10/12/04
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Bibliography of related texts:
Axford & Huggins. 2001. New Media & Politics. Sage. London.
Bateson, Gregory. 1972. Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology,
Psychiatry, Evolution and Epistemology. San Fransisco: Chandler.
Boyle, James. 1996. Shamans, Software and Spleens: Law and the Construction of the
Information Society. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Canguilhem, Georges. 1992 [1952]. "Machine and Organism." Trans. Mark Cohen and
Randall Cherry. In Incorporations (Zone 6). Ed. Stanford Kwinter and Jonathan
Crary. New York: Zone Books, 1992.
Collins & Murroni. 1996. New Media New Policies. Polity. Oxford.
DeLanda, Manuel. 1991. War in the Age of Intelligent Machines. New York: Zone Books.
Deleuze, Gilles. 1988. Foucault. Trans. Seán Hand. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
Deleuze, Gilles. 1995. "Postscript on Control Societies" In Negotiations, 1972-1990. Trans.
Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia University Press.
Foucault, Michel. 1977 [1975]. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan
Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books.
Galison, Peter. 1994. "The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic
Vision." Critical Inquiry 21 (Autumn): 228-266.
Haraway, Donna J. 1991. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. London:
Routledge.
Hayles, N. Katherine. 1999. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics,
Literature, and Informatics. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.
Heidegger, Martin. 1977. Basic Writings. Ed. D.F. Krell. London: Harper & Row.
Kittler, Friedrich. 1997. Literature, Media, Information Systems. Ed. John Johnston. Sidney:
G+B Arts International.
Kittler, Friedrich. 1999 [1986]. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Trans. G. Winthrop-Young
and M. Wutz. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Lash, Scott. 2002. Critique of Information. London: Sage.
Latour, Bruno. 1992. "Where are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane
Artifacts." In Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical
Change. Ed. Wiebe E. Bijker and John Law. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press.
Lenoir, Timothy, ed. 2002. Writing the Body into the Posthuman Technoscape. Part One:
Embracing the Posthuman. Special Issue of Configurations 10, no 2 (Spring).
Lyotard, Jean-François. 1984 [1979]. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge.
Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
Mansell, R.. 1993. The New Telecommunications. Sage. London.
Negroponte, N. 1995. Being Digital. Hodder & Sloughton. London.
Poster, M. 1992. The Mode Of Information. Polity. Oxford.
Poster, M. 1995. The Second Media Age. Polity. Oxford
Serres, Michel. 1982. Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press.
Waldby, Catherine. 2000. The Visible Human Project: Informatic Bodies and Posthuman
Medicine. London: Routledge.
Wiener, Norbert. 1954. The Human Uses of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society. Revised
ed. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin.
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