Ann Weinstone: Avatar Bodies: A Tantra for Posthumanism (2004)

“An ethically-based approach to human relations for the media age.

Otherness, alterity, the alien—over the course of the past fifty years many of us have based our hopes for more ethical relationships on concepts of difference. Combining philosophy, literary criticism, fiction, autobiography, and real and imagined correspondence, Ann Weinstone proposes that only when we stop ordering the other to be other—whether technological, animal, or simply inanimate—will we truly become posthuman.

Posthumanism has thus far focused nearly exclusively on human–technology relations. Avatar Bodies develops a posthumanist vocabulary for human-to-human relationships that turns our capacities for devotion, personality, and pleasure. Drawing on both the philosophies and practices of Indian Tantra, Weinstone argues for the impossibility of absolute otherness; we are all avatar bodies, consisting of undecidably shared gestures, skills, memories, sensations, beliefs, and affects.

Weinstone calls her book a “tantra”—by which she means a set of instructions for practices aimed at sensitizing the reader to the inherent permeability of self to other, self to world. This tantra for posthumanism elaborates devotional gestures that will expose us to more unfettered contacts and the transformative touch.”

Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 2004
Electronic Mediations series, 10
ISBN 0816641463, 9780816641468
227 pages

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2018-6-6)

Félix Guattari, Antonio Negri: New Lines of Alliance, New Spaces of Liberty (1985/2010)

“The project: to rescue ‘communism’ from its own disrepute. Once invoked as the liberation of work through mankind’s collective creation, communism has instead stifled humanity. We who see in communism the liberation of both collective and individual possibilities must reverse that regimentation of thought and desire which terminates the individual….”

Thus begins the extraordinary collaboration between Félix Guattari and Antonio Negri, written at dawn of the 1980s, in the wake of the crushing of the autonomous movements of the previous decade. Setting out Guattari and Negri diagnose with incisive prescience transformations of the global economy and theorize new forms of alliance and organization: mutant machines of subjectivation and social movement.

Prefiguring his collaboration with Michael Hardt, Negri and Guattari enact a singular hybridization of political and philosophical traditions, brining together psychiatry, political analysis, semiotics, aesthetics, and philosophy. Against the workings of an increasingly integrated world capitalism, they raise the banners of singularity, autonomy, and freedom to search out new routes for subversion.

This newly expanded edition includes previously untranslated materials and a new introduction by Matteo Mandarini.

Main text originally published in French in 1985 as Les nouveaux espaces de liberté. First English edition, 1990, published under the title Communists Like Us.
Translated by Michael Ryan, Jared Becker, Arianna Bove, and Noe Le Blanc
Edited by Stevphen Shukaitis
Publisher: Minor Compositions, London / New York in conjunction with Autonomedia and MayFlyBooks
ISBN 978-1-57027-224-0
144 pages

publisher
google books

PDF (updated on 2012-7-27)

Curtis Roads, et al: The Computer Music Tutorial (1996–) [English, French]

“The Computer Music Tutorial is a comprehensive text and reference that covers all aspects of computer music, including digital audio, synthesis techniques, signal processing, musical input devices, performance software, editing systems, algorithmic composition, MIDI, synthesizer architecture, system interconnection, and psychoacoustics. A special effort has been made to impart an appreciation for the rich history behind current activities in the field.

Profusely illustrated and exhaustively referenced and cross-referenced, The Computer Music Tutorial provides a step-by-step introduction to the entire field of computer music techniques. Written for nontechnical as well as technical readers, it uses hundreds of charts, diagrams, screen images, and photographs as well as clear explanations to present basic concepts and terms. Mathematical notation and program code examples are used only when absolutely necessary. Explanations are not tied to any specific software or hardware.”

Publisher MIT Press, 1996
ISBN 0262680823, 9780262680820
xx+1234 pages

Reviews: Sam Reese (Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education, 1997), Douglas Geers (Current Musicology, 2001), Gregory Taylor (Cycling ’74, 2016).

Publisher

The Computer Music Tutorial (English, DJVU, 22 MB, updated on 2021-4-8)
L’audionumérique: musique et informatique (French, trans. Jean de Reydellet, 3rd ed., 1999/2016, 15 MB, added on 2021-4-8)
Corrections and revisions (added on 2017-11-20, updated on 2021-4-8)