Extensions after Man: Race, Counter/insurgency and the Futures of Media Theory
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article returns to the geopolitical scene and racial logics that provide the underacknowledged conditions of Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media and, specifically, its well-known proposition that media should be understood foremost as ‘outerings’ or ‘extensions of man’. Attending to the structuring inheritances of racial slavery and the plantation system in this founding statement of mid-twentieth-century media theory, as well as its debt to the literary and intellectual movement of the Southern Agrarians, I consider how the racializing figure of ‘Man’ conserved by the nascent field of media studies was contemporaneously brought to crisis by black (and) anticolonial freedom struggles. Arguing for the need to reread the career of western media theory through its political vocation in attempting to manage this crisis, the article concludes by turning briefly to a revisionary account of media and exteriority also circulated in 1964: the revolutionary intellectual James Boggs’s ‘The Negro and Cybernation’. Boggs’s writings, which situate emergent forms of computing and cybernation within a longer materialist genealogy of race, capitalism and technology, offer both a proleptic critique of the early disciplinary formation of media theory and a divergent set of coordinates for approaching media technology on the terrain of black political struggle.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it