Contingency and Plasticity in Everyday Technologies
Contingency and Plasticity in Everyday Technologies

Author: Natasha Lushetich

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2022-11-23

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 1538171597

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Technology is a host of social, material, and epistemic transformation techniques, tools, and methods. The common perception of digital technology today is that it is determined, even over-determined. This volume suggests a different view: the digital is indeterminate. Mobilising insights from philosophy, art and architecture theory, mathematics, computer science and anthropology, it situates digital indeterminacy within the wider context of material and immaterial processes, causations, triggerings, and their performative working. The book’s tripartite structure reflects technology’s inherent capacity to transform knowledges, practices, and time. Part I: Social-Digital Technologies juxtaposes arguments for machinic indeterminacy to those of overdetermination in blockchain, cognitive augmentation, and digital ideology. Part II: Spatial, Temporal, Aural and Visual Technologies delves deeper into received ideas about technologies for building spatial structures, manufacturing instruments and constructing the visual space. Part III: Epistemic Technologies analyses the use of plasticity in cognitive science, contingency in thinking habits, ontogenesis in experimental computing, and divination techniques with an inbuilt margin of indeterminacy. List of contributors: Franco 'Bifo' Berardi, Iain Campbell, Stephen Darren Dougherty, Aden Evens, Oswaldo Emiddio Vasquez Hadjilyra, Stavros Kousoulas, Natasha Lushetich, Peteer Müürsepp, Luciana Parisi, Andrej Radman, Alesha Serada, Dominic Smith, Sha Xin Wei, Joel White, Ashley Woodward, and David Zeitlyn.

The Digital and Its Discontents
The Digital and Its Discontents

Author: Aden Evens

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2024-02-27

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 1452970645

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A groundbreaking critique of the digital world that analyzes its universal technological foundations Whence that nagging sense that something in the digital is amiss—that, as wonderful as our devices are, time spent on smartphones and computers leaves us sour, enervated, alienated? The Digital and Its Discontents uniquely explains that worry and points us toward a more satisfying relationship between our digital lives and our nondigital selves, one that requires a radical change in the way we incorporate technology into our lives. Aden Evens analyzes universal technological principles—in particular, the binary logic—to show that they encourage certain ways of thinking while making others more challenging or impossible. What is out of reach for any digital machine is contingency, the ontological principle that refuses every rule. As humans engage ourselves and our world ever more through digital machines, we are losing touch with contingency and so banishing from our lives the accidental and unexpected that fuel our most creative and novel possibilities for living. Taking cues from philosophy rather than cultural or media theory, Evens argues that the consequences of this erosion of contingency are significant yet often overlooked because the same values that make the digital seem so desirable also make contingency seem unimportant—without contingency the digital is confined to what has already been thought, and yet the digital’s ubiquity has allowed it to disguise this inherent sterility. Responsive only to desires that meet the demands of its narrow logic, the digital requires its users to practice those same ideological dictates, instituting a hegemony of thought and value sustained by the pervasive presence of digital mechanisms. Interweaving technical and philosophical concepts, The Digital and Its Discontents advances a powerful and urgent argument about the digital and its impact on our lives. Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly.

Revolutionary Messages
Revolutionary Messages

Author: Antonin Artaud

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2024-08-22

Total Pages: 293

ISBN-13: 1350179043

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Published here in its entirety in English, Artaud's Revolutionary Messages collects Antonin Artaud's political, aesthetic and philosophical writings during his travels to Mexico in 1936. Written around the same time as his seminal work The Theatre and its Double, it captures a crucial point in Artaud's life shortly before he was admitted to a mental asylum in which he was to spend a significant part of his later life. Revolutionary Messages contains conferences that Artaud gave at the University of Mexico, articles from the daily Mexican newspaper El Nacional Revolucionario and a study of three seminal artists of the time influenced by or from Mexico: Franz Hals, Ortiz Monasterio and Maria Izquierdo. Not only will you gain crucial insight into Artaud's time in Mexico and his vision of a “total revolution,” which he places in distinction to Marxist and Surrealist conceptions of revolution, but you will deepen your understanding of the philosophical roots of his theatrical project, which ultimately shaped modern theatre and dance. The publication includes an introduction by the translator, Joel White, and a preface by Professor of European Philosophy, Howard Caygill.

Machine and Sovereignty
Machine and Sovereignty

Author: Yuk Hui

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2024-10-29

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 1452972109

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Developing a new political thought to address today’s planetary crises What is “planetary thinking” today? Arguing that a new approach is urgently needed, Yuk Hui develops a future-oriented mode of political thought that encompasses the unprecedented global challenges we are confronting: the rise of artificial intelligence, the ecological crisis, and intensifying geopolitical conflicts. Machine and Sovereignty starts with three premises. The first affirms the necessity of developing a new language of coexistence that surpasses the limits of nation-states and their variations; the second recognizes that political forms, including the polis, empire, and the state, are technological phenomena, which Lewis Mumford terms “megamachines.” The third suggests that a particular political form is legitimated and rationalized by a corresponding political epistemology. The planetary thinking that this book sketches departs from the opposition between mechanism and organism, which characterized modern thought, to understand the epistemological foundations of Hegel’s political state and Schmitt’s Großraum and their particular ways of conceiving the question of sovereignty. Through this reconstruction, Hui exposes the limits of the state and reflects on a new theoretical matrix based on the interrelated concepts of biodiversity, noodiversity, and technodiversity. Arguing that we are facing the limit of modernity, of the eschatological view of history, of globalization, and of the human, Hui conceives necessary new epistemological and technological frameworks for understanding and rising to the crises of our present and our future. Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly.

Meta-Xenakis
Meta-Xenakis

Author: Sharon Kanach

Publisher: Open Book Publishers

Published: 2024-10-09

Total Pages: 659

ISBN-13: 1805112279

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Meta-Xenakis offers readers a comprehensive collection of insights into the history, works and legacy of Iannis Xenakis, one of the twentieth century’s most significant creative figures. It presents a transcontinental engagement with his life and output, focusing as much on the impact of the questions he posed as on the accomplishments of his body of work. This volume evolved out of the multi-modal, international Meta-Xenakis Consortium’s artistic and scholarly events commemorating his centenary. Informative and comprehensive, contributions span subjects including music composition, creative pedagogy, aesthetics, game theory, architecture, and the social and political contexts in which Xenakis operated. The book is organized in eight sections, centered on different facets of Xenakis’s work and reception. It includes a digital archive of audio and visual media from the events staged throughout 2022, as well as computer software. Bringing into conversation the diverse perspectives and insights of researchers, musicians and artists, this volume serves as a foundational resource for future research on the life and work of Xenakis. It will be of interest to students, scholars, and practitioners across a range of disciplines including music, architecture, cybernetics and computation, and the digital arts.

Technology and Anarchy
Technology and Anarchy

Author: Simona Chiodo

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2020-12-04

Total Pages: 167

ISBN-13: 1793632952

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In Technology and Anarchy: A Reading of Our Era, Simona Chiodo argues that our technological era can be read as the most radical form of anarchism ever experienced. People are not only removing the role of the expert as a mediator, but also trying, for the first time in history, to replace the role of a transcendent god itself by creating, especially through information technology, a totally immanent technological entity characterized by the typical ontological prerogatives of the divine: omnipresence (by being everywhere), omniscience (by knowing everything, especially about us), omnipotence (by having power, especially over us), and inscrutability. Chiodo proposes a novel view of our technological era by reading it as the last step of a precise trajectory of Western thought, i.e. as the most radical form of anarchism we have ever experienced, due to the crisis of the founding epistemological relationship between ideality and reality. By doing this, Chiodo helps fill the gap between technological innovation and the humanities, which is becoming an emerging research goal that is more and more urgent in order to face the greatest challenges of our present and future.

For and Against Scientism
For and Against Scientism

Author: Moti Mizrahi

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2022-04-04

Total Pages: 207

ISBN-13: 1538163349

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The term “scientism” is used in several ways. It is used to denote an epistemological thesis according to which science is the source of our knowledge about the world and ourselves. Relatedly, it is used to denote a methodological thesis according to which the methods of science are superior to the methods of non-scientific fields or areas of inquiry. It is also used to put forward a metaphysical thesis that what exists is what science says exists. In recent decades, the term “scientism” has acquired a derogatory meaning when it is used in defense of non-scientific ways of knowing. In particular, some philosophers level the charge of “scientism” against those (mostly scientists) who are dismissive of philosophy. Other philosophers, however, embrace scientism, or some variant thereof, and object to the pejorative use of the term. This book critically examines arguments for and against different varieties of scientism in order to answer the central question: Does scientism pose an existential threat to academic philosophy? Or should philosophy become more scientific?

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

Author: Julian Jaynes

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Published: 2000-08-15

Total Pages: 580

ISBN-13: 0547527543

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National Book Award Finalist: “This man’s ideas may be the most influential, not to say controversial, of the second half of the twentieth century.”—Columbus Dispatch At the heart of this classic, seminal book is Julian Jaynes's still-controversial thesis that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but instead is a learned process that came about only three thousand years ago and is still developing. The implications of this revolutionary scientific paradigm extend into virtually every aspect of our psychology, our history and culture, our religion—and indeed our future. “Don’t be put off by the academic title of Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Its prose is always lucid and often lyrical…he unfolds his case with the utmost intellectual rigor.”—The New York Times “When Julian Jaynes . . . speculates that until late in the twentieth millennium BC men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of the gods, we are astounded but compelled to follow this remarkable thesis.”—John Updike, The New Yorker “He is as startling as Freud was in The Interpretation of Dreams, and Jaynes is equally as adept at forcing a new view of known human behavior.”—American Journal of Psychiatry

Heraclitus Redux: Technological Infrastructures and Scientific Change
Heraclitus Redux: Technological Infrastructures and Scientific Change

Author: Joseph C. Pitt

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2019-10-25

Total Pages: 128

ISBN-13: 1786612364

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Scientific change is often a function of technological innovation – new instruments show us new things we could not see before and we then need new theories to explain them. One of the results of this process is that what counts as scientific evidence changes, and how we do our science changes. Hitherto the technologies which make contemporary science possible have been ignored. This book aims to correct that omission and to spell out the consequences of taking the technologies behind the doing of science seriously.

Recursivity and Contingency
Recursivity and Contingency

Author: Yuk Hui

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2019-01-28

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 1786600544

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This book is an investigation of algorithmic contingency and an elucidation of the contemporary situation that we are living in: the regular arrival of algorithmic catastrophes on a global scale. Through a historical analysis of philosophy, computation and media, this book proposes a renewed relation between nature and technics.