Matt Tierney

"For the master's tools," the poet Audre Lorde wrote, "will never dismantle the master's house." Dismantlings is a study of literary, political, and philosophical critiques of the utopian claims about technology in the Long Seventies, the decade and a half before 1980. Following Alice Hilton's 1963 admonition that the coming years would bring humanity to a crossroads—"machines for HUMAN BEINGS or human beings for THE MACHINE"—Matt Tierney explores wide-ranging ideas from science fiction, avant-garde literatures, feminist and anti-racist activism, and indigenous eco-philosophy that may yet challenge machines of war, control, and oppression.

Dismantlings opposes the language of technological idealism with radical thought of the Long Seventies, from Lorde and Hilton to Samuel R. Delany and Ursula K. Le Guin to Huey P. Newton, John Mohawk, and many others. This counter-lexicon retrieves seven terms for the contemporary critique of technology: Luddism, a verbal and material combat against exploitative machines;communion, a kind of togetherness that stands apart from communication networks; cyberculture, a historical conjunction of automation with racist and militarist machines; distortion, a transformative mode of reading and writing; revolutionary suicide, a willful submission to the risk of political engagement; liberation technology, a synthesis of appropriate technology and liberation theology; and thanatopography, a mapping of planetary technological ethics after Auschwitz and Hiroshima. Dismantlings restores revolutionary language of the radical Long Seventies for reuse in the digital present against emergent technologies of exploitation, subjugation, and death.

AMERICAN LITERATURE (September 2016): "The nature of the aesthetic object is the fundamental question behind Matt Tierney’s What Lies Between [which] powerfully uncovers the space of resistance that formed around the cybernetic ideal of perfect communication...This literary-historical work not only challenges the very idea of a fully coherent postwar consensus culture that would not break until the 1960s, but also convincingly argues that the concept of negativity...[became] so popular in part because Americanists had already been thinking in those terms...Rehistoricizing American studies to crack open the black box of technological mediation, Tierney shows the critical purchase that can be gained on media infrastructures if the medium itself can be seen as a historically contingent and socially contested object that contains within itself traces of struggle, protest, and failure." (Jessica Hurley)

CHOICE (July 2015): "Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above."

JOHN MOWITT, University of Leeds: "Ex nihilo nihil fit. Out of nothing, nothing comes. Matt Tierney puts insistent and subtle pressure on this ancient cosmological and philosophical chestnut by recasting nothing as void. And, as one might expect, what comes out of the void is far from nothing. Situated initially in the literary, critical and filmic practices of figures as diverse as Richard Wright, Jonas Mekas and Paul Goodman, void is shown to generate a medium of aesthetic politics that, in the end, Tierney wants to call Melvillean. As the reference to Melville might suggest, this resourceful and principled meditation on the void and its textual iterations—blankness, darkness, negativity, the silhouette—is a bold disruption of the dispersed field of American literary and cultural studies, one that moves to gather the void into a point: it offers us a way to keep the future open and avoid succumbing to the deadlock of a presumed post-political era of contemporary America, a national project indefinitely suspended between utopia and nostalgia. Dissatisfied with merely pointing, Tierney concludes by teasing out of a work like Kara Walker’s Subtlety the nothing that connects us to potentia, power and possibility. Now that’s something."

REY CHOW, Duke University: "By tracking the generative figure of the void in mid-twentieth-century American fiction, cinema, and criticism, and by articulating that figure to questions of medium, intermediality, race, narrative, communication, and community, Matt Tierney offers not only an original statement on aesthetic form but also an informed critique of the technological complacency of our time. Written with remarkable learning and subtlety, this book makes us appreciate anew the indispensability of political dissensus."

INTERDISCIPLINARY LITERARY STUDIES (2016): "Tierney's void aesthetics...evangelize the allowance of gaps in comprehension that redirect the need-to-know impulse down a path that is specifically literary...[They are] a sort of alluvial muck of cultural evolution...[and] a method of unfreezing the garden." (Danielle Barrios-O'Neill)

Mark Goble: "Matt Tierney[’s] excellent and impassioned new book… show[s] how the contours of our contemporary world emerged in debates about the economic effects of automation and deindustrialization, the power of media in a networked public sphere, and the uneven damage that was experienced along lines of race and sexuality as one ‘machine age’ mutated into another... It is a lesson  that Tierney shows is utterly worth learning again. And getting right."

Mary Foltz: "With passion and insight, Tierney re-evaluates the decade as one in which literary and other authors challenge the metaphors used in boosterism for technological advancement... Unable to do justice to this magnificent monograph here, it will have to suffice to say that Tierney's DISMANTLINGS is one of the most important books of the year."

Zachary Loeb: "Phenomenal...DISMANTLINGS is a remarkable book. It is also a difficult book. Difficult not because of impenetrable theoretical prose (the writing is clear and crisp), but because it is always challenging to go back and confront the warnings that were ignored...The lessons from the long seventies are those that we are still struggling to reckon with today, including the recognition that in order to fully make sense of the machines around us it may be necessary to dismantle many of them."

Jessica Hurley: "The nature of the aesthetic object is the fundamental question behind Matt Tierney’s What Lies Between[, which] powerfully uncovers the space of resistance that formed around the cybernetic ideal of perfect communication ... This literary-historical work not only challenges the very idea of a fully coherent postwar consensus culture that would not break until the 1960s, but also convincingly argues that the concept of negativity...[became] so popular in part because Americanists had already been thinking in those terms ... Rehistoricizing American studies to crack open the black box of technological mediation, Tierney shows the critical purchase that can be gained on media infrastructures if the medium itself can be seen as a historically contingent and socially contested object that contains within itself traces of struggle, protest, and failure."

This chapter juxtaposes two kinds of utopianism, both endemic to the current century: on one side, visions of another world than this one, committed to a total transformation of human relations with each other and with human-made machines; and on the other side, visions of this world lived otherwise than according to the rules of accumulation and violence. It examines, among other things ,the call for active engagement by Toni Morrison, the promises and problems of Digital Utopias deriving from Silicon Valley, and the argument for a “chastened utopia."

Citational practices have relied on a fiction of ownership, by which ideas can be said to belong to those scholars who wrote them down, then are borrowed by others who cite their writings. But this fiction is unsustainable under conditions of racialized and gendered precarity in the academic profession. Ursula K. Le Guin's novel The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia, when read idiosyncratically as a campus novel, provides an allegory for contemporary conditions in academia, while inviting the possibility that scholarly citation must accommodate non-scholarly or para-academic ideas, even at the risk of its displacement.

"Dismantlings offers a luminous engagement with a period of theoretical and artistic ferment too often neglected in contemporary literary theory. Tierney skillfully elucidates the poetic, activist, and theoretical strands of the period, offering a window into the past potential and present promise of 1970's feminist, anti-racist, anti-colonial understandings of technology and society."—Alexis Shotwell, Carleton University, author of Knowing Otherwise

"Dismantlings conjugates media studies, literary histories, and political theory in tracking an emergent technological imagination around computation, militarism, and capitalism through the long seventies. Theoretically capacious, catholic in its historical engagements, and incisive in its readings of major literary figures, cultural critics, and political theorists, this is an impressive contribution to media philosophy and cultural history."—Bishnupriya Ghosh, University of California, Santa Barbara, author of Global Icons

"Phenomenal...Matt Tierney’s Dismantlings: Words Against Machines in the American Long Seventies is a remarkable book. It is also a difficult book. Difficult not because of impenetrable theoretical prose (the writing is clear and crisp), but because it is always challenging to go back and confront the warnings that were ignored...The lessons from the long seventies are those that we are still struggling to reckon with today, including the recognition that in order to fully make sense of the machines around us it may be necessary to dismantle many of them."—Zachary Loeb, Librarian Shipwreck

"With passion and insight, Tierney re-evaluates the decade as one in which literary and other authors challenge the metaphors used in boosterism for technological advancement... Unable to do justice to this magnificent monograph here, it will have to suffice to say that Tierney's Dismantlings is one of the most important books of the year."—Mary Foltz, The Year's Work in English Studies

This essay describes a gesture of thought and politics—almost ahistorically called "cyberculture"—that appeared in the early 1960s and extended its reach into the politics and poetry that followed. To reread this gesture, I explain, brings new terms of legibility to this later work, from Marshall McLuhan to W.S. Merwin and Philip José Farmer to Shulamith Firestone and Martin Luther King Jr. It may also enable a point of resistance to advancing technological orders of global capitalism.

In this article I claim that Americanism is not only a method and site of literary and cultural study but also a persistent ideological formation, while transnational and postnational frames of Americanist criticism endeavor prematurely to transcend the nation form, when indeed the nation form has not faded but only mutated. To refine this claim into a theoretical polemic and program, I read as both symptom and source the work of modernist critic Van Wyck Brooks, whose early writings are among the founding documents of American studies. Through and against Brooks, I argue that the nation form is a site of both plasticity and contradiction, of simultaneous transformation, production, and disintegration—that is, in Brooks's terms, “unfinished and already half in ruin.”

AMERICAN LITERATURE (September 2016): "The nature of the aesthetic object is the fundamental question behind Matt Tierney’s What Lies Between [which] powerfully uncovers the space of resistance that formed around the cybernetic ideal of perfect communication...This literary-historical work not only challenges the very idea of a fully coherent postwar consensus culture that would not break until the 1960s, but also convincingly argues that the concept of negativity...[became] so popular in part because Americanists had already been thinking in those terms...Rehistoricizing American studies to crack open the black box of technological mediation, Tierney shows the critical purchase that can be gained on media infrastructures if the medium itself can be seen as a historically contingent and socially contested object that contains within itself traces of struggle, protest, and failure." (Jessica Hurley)

CHOICE (July 2015): "Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above."

JOHN MOWITT, University of Leeds: "Ex nihilo nihil fit. Out of nothing, nothing comes. Matt Tierney puts insistent and subtle pressure on this ancient cosmological and philosophical chestnut by recasting nothing as void. And, as one might expect, what comes out of the void is far from nothing. Situated initially in the literary, critical and filmic practices of figures as diverse as Richard Wright, Jonas Mekas and Paul Goodman, void is shown to generate a medium of aesthetic politics that, in the end, Tierney wants to call Melvillean. As the reference to Melville might suggest, this resourceful and principled meditation on the void and its textual iterations—blankness, darkness, negativity, the silhouette—is a bold disruption of the dispersed field of American literary and cultural studies, one that moves to gather the void into a point: it offers us a way to keep the future open and avoid succumbing to the deadlock of a presumed post-political era of contemporary America, a national project indefinitely suspended between utopia and nostalgia. Dissatisfied with merely pointing, Tierney concludes by teasing out of a work like Kara Walker’s Subtlety the nothing that connects us to potentia, power and possibility. Now that’s something."

REY CHOW, Duke University: "By tracking the generative figure of the void in mid-twentieth-century American fiction, cinema, and criticism, and by articulating that figure to questions of medium, intermediality, race, narrative, communication, and community, Matt Tierney offers not only an original statement on aesthetic form but also an informed critique of the technological complacency of our time. Written with remarkable learning and subtlety, this book makes us appreciate anew the indispensability of political dissensus."

INTERDISCIPLINARY LITERARY STUDIES (2016): "Tierney's void aesthetics...evangelize the allowance of gaps in comprehension that redirect the need-to-know impulse down a path that is specifically literary...[They are] a sort of alluvial muck of cultural evolution...[and] a method of unfreezing the garden." (Danielle Barrios-O'Neill)

This article conducts a critical narrative of the public lives and performances of the actor Sterling Hayden as a contribution to the theory of emotion. Cultural theories of feeling have frequently suspended their attention to the diachronies of story and history in favor of a synchronic analysis of affect and ontology. This article argues that the analysis of a particular passion, coalescing in a series of moments in a single star text, offers a way to reconcile these divergent theoretical models.