The erasure of technology in cultural critique

How can we think technology in its material specificity? Contemporary critical theory treats technology as a trope or representation rather than a physical reality in the world. The 'machine' is not just a metaphor for a particular technology, but for technology itself. And at a deeper level, this metaphor enframes technology within a semiotically constituted field. US critic Mark Hansen argues that this perspective gives us no access to the materiality of technology itself, to its impact on our embodied lives. We should abandon the systemic-semiotic approach, or at least find an alternative. In this essay I explore Hansen’s argument and claim that it constructs this as a choice – we either approach technology through the body, or we approach it through language. I argue for a different reading: a reading which does not create a choice between text and materiality, text and technology – but at the same time, a reading which does not depend entirely on cognition and representation, which does not dissolve materiality into thought. I want to think technology as at once material opacity and as representation. And I believe that the elements for this can actually be found in the work of Bernard Stiegler and Jacques Derrida. I want to extricate a politics of technology that sacrifices neither side of the equation, that addresses the specificities of new media technology through the concept of the archive.