UGST4077 - Cultures of Quantification (Winter 2023)
Section outline
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Assigned reading:
Thomas Carlyle, “Signs of the times,” Edinburgh Review 49 no. 98 (June 1829): 439–459.
Marx and Engels, "He becomes an appendage of the machine," in section 1, "Bourgeois and proletarians," from The Communist Manifesto (1848). [Read this whole section, but concentrate on the middle portion, where they spell out their position on machinery.] [Feel free to read this in any one of eighty languages.] [If you prefer, you may read the earliest English translation in The Red Republican (November 1850): 161–190 (passim).]
Further resources:Donald Mackenzie, "Marx and the Machine," Technology and Culture 25 (1984): 473-502.
Bruce Bimber, "Karl Marx and the three faces of technological determinism," Social Studies of Science 20 (1990): 333-351.