The American poet and essayist Wendell Berry famously refused to purchase a computer, and consequently relied on his wife’s assistance in typewriting his manuscripts. Responding to subsequent accusations of marital exploitation by his feminist critics, Berry used the occasion to offer a scathing assessment of how technological progress threatened to transfigure or disfigure us, especially with regards to our work and relationships with one another. Have recent technological developments truly helped us, or are they humanly and environmentally costly solutions to non-problems? Does work outside of home liberate women and better their lives, or does it merely subject women “to the same specialization, degradation, trivialization, and tyrannization of work that men have submitted to”? Can we ever completely assert our independence from technology, and even if so, how could such a limitation on our capacities constitute an improvement? Join us for a discussion of Wendell Berry’s “Feminism, the Body, and the Machine,” led by Dr. Nathaniel Peters.
“A handwritten or typewritten page therefore is usually to some degree a palimpsest; it contains parts and relics of its own history—erasures, passages crossed out, interlineations—suggesting that there is something to go back to as well as something to go forward to. The light-text on the computer screen, by contrast, is an artifact typical of what can only be called the industrial present, a present absolute. A computer destroys the sense of historical succession, just as do other forms of mechanization. . . . look at a large factory or a power plant or an airport, and see if you can imagine—even if you know—what was there before. In such things materials of the world have entered a kind of orphanhood.”