Seb Franklin
Biographic Data
| ID | 3584206 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Seb Franklin |
| GIVEN NAMES | Seb |
| FAMILY NAME | Franklin |
| SIGNATURE | FRANKLIN S |
| AFFILIATIONS | King's College London |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7671-8842 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 15 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 4 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 15 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Reproduction at the Interface
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 collecti…
Value and Slavery, or the Longue Durée of the Analog-Digital Distinction
What does it mean to speak in terms of aesthetics of an object whose distinctive property is its mode of production-in-circulation? Theories of internet memes emphasize “aggregate texts, collectively created, circulated, and transformed by countless cultural participants,” texts that put “more voices in the air,” and that exhibit a “mystifying” capacity to change in the course of their circulation, to the extent that they appear the “instrument o…
Server the Servants
In the final chapter of his 2011 book The Server, Markus Krajewski reiterated the book's animating claim: “The history of subaltern serviceability must update its traditional means of analysis and conventional sociological theories.” The basis of these traditional means and conventional theories is underscored with a curt parenthetical: “(keyword: exploitation).” To understand the twenty-first century logic of subalternity, Krajewski argued, it i…
Data/Dispossession
Book Review| March 17 2023 Data/Dispossession Cloud Ethics: Algorithms and the Attributes of Ourselves and Others. By Louise Amoore. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press. 2020. 232 pp. Cloth $99.95; paper $25.95; e-book $25.95.Discriminating Data: Correlation, Neighborhoods, and the New Politics of Recognition. By Wendy Hui Kyong Chun. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 2021. 344 pp. Cloth $29.95; e-book $17.99. Seb Franklin Seb Franklin Seb Franklin is a lecture…
Logical circuitry-perverse circuitry
This essay argues that the figure of the circuit that recurs across Denise Ferreira da Silva's Unpayable Debt, which might be too easily treated as a passing metaphor, illuminates the book's most significant concerns: the problem of unity; relationships among the economic, the ethical, and the juridical; and the reticulated dynamics of 'free' labor and racialized slavery in the circulation of value. Building on Ferreira da Silva's references to c…
Racial Capitalism and the Informatics of Value
This article takes the presentation of mechanical and informatic models in Samuel Delany's Neveryóna as an occasion to examine the relations of force, abstraction, information, and differential valuation that constitute racial capitalism. In order to do this, the article considers the continuities and divergences between the principles those models demonstrate, the lessons on value and economic determination that precede them, and Delany's subseq…
The Synthesis is in the Machine
In this interview Marxist feminist theorist Silvia Federici discusses the following: the relationships between accumulation and reproduction; biotechnology; the recent resurgence of social reproduction theory as exemplified by work in Endnotes and Lies; the mystification of gendered labour; the disciplining of productive bodies; the sites and technologies of primitive accumulation in the present; and the reproduction of feminism and other social …
Cleverness and Drive, or the Cybernetic Fantasy of Value
September 01 2017 Cleverness and Drive, or the Cybernetic Fantasy of Value: R.S. Hunt's “Two Kinds of Work” Seb Franklin Seb Franklin Seb Franklin is Lecturer in Contemporary Literature at King's College London, where he co-convenes the MA in Contemporary Literature, Culture, and Theory. He is the author of Control: Digitality as Cultural Logic (MIT Press, 2015). Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Articl…
Notes on Digital Community and Revolution
This essay addresses the forms of utopian imagination that are produced when concepts such as society, community, and revolution are rendered using computational and communicational metaphors. By connecting recent phenomena such as the notion of “Twitter revolution” and Sheryl Sandberg's ongoing Lean In project to a longer genealogy of cybernetic imaginaries, capitalist economism, and governmentality, the author questions the assumptions and occl…
The Future of Literary Thinking
All good writing takes us somewhere uncomfortable. One of the great services given by Textual Practice over the past 30 years has been to create a comfortable place for uncomfortable criticism. Yet right now, it is not writing but the world itself that is proving incommodious. What should criticism be doing in a political culture that has embraced hostility
Digital Media
This chapter reviews books and articles published in 2011. It is focused on texts that address the intersections of digital computation and the social and cultural formations of the historical period that has variously been named that of late capitalism, neoliberalism, post-Fordism and control societies.
Humans and/as machines
This essay engages with the aesthetics and politics of digitality through a parallel study of Samuel Beckett's writing and the development of the electronic digital computer. By placing these distinct threads in parallel, the essay argues that the digital logic of command and control, in which the experienced world and the possibilities for future action are parsed, formulated as text and expressed as sets of discrete algorithms, represents an em…
Cloud Control, or the Network as Medium
Cloud computing is an increasingly commonplace term today, used to describe the relocation of hardware resources, programs, and data from individual, local machines to a network accessible from a variety of platforms and devices. In unpicking the complex cultural logic that cloud computing emblematizes, this essay analyzes the connections between the interrelated histories of cybernetics, computing, and distributed networks and the emerging econo…
Virality, Informatics, and Critique; or, Can There Be Such a Thing as Radical Computation
'This essay, which is deeply indebted to the approach set out by Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello in The New Spirit of Capitalism and taken up by Nancy Fraser in her commanding “Feminism, Capitalism, and the Cunning of History,” aims to interrogate certain notions of radical political practice and the theoretical models that might be derived from them in the context of post-Fordist, neoliberal economics and the ubiquitous informatic culture that i…
The Limits of Control
Book Review| July 01 2011 The Limits of Control Edited Clean Version: Technology and the Culture of Control, Guins, Raiford, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2009, ISBN 978-0-8166-4815-3The Spam Book: on Viruses, Porn and Other Anomalies from the Dark Side of Digital Culture, ed. Parikka, Jussi and Sampson, Tony D., Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2009, ISBN 978-1-57273-916-1 Seb Franklin Seb Franklin Author InformationSEB FRA…
The Future of Literary Thinking
All good writing takes us somewhere uncomfortable. One of the great services given by Textual Practice over the past 30 years has been to create a comfortable place for uncomfortable criticism. Yet right now, it is not writing but the world itself that is proving incommodious. What should criticism be doing in a political culture that has embraced hostility
Reproduction at the Interface
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 collecti…
Cloud Control, or the Network as Medium
Cloud computing is an increasingly commonplace term today, used to describe the relocation of hardware resources, programs, and data from individual, local machines to a network accessible from a variety of platforms and devices. In unpicking the complex cultural logic that cloud computing emblematizes, this essay analyzes the connections between the interrelated histories of cybernetics, computing, and distributed networks and the emerging econo…
The Limits of Control
Book Review| July 01 2011 The Limits of Control Edited Clean Version: Technology and the Culture of Control, Guins, Raiford, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2009, ISBN 978-0-8166-4815-3The Spam Book: on Viruses, Porn and Other Anomalies from the Dark Side of Digital Culture, ed. Parikka, Jussi and Sampson, Tony D., Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2009, ISBN 978-1-57273-916-1 Seb Franklin Seb Franklin Author InformationSEB FRA…
Cloud Control, or the Network as Medium
Cloud computing is an increasingly commonplace term today, used to describe the relocation of hardware resources, programs, and data from individual, local machines to a network accessible from a variety of platforms and devices. In unpicking the complex cultural logic that cloud computing emblematizes, this essay analyzes the connections between the interrelated histories of cybernetics, computing, and distributed networks and the emerging econo…
Virality, Informatics, and Critique; or, Can There Be Such a Thing as Radical Computation
'This essay, which is deeply indebted to the approach set out by Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello in The New Spirit of Capitalism and taken up by Nancy Fraser in her commanding “Feminism, Capitalism, and the Cunning of History,” aims to interrogate certain notions of radical political practice and the theoretical models that might be derived from them in the context of post-Fordist, neoliberal economics and the ubiquitous informatic culture that i…
Digital Media
This chapter reviews books and articles published in 2011. It is focused on texts that address the intersections of digital computation and the social and cultural formations of the historical period that has variously been named that of late capitalism, neoliberalism, post-Fordism and control societies.
Humans and/as machines
This essay engages with the aesthetics and politics of digitality through a parallel study of Samuel Beckett's writing and the development of the electronic digital computer. By placing these distinct threads in parallel, the essay argues that the digital logic of command and control, in which the experienced world and the possibilities for future action are parsed, formulated as text and expressed as sets of discrete algorithms, represents an em…
Notes on Digital Community and Revolution
This essay addresses the forms of utopian imagination that are produced when concepts such as society, community, and revolution are rendered using computational and communicational metaphors. By connecting recent phenomena such as the notion of “Twitter revolution” and Sheryl Sandberg's ongoing Lean In project to a longer genealogy of cybernetic imaginaries, capitalist economism, and governmentality, the author questions the assumptions and occl…
The Future of Literary Thinking
All good writing takes us somewhere uncomfortable. One of the great services given by Textual Practice over the past 30 years has been to create a comfortable place for uncomfortable criticism. Yet right now, it is not writing but the world itself that is proving incommodious. What should criticism be doing in a political culture that has embraced hostility
Cleverness and Drive, or the Cybernetic Fantasy of Value
September 01 2017 Cleverness and Drive, or the Cybernetic Fantasy of Value: R.S. Hunt's “Two Kinds of Work” Seb Franklin Seb Franklin Seb Franklin is Lecturer in Contemporary Literature at King's College London, where he co-convenes the MA in Contemporary Literature, Culture, and Theory. He is the author of Control: Digitality as Cultural Logic (MIT Press, 2015). Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Articl…
The Synthesis is in the Machine
In this interview Marxist feminist theorist Silvia Federici discusses the following: the relationships between accumulation and reproduction; biotechnology; the recent resurgence of social reproduction theory as exemplified by work in Endnotes and Lies; the mystification of gendered labour; the disciplining of productive bodies; the sites and technologies of primitive accumulation in the present; and the reproduction of feminism and other social …
Racial Capitalism and the Informatics of Value
This article takes the presentation of mechanical and informatic models in Samuel Delany's Neveryóna as an occasion to examine the relations of force, abstraction, information, and differential valuation that constitute racial capitalism. In order to do this, the article considers the continuities and divergences between the principles those models demonstrate, the lessons on value and economic determination that precede them, and Delany's subseq…
Server the Servants
In the final chapter of his 2011 book The Server, Markus Krajewski reiterated the book's animating claim: “The history of subaltern serviceability must update its traditional means of analysis and conventional sociological theories.” The basis of these traditional means and conventional theories is underscored with a curt parenthetical: “(keyword: exploitation).” To understand the twenty-first century logic of subalternity, Krajewski argued, it i…
Data/Dispossession
Book Review| March 17 2023 Data/Dispossession Cloud Ethics: Algorithms and the Attributes of Ourselves and Others. By Louise Amoore. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press. 2020. 232 pp. Cloth $99.95; paper $25.95; e-book $25.95.Discriminating Data: Correlation, Neighborhoods, and the New Politics of Recognition. By Wendy Hui Kyong Chun. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 2021. 344 pp. Cloth $29.95; e-book $17.99. Seb Franklin Seb Franklin Seb Franklin is a lecture…
Logical circuitry-perverse circuitry
This essay argues that the figure of the circuit that recurs across Denise Ferreira da Silva's Unpayable Debt, which might be too easily treated as a passing metaphor, illuminates the book's most significant concerns: the problem of unity; relationships among the economic, the ethical, and the juridical; and the reticulated dynamics of 'free' labor and racialized slavery in the circulation of value. Building on Ferreira da Silva's references to c…
Reproduction at the Interface
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 collecti…
Value and Slavery, or the Longue Durée of the Analog-Digital Distinction
What does it mean to speak in terms of aesthetics of an object whose distinctive property is its mode of production-in-circulation? Theories of internet memes emphasize “aggregate texts, collectively created, circulated, and transformed by countless cultural participants,” texts that put “more voices in the air,” and that exhibit a “mystifying” capacity to change in the course of their circulation, to the extent that they appear the “instrument o…
Computer Science (10 works) · Sociology (10 works) · Political science (7 works) · Art (6 works) · History (6 works) · Law (6 works) · Philosophy (6 works) · Politics (6 works) · Aesthetics (5 works) · Epistemology (5 works)