| Abstrakt: |
In Mati Diop's film Atlantics (France/Senegal/Belgium, 2019), images of people holding, using, and disposing of cell phones knit together scenes of attenuated social reproduction. In this essay, I take those images as the basis for a theory of interfaces. In so doing, I connect some of the principal concerns of media theory to the social operations--of labor, of social reproduction, and of racialized, gendered, and sexuated valuation--that collectively enact the expanded reproduction of capital. From the perspective of those operations, media technologies such as cell phones become intelligible as elements in a determinate form of society: not only interfaces in themselves but also elements in an expansive, emergent, and (apparently) self-regulating network of interfaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
