RafaelFajardo

You have some sharp, precise critique for the male bias of the history of technology as long practiced. What are some of the feminist implications of the infrastructuralist imagination?

Revealing the invisible supports that hold up the world, a chief aim of infrastructuralism, is clearly allied with the feminist project of revealing unpaid and unappreciated labor. (I will resist the temptation to join the current controversy about “wife bonuses” for rich stay-at-home moms!) The infrastructuralist imagination — nice term, by the way — seeks to appreciate all that is essential and off the radar. Without reinforcing a gender binary, the book points to the vast realms of technical history made invisible by the masculinist view of technologies as artifacts that work on matter rather than practices that shape bodies. Technology, as I wrote about one of Google’s more outlandish moves, is womb envy.

The history of media theory from McLuhan to Kittler was always also an implicit theory of gender. What if the philosophy of technology focused on birth as much as death? What if we appreciated container technologies as much as power technologies, or labor on life as much as work on things? What if we took domestication not as lost vigor but as the site of the hardest and greatest work? The book doesn’t answer these questions at length, but suggests they are essential to any future philosophy of media.