Dismantlings: Words Against Machines in the American Long Seventies

"For the master's tools," the poet Audre Lorde wrote, "will never dismantle the master's house." Dismantlings is a study of literary, political, and philosophical critiques of the utopian claims about technology in the Long Seventies, the decade and a half before 1980. Following Alice Hilton's 1963 admonition that the coming years would bring humanity to a crossroads-"machines for HUMAN BEINGS or human beings for THE MACHINE"-Matt Tierney explores wide-ranging ideas from science fiction, avant-garde literatures, feminist and anti-racist activism, and indigenous eco-philosophy that may yet challenge machines of war, control, and oppression. Dismantlings opposes the language of technological idealism with radical thought of the Long Seventies, from Lorde and Hilton to Samuel R. Delany and Ursula K. Le Guin to Huey P. Newton, John Mohawk, and many others. This counter-lexicon retrieves seven terms for the contemporary critique of technology: Luddism, a verbal and material combat against exploitative machines; communion, a kind of togetherness that stands apart from communication networks; cyberculture, a historical conjunction of automation with racist and militarist machines; distortion, a transformative mode of reading and writing; revolutionary suicide, a willful submission to the risk of political engagement; liberation technology, a synthesis of appropriate technology and liberation theology; and thanatopography, a mapping of planetary technological ethics after Auschwitz and Hiroshima. Dismantlings restores revolutionary language of the radical Long Seventies for reuse in the digital present against emergent technologies of exploitation, subjugation, and death.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: For the Sake of Survival 1. Luddism 2. Communion 3. Cyberculture 4. Distortion 5. Revolutionary Suicide 6. Liberation Technology 7. Thanatopography Conclusion: American Carnage and Technologies of Tomorrow Acknowledgments Notes Works Cited Permissions Index

About the Author :
Matt Tierney is Assistant Professor of English at The Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of What Lies Between.

Review :
Dismantlings is a remarkable book. It is also a difficult book. Difficult not because of impenetrable theoretical prose (the writing is clear and crisp), but because it is always challenging to go back and confront the warnings that were ignored... The lessons from the long seventies are those that we are still struggling to reckon with today, including the recognition that in order to fully make sense of the machines around us it may be necessary to dismantle many of them. (boundary 2) Unable to do justice to this magnificent mongraph, it will have to suffice to say that Tierney's Dismantlings is one of the most important books of the year as it offers up a number of thinkers and artists that provide language and strategies for working through urgent issues impacting the globe today and for inspiring ways to use words against machines to act towards more equitable futures. - Mary Foltz (The Year's Work in English Studies) Matt Tierney['s] excellent and impassioned new book, Dismantlings, reminds us that some of the most powerful critiques of technology throughout the period drew on rhetorics steeped in Luddite ideologies that were cannier than we think. (American Literary History)