This article considers the expropriation, description, and cultivation of land as a central problem for media history and political ecology. Recent work in the history and theory of media has posited the cultivation of land as a primordial cultural technique or a material operation that underlies signification. Such work stops short, however, of considering that operation—which begins with the drawing of lines on the ground—as a form of labor and hence a dimension of political economy comparable to Rousseau’s account of (...) the origin of property. John Bellamy Foster has shown how Marx’s early development of a neo-Epicurean materialism led, when informed by mid-nineteenth-century scientific agriculture, to what Foster calls Marx’s theory of “metabolic rift,” the disruption of the metabolic interchange between nature and society mediated by human labor. This article returns to the unfinished business of critical theory that rejoins the critique of culture with the critique of nature, by showing how a mediapolitics of land governs the dialectical processes described by eco-Marxists like Foster. Specifically, the article considers the material production of land for both agriculture and industry, informed by scientific agriculture and with plantation slavery as a limit case, through the work of Henry Charles Carey. Rethinking the political economy of land in this way extends the cultural materialism predominant in media history and theory into a more fully historical materialism adequate to an ecological situation in which all that may once have been solid has truly melted, or burned, into air. (shrink)

This essay explores histories of common salt, sodium chloride, using concepts and methods from media theory. It contributes to research on media and environment and the general ‘material turn’ taken across the Humanities. I conceive of salt as what Peters calls an ‘elemental’ medium so as to show, first, the imbrication of naturally-occurring substances in the operations and supply chains of digital culture. Second, the many lives salt has lived materially, in techniques of survival and exchange, and metaphorically, in cultural (...) expression, complicate conventional understandings of media. In showing how salt performs three functions, processing, storage, and transfer, which Kittler ascribed to technical and symbolic media, I argue for a more expansive use of ‘mediation’ as a bridge concept that speaks to matters of nature and culture, Arts and Science, and to account for deep histories of extraction and economy that shape digital culture and global supply chains. (shrink)

Phenomenological accounts of technology, mediation, and embodiment are beginning to problematize traditional distinctions between subject (human) and object (machine). This shift is often attributed to a material or post-human turn since it is usually associated with an interest in the non-human actors and objects that make media interfaces possible. This article contends that these tendencies should also be considered part of a deeper lineage of dialectical thought in critical theory. Using videogames as an example, I argue that academic debates related (...) to the player/game relationship can be read through the lens of Adorno’s aesthetic theory. Developing Adorno’s concept of mimesis, I argue that the interface is often treated as a dialectical question of how the space between subject and object should be traversed. I reflect on the possible advantages of focusing on this contested space through a discussion of game controllers and the Aristotelian concept of techne. (shrink)

Initially coined by Weizenbaum in 1976, ‘alien' thought refers to the radical difference with which ‘thinking machines’ approach the process of thinking. The contemporary paradox of over-determination and indeterminacy—caused largely by algorithmic decision-making in the civic realm—makes these differences both more entangled and more difficult to navigate. In this essay, I trace over-determination to Leibniz and Turing’s axiomatic procedures and to instrumental rationality, and I trace indeterminacy to the mid-twentieth century co-development of computers and neurosciences to advance the following proposition: (...) understanding alien thought requires understanding incomputability, temporal swarming, and inscriptive-significational errance. Understanding these phenomena in turn requires understanding thinking by doing, distributed thinking, and ontological indeterminacy. All are present in machinic operations as well as in the twentieth century experimental artistic practices of artists such as Duchamp, Cage, and Xu. These practices rely on indeterminate procedures and function as diagrammatic machines. A diagrammatic machine is neither abstract nor particular; neither an idea that is determining in the supreme instance, nor an infrastructure that is determining in the last instance, but rather instantiates a real yet to come (Deleuze and Guattari in A thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia: Trans. Massumi B, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1987). In this essay, indeterminate artistic practices are used as an entry into alien thought and its correlates—infinity and complexity—by way of aesthetic analogy. (shrink)