Our new Lecture series Forms of Intelligence: Literary Knowledge in the Age of AI aims to bring in leading literature scholars to address questions about how our discipline might speak to the current moment—drawing on centuries of thinking about questions that computer scientists have recently taken up, regarding context, culture, affect, translation, and so on.

Speaker:

Caroline Levine, Cornell University

Title:
“Follow the money”: A Political Case for Metonymy in the Age of AI

Abstract:

Marxist critics have often rejected Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory because Latour favors small-scale scenes of encounter over a recognition of the totalizing systems that structure unequal and exploitative conditions. I will argue that a powerful strain of Marxist reading turns on the work of metaphor, while ANT relies on metonymy, and  I will make the case that Latour can actually help the Marxist case: we need metonymic analysis to understand socio-economic structures and to mount a powerful resistance to the fossil fuel and AI oligarchs. Metonymy opens a space for political agency which critics, and especially those in the Frankfurt School tradition, foreclose. 

Upcoming Speakers in the Series:

March 11, Markus Krajewski (Basel)

April 1, Patrick Jagoda (U Chicago)

April 15, Rita Raley (UCSB)