An Argument for a Cartographic Approach to Technology
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Date
2024-01-09
Authors
McLevey, Mare
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Publisher
University of Oregon
Abstract
This dissertation develops a way to study technology and politics that is an alternative to dominant approaches particular to contemporary philosophy of technology’s empirical and ethical turns. Dominant models fix technologies as stable objects to be related to in ethical ways or as objects whose designs should be reformed over time. Alternatively, I develop what I call a cartographic approach to technology (CAT). CAT situates technologies as components of larger dynamic ensembles the transformations of which must be diagrammed and mapped. The cartographic task is not simply to describe existing relations; it involves the creation of new assemblages through the experimental construction of maps linking technologies with other forces and elements in the wholes of which they are a part. I argue CAT underscores how technological objects themselves are the products of multi-scalar processes of arrangement. Furthermore, these processes are always political and might be points of intervention at any and every moment. CAT throws technologies back into the ensembles enmeshing them and forces productive links between heterogeneous elements. This linking work might carry libidinal, material, psychic, structural, and other types of weight in the real. And it should be undertaken with a view to the production of new cartographies. My argument unfolds across four chapters. In Chapter 2, I develop four tenets of CAT drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s analytic focus on transformations and their concepts of machines, assemblages, and cartography. I illustrate these tenets in Chapters 3 and 4 through comparative studies of CAT alongside Postphenomenology and Critical Theory of Technology, respectively. In Chapter 5, I propose that collective counter-mapping projects such as those of the Counter-Cartographies Collective and Iconoclasistas suggest concrete possibilities for CAT as a site of collective knowledge production about technology. All four chapters together outline an image of philosophy of technology as experimental, creative, collective, and guided by explicit political commitments.
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Keywords
Counter-Mapping, Critical Theory of Technology, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Philosophy of Technology, Postphenomenology, Social and Political Philosophy