Gary Hall, Clare Birchall (eds.): New Cultural Studies: The Liquid Theory Reader (2009)

Culture Machine Liquid Books is a series of experimental digital ‘books’ published under the conditions of both open editing and free content. As such, you are free to compose, rewrite, edit, annotate, tag, add to, remix, reformat, reinvent and reuse any of the books in the series, or produce parallel versions of them – and what’s more you are expressly invited and encouraged to do so. The wiki has been set up to expressely facilitate such experimention. It provides you with read/write access to all the volumes in the Liquid Books series.

The first volume in the Culture Machine Liquid Books series is New Cultural Studies: The Liquid Theory Reader. This has initially been put together by Gary Hall and Clare Birchall as a follow up to their 2006 woodware volume, New Cultural Studies: Adventures in Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press). The first ‘frozen liquid’ version of this book – New Cultural Studies: The Liquid Theory Reader (Version 1.0) – appeared as part of the Culture Machine journal’s ‘Pirate Philosophy’ issue in 2008.

wiki

Flo Conway, Jim Siegelman: Dark Hero of the Information Age. In Search Of Norbert Wiener–Father of Cybernetics (2004)

In the middle of the last century, Norbert Wiener–ex-child prodigy and brilliant MIT mathematician–founded the science of cybernetics, igniting the information-age explosion of computers, automation, and global telecommunications. Wiener was the first to articulate the modern notion of “feedback,” and his ideas informed the work of computer pioneer John von Neumann, information theorist Claude Shannon, and anthropologists Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead. His best-selling book, Cybernetics, catapulted him into the public spotlight, as did his chilling visions of the future and his ardent social activism. So why is his work virtually unknown today? And what, in fact, is his legacy? In this book, award-winning journalists Conway and Siegelman set out to rescue Wiener’s genius from obscurity and to explore the many ways in which his groundbreaking ideas continue to shape our lives.

Publisher Basic Books, 2004
ISBN 0738203688, 9780738203683
423 pages

publisher
google books

PDF (updated on 2012-7-25)

Cary Wolfe: Critical Environments: Postmodern Theory and the Pragmatics of the “Outside” (1998)

“Unique in its collation of major theorists rarely considered together, Critical Environments incorporates detailed discussions of the work of Richard Rorty, Walter Benn Michaels, Stanley Cavell, Humberto Maturana, Francisco Varela, Niklas Luhmann, Donna Haraway, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Fredric Jameson, and others, and ranges across fields from feminist philosophy of science to the theory of ideology. Offering American readers a comprehensive introduction to systems theory and responding to the widespread charge of relativism leveled against it, Wolfe’s work will enhance and inspire new kinds of critical thought.”

Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 1998
ISBN 0816630194, 9780816630196
175 pages

Keywords and phrases
postmodern, systems theory, Gilles Deleuze, Marxist, Richard Rorty, second-order cybernetics, Niklas Luhmann, autopoiesis, posthumanist, epistemological, poststructuralism, Michel Foucault, Ernesto Laclau, Michael Hardt, Walter Benn Michaels, Stanley Cavell, Fredric Jameson, autopoietic, representationalism, Chantal Mouffe

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2012-7-27)