Abstarct:

Analogy is a literary term which has well escaped the disciplinary boundaries of literary studies: we all think we know what an analogy is. Indeed, in the 20th century, the mobilization of analogy has had the biggest impact not on literary studies but rather in the sciences and on the study of technology. On one level, analogy refers to basically any interdisciplinary exchange among those fields—the way they connect to, borrow from, refute, and learn from each other. This is its promise. An instantiation of this is the famous “Brownian Model of Financial Markets”, which employs analogy by connecting physics to economics, and explains asset pricing by treating markets like the motion of particles. It follows that, in the twenty-first century, “analogy” is one name for the inherent commensurabilities we tend to assume among the sciences today, one that has culminated in their designation as “STEM” disciplines.

Did analogy itself, as both a stated concept and an unstated axiom of multiple interdisciplinary methodologies employed today, play a role in breaking down those purported boundaries? Certainly, “breaking down interdisciplinary boundaries” and “making connections” do not sound like particularly bad objectives, but the facility and ease with which we feel we might move between and within the sciences and the study of technology is just as often a signal of ignored contradictions as it is one of real connections. In this panel, we each attempt to connect this promissory operation of analogy to the philosophical propositions that must be assumed (and often times forgotten) in order for such operations—connecting, borrowing, equating—to succeed. We focalize this project—interdisciplinary work about the problem of interdisciplinarity—on the basis of a key analogy whose implications and meanings are still unsettled: the analogy between the human and the machine.

Xindi Li’s piece will explore the place and function of analogy in the study of cybernetics, analyzing how Gregory Bateson’s attempt to create an “addicted machine” both imported and transformed extant physiological and psychological work on addiction. Anastasia Volobueva will speak about how contemporary technologies of memory and rememoration profit from productive indistinctions between the concepts of knowledge, information, and memory. Finally, Devin Wangert will look at the concept of labour within the framework of automation, discussing how labour’s reformulation as a technical capacity of automative technologies can allow scholars to reinterpret the history of technological development under capitalism. Sergey Kochkurov will moderate the panel, with a view to how analogy mediates notions of interdisciplinarity today.

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