Project at HIAS
Useful Nature: Energy, Technology, and Political Economy from Petroleum to Photovoltaics
What is use? Dialectically, this project argues, use is an idea as well as a material process. Tracking the interplay of these two levels, The Idea of Use cuts a historical cross-section through the twentieth-century American technosphere, from oil underground to atmospheric microwaves to satellites in orbit, from the Gilded Age to the Cold War, from engineering to political economy. Today, engineers are our oracles, and we worry about surrendering our humanity to machines. Too often, however, the history of technology and economic history treat use transparently. The historical record is full of things and thoughts that were made useful only by design. More than mere instruments or the mute crystallization of social relations, these are artifacts of ideation from which new ideas arise. Petroleum-as-fuel is one, microwave radiation another, photovoltaics a third.
Seen within the ideal-material complexes—the media complexes—to which they belong, these three are also poignant symbols. Historically, they all helped to write and to realize the American myth of technological progress and national triumph, cast in capital. An intellectual history of technology, The Idea of Use is also a history of that myth as an untimely elegy, a promise unmade.
The book-in-progress begins before 1900 in Texas, with petroleum thousands of feet below, moves from there to mid-century experiments with microwave radiation at Stanford University, in northern California’s Silicon Valley, and concludes in the 1970s with solar-powered communications satellites designed at Bell Laboratories orbiting above. Adding technology to Ernst Cassirer’s philosophy of “symbolic forms,” Martin shows how oil, microwaves, and sunlight were made useful through the mediation of technical artifacts and technical knowledge, animated by a changing idea of use within an ideal-material dialectic.
His Tandem Partner is Birgit Recki, Professor of Practical Philosophy at the University of Hamburg.
Website
Funding
The HIAS Fellowship is provided by the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg and the federal and state funds acquired by the University of Hamburg in the framework of its Excellence Strategy.
Tandem
Prof. em. Dr. Birgit Recki, Philosophy, University of Hamburg
Biography
Reinhold Martin is historian of architecture, technology, and media. His first book The Organizational Complex: Architecture, Media, and Corporate Space (2003), showed how architecture, the visual arts, and cybernetics formed an organizing nexus within the post-World War II military-industrial complex. His second book Utopia’s Ghost: Architecture and Postmodernism, Again (2010), argued that the postmodern injunction against structural change failed fully to exorcise the architectural “ghosts” of oppositional utopian thought and praxis. A collection of essays on global urbanization, The Urban Apparatus: Mediapolitics and the City (2016), charts an infrastructural mediapolitics of the contemporary city. Most recently Knowledge Worlds: Media, Materiality, and the Making of the Modern University (2021) writes the media history of colleges and universities in the United States over two centuries as a series of unresolved boundary problems.
A companion to The Idea of Use, his manuscript-in-progress, is another book project, Aesthetics and Modern Architecture: The Ideal-Material Dialectic.
At Columbia, Martin is co-director of the Center for Comparative Media, a member of the Committee on Global Thought, former chair of the Society of Fellows / Heyman Center for the Humanities, and former director of the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture. He was also a founding co-editor of the interdisciplinary journal Grey Room. Among numerous awards and fellowships, he is the recipient of an honorary doctorate from the Eesti Kunstiakadeemia / Estonian Academy of Arts.
Martin’s research interests combine a comparative approach to media history, cultural history, and intellectual history with a focus on architecture and technology in the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. From early work on the history of corporate architecture in the United States to recent work on universities as media complexes, he has studied the material and symbolic infrastructures of cultural, technological, and political-economic modernity. Martin is also committed to intellectual work in the public sphere, and has written on architecture, culture, and politics in a wide variety of contexts.
Reinhold Martin’s HIAS Fellowship is provided by the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg and the federal and state funds acquired by the University of Hamburg in the framework of its Excellence Strategy.
Image Information
RCA Radiotron triode vacuum tube, 1921. Source: Vacuum Tube Valley 9 (Spring 1998)