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the energy crisis increased the public administration’s lack of interest and the energy lobbies’ marginalization of disconnection advocates. As the causes of this problematic development were often associated with its image of “critical technology,” the relevance of this description would be discussed in view of its founding concepts: the self-guarantee of vital necessities and the reconstitution of an economy of everyday life. Overcoming negative symbolism Energy autonomy provided a glimpse of surprising spatial and social potential. Rather than a technical
Some of the most famous ANT cases have investigated the role of a range of technologies, including aeroplanes, ships, microscopes and a personal rapid-transport system. Technologies are frequently forefronted in ANT work in a reflection of the equal emphasis ANT places on humans and non-humans, with technologies often taking the form of significant non-human actants. In this book I am similarly interested in the non-human actants in sport and take these as my starting-point when investigating technologies
Feenberg’s critical theory of technology is to a large extent constructed through a synthesis of concepts from several predecessor theories, each of them important to his work in different ways, and each a source of concepts that he modifies in order to incorporate them into his own syncretic framework. This chapter describes the overarching rationale of Feenberg’s intellectual project, with reference to some of these sources. It suggests that the result is a new system in which concepts take on altered significance and are made to do quite different work than
4 Steve Millett Technology is capital: Fifth Estate’s critique of the megamachine Introduction ‘How do we begin to discuss something as immense as technology?’, writes T. Fulano at the beginning of his essay ‘Against the megamachine’ (1981a: 4). Indeed, the degree to which the technological apparatus penetrates all elements of contemporary society does make such an undertaking a daunting one. Nevertheless, it is an undertaking that the US journal and collective Fifth Estate has attempted. In so doing, it has developed arguably the most sophisticated and
In 1985 the book historian Armando Petrucci expressed pessimism about reading’s place in a world dominated by new technologies: Western reading practices were being eroded, he argued, by habits contracted from other media. In a move that would have seemed less quaint when it was originally formulated, he complained that ‘the use of remote-control devices has given television spectators the power to change channels instantly, jumping from a film to a debate, from a game show to a news programme, from a commercial announcement to a soap opera’. For Petrucci
5 ‘Going with the technology’: the final generation of hot-metal compositors Introduction All of them today are employed in light, modern offices, where the loudest noise is the background hum of air conditioning. They see no ink, handle no lead, lift no heavy weights. Their materials are paper and film. And into their labour process, the terrain of control contested by management and the trade union, has entered a new organising principle: the computer.1 – Cynthia Cockburn When sociologist Cynthia Cockburn published the polemical text Brothers in 1983, London
4 A technology of presence: genre and temporality in Fox’s Journal What kind of a text is Fox’s Journal, in the most literal sense? Is it a journal, as Fox and his editors termed it? Or does its retrospective composition mean that it is better understood, as more recent critics have suggested, either as a spiritual autobiography or else as a history of the first years of the Quaker movement? This chapter re-examines the debates about the proper generic designation of the text, not in order to adjudicate between them but rather to propose that what these diverse
Ground noise and optical crackle: the sound of film There are a number of important cinesonic elements that escape the traditional tripartite division of the film soundtrack into speech, music and effects: one is noise, another silence and the third the sound of the technology of film itself. This last
6 Image, technology, enchantment Marina Warner in conversation with Dan Smith Dan Smith: I’d like to discuss a range of topics that arise in your work. But the focus here is the integration of mythic and sacred elements within photographic and institutional technologies. I want to think about this in terms of the impact of ethnographic work and folklore studies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We can think of these as discourses that popularised and disseminated the belief systems of different cultures. Your work often reflects upon forms
3 Technology, embodiment, and homosexuality Modernity and technics Over the 1880 to 1920 period, modern life in Western cities became exponentially enmeshed with a host of new technologies: automobiles, express trains, aeroplanes, electrical lighting, electrical conveyances (tramways, elevators, funiculars, moving sidewalks, etc.), telephone, wireless, and of course cinema. There were also less public innovations in industrial production and chemistry, in medicine (X-rays, pharmacology, dentistry, surgery, cosmetics, eyewear), and in destructive technologies of