Suspended Declension: Automation and Economies of Exhaustion

Abstract

Suspended Declension: Automation and Economies of Exhaustion is a study of the ongoing historical and theoretical process whereby labour becomes a technical capacity—something that machines can be said to do. The principal approach of this project is that what is said about automation must be considered as part of what automation does: I rewrite an intellectual history of automation from the 19th century to the 21st century, demonstrating that descriptions of automation within media studies, the social construction of technology, and political economy are not only historical records of automative operations but are themselves instances of automation that can be subject to forensics and reconstruction. At the same time, automation is never transparently given as an object of study. We cannot begin with what machines say they do but must ask how machines can work at all. The majority of scholarship on automation today misses this point: on the one hand, there have been a surfeit of theories on the automation of any given process once ascribed to human labour (chapter 1); on the other hand, this has contributed to the dominance of a historical reading of automation’s technical trajectory, a dual narrative in which the development of technology under capitalism is expressed in its progressive subsumption of sites of labour and its progressive displacement of human labourers (chapter 2). In starting from the thesis that automation works, leading theorists in the above fields do not account for how automation works. I argue that this causes them to reproduce rather than resolve an enduring contradiction transversal to the fields that study automation. Namely, while the popular idiom of competition and displacement means that machines and labourers can only be understood as separate claimants on the same labour processes, machinic labour is predominantly narrated in terms of the human labour it is for that same reason always in the process of displacing and thus has never fully displaced (chapter 4). I argue that contradictions and theoretical inconsistencies in theories of human and machine labour—what I call “media theories of labour”—quite literally index automative operations in their failure to theorize and describe them. Media theories of labour thus allow us to reconstruct the genetic process whereby social antagonisms specific to capitalism are transformed into technical capacities borne by machines, which can then be said to threaten replacement of a labour force or augmentation of a labour process (chapter 3). I make three related interventions into the study of automation on the basis of this approach. Political economy: I untether the history of proletarianization from the creation of jobs that maintain and reproduce the worker; Media studies: I define automation as a human-machine relation independent of contemporary automative technologies; and Science and Technology Studies (STS): I argue that the history of automation under capitalism is a history of anachronism, whereby automation is perpetually occurring again and for the first time.