Abstract
Material Excursions
“Material Excursions” teases two questions. How does the
general mobility and flexibility of late capitalism, increased—if not
inaugurated—by cloud computing, leave material traces? And, given romantic
poetry's preoccupation with clouds, how does romantic poetry, specifically
the poetry of William Wordsworth, help us to think the material traces of
cloud computing and the knowledge economy differently? The essay draws from
the accidental convergence of Apple’s rhetoric surrounding iCloud and
Wordsworth’s “I wandered lonely as a cloud.”