[Commlist] cfa: On Extraction and Media

*CFA: /On Extraction and Media/*

Our goal is to explore the relations of extraction that underpin and 
shape global media cultures. In what follows, we sketch out an 
invitation to foster collective scholarship on these relations across 
space and time. One outcome will be a book, but others are yet to be 
decided. Our words are not a CFP in the traditional sense, but instead a 
Call for Allies to co-create histories, explorations, and interventions.

/On Extraction and Media /begins as a dialectical quest. One part must 
examine media’s relationship to the deep legacies and processes of 
capitalist and industrial extraction. Our project builds on the 
histories of racialised capitalism as an environment-making force, 
formed by cycles of conquest, enslavement, extraction and the elemental 
separation of the “human” from “nature.” It is a deep history, of a 
colonial nomos, enabled by genocidal conquests of the Americas 
transforming land, biota, and climate in the Fifteenth Century, 
accelerated by human enslavement, the deforestation of land, and the 
expansion of /plantations/ by a globalising Europe in the Sixteenth 
century transforming the commons into property and ordering the world by 
fictions of race. As is now well-known, the conversion of thermal and 
then fossil energy into mechanical energy across the long nineteenth 
century powered a technological and economic revolution. In the late 
nineteenth century, the discovery and harnessing of electricity, 
alongside new developments in chemistry, produced a second-stage 
industrial revolution. It is in the wake of these developments that new 
forms of “mass” media emerged, built from minerals and chemicals, and 
powered by electricity.  Cinema, radio, and television developed from 
complex amalgams of metals, plastics, wood pulp, oil, silver, 
phosphorous and other materials. Beginning from the 1940s, a “digital” 
electronic information industry emerged using common and rare earth 
elements, minerals, metals and metalloids, such as tin, nickel, silicon, 
coltan, and lithium. Over time new forms of computation and 
computer-networking produced a new media configuration that garnered 
commercial and political profit from the extraction of information about 
people. One common illustration of this is the “smartphone,” a rapidly 
obsolescent technology increasingly central to “the information 
economy,” built from rare-earth minerals on the backs of exploited 
labour in Africa and China, reliant on the generation of electricity 
(“the Cloud” is the fifth largest user of electricity on this planet), 
and productive of trails of /data/ principally from “social media.”

Our call is for collaborators across disciplines and research fields who 
are curious about the political histories of the /materiality/ of media 
(of copper, camphor, silicon, lithium, oil, silver, coltan, tin, and so 
on); the /energy/ sources that power media technologies; the extraction 
of /labour/ necessary to produce this materiality; and the mining of 
/information/ about people in the service of commercial and political 
interests bent on further degrading environments as property. One thread 
of our project, then, explores the extraction of resources and energy 
from land and labouring bodies to produce media objects and cultures. It 
situates media in relation to the deep history of capitalism, and its 
degradation of peoples and environments, in order to generate political 
and material histories of extraction and media.

The second part of this dialectical project seeks to explore the 
possibilities that exist outside a framework focused on capitalist 
extraction, which risks reinstalling the primacy of extractors – chiefly 
from the Global North – as the principal historical actors of 
consequence, rendering other people and regions into objects of 
extraction or end consumers of West-centric globalisation. Doing so 
rushes past the complex developmental histories and heterogenous 
temporalities of modernization and industrialization, particularly in 
recent or emerging energy societies such as China and India. Our 
histories must clearly be global in scope. Alongside the construction of 
a multi-sited history, we seek the possibilities that lie beyond 
instrumental thought and outside the epistemic construction of land and 
people as /resource/.  Questions here include, what are the presumptive 
scope and limits of a foundationally humanistic enquiry? What strategies 
enable ways of thinking and being outside the anthropogenic framework of 
extractive industries and practices? And how might our collective 
knowledge enable struggles against the technological instrumentalization 
of (human and nonhuman) nature?  Can we collectively discern modes, from 
the praxis of indigenous resistance to social and policy activism, that 
enable the fostering of a convivial-multi-species-liveable shared 
environment?

/On Extraction and Media/seeks to build on pioneering work in elemental 
media, histories of racialised capitalism, environmental humanities, and 
imperial studies. It is rooted in Film and Media Studies but we hope to 
foster collaborations with scholars beyond old disciplinary 
configurations, which are no longer fit for the task of understanding 
the technological instrumentalization of life in the face of climate 
breakdown. Is it possible, for example, that a reckoning with 
modernity’s dependence on extractive industries can reformulate the 
disciplinary study of media objects? Our hope is to generate a 
collaborative project bringing together people across the globe who 
galvanise a historical analysis of capitalism and industrial modernity 
to reflect on the disparities, variable trajectories, unequal 
consequences, and seemingly irreconcilable aspirations of a range of 
nations, states and populations comprising our energy-dependent world 
today. Our call is for allies to explore and think together as part of 
an imperative to generate knowledge and practice resistance to the 
depredations of global capitalism and its destruction of our shared 
environments.

We hope to organize events together, virtually “in” Los Angeles, London 
and elsewhere, in the process of collaborating on an anthology. If you 
are interested, please write to us at the addresses below by 30^th July 
2021 with a brief description of your biography and research interests 
(200 words).

Who we are:

Lee Grieveson is Professor of Media History at University College 
London. Mostly recently he has been co-editor of /Empire and Film/ 
(British Film Institute, 2011),/Film and the End of Empire/ (BFI, 2011), 
and /Cinema’s Military Industrial Complex/ (University of California 
Press, 2019); and author of /Cinema and the Wealth of Nations: Media, 
Capital, and the Liberal World System/ (University of California Press, 
2018). (l.grieveson /at/ ucl.ac.uk) <mailto:(l.grieveson /at/ ucl.ac.uk)>

Priya Jaikumar is Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the School of 
Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California, Los Angeles. She is 
author of /Cinema at the End of Empire/ (Duke University Press, 2006) 
and /Where Histories Reside: India as Filmed Space/ (Duke, 2019). 
(pjaikumar /at/ cinema.usc.edu) <mailto:(pjaikumar /at/ cinema.usc.edu)>

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