Media Theories of Labour

Automation is an inescapable term in any reckoning with the contemporary moment, appearing as an avatar of and for the present. A surfeit of scholarly, artistic, and economic accounts of what automation does continues to multiply, but it does so amid the enduring absence of a coherent understanding of what automation is. This course explores what it takes, technically and theoretically, for a machine to be said to work. How does automation come to be understood as the property of certain technologies?

Through close reading of texts taken from media theory, the history of technology, political economy, and philosophy, this course offers an expansive conception of automation that systematically relates contemporary labour processes and technological processes as different formulations of the same critical problem. Its premise is that before automation is aligned with any discrete instance of machinic labour - it works first as an operation on human labour. It works as the positing of a specific human-machine relation. Covering material from the late nineteenth century to the present, this course develops an analytic adequate to contemporary instances of automation. Throughout the semester we will use this analytic to consider problems thus far untreated in terms of automation.