Richard Doyle: Wetwares: Experiments in Postvital Living (2003)

The mind of the machine, the body suspended in time, organs exchanged, thought computed, genes manipulated, DNA samples abducted by aliens: the terrain between science and speculation, fraught with the possibility of technological and perhaps even evolutionary transformations, is the territory Richard Doyle explores in Wetwares. In a manner at once sober and playful, Doyle maps potentials for human transformation by new ecologies of information in the early twenty-first century. Wetwares ranges over recent research in artificial life, cloning, cryonics, computer science, organ transplantation, and alien abduction. Moving between actual technical practices, serious speculative technology, and science fiction, Doyle shows us emerging scientific paradigms where “life” becomes more a matter of information than of inner vitality–in short, becomes “wetwares” for DNA and computer networks. Viewing technologies of immortality–from cryonics to artificial life–as disciplines for welcoming a thoroughly other future, a future of neither capital, god, human, nor organism, the book offers tools for an evolutionary, transhuman mutation in the utterly unpredictable decades to come.

Publisher U of Minnesota Press, 2003
ISBN 0816640092, 9780816640096
235 pages

Keywords and phrases
SimLife, deterritorialization, Thousand Plateaus, Alan Sokal, Gilles Deleuze, ribotype, Dead Zone, autopoiesis, Robert Ettinger, wetware, nanotechnology, technoscience, Philip K, alife, information theoretic death, exotic derivatives, coma, Mike Darwin, ecology, brain death

publisher
google books

PDF (updated on 2012-3-9)

William E. Connolly: Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed (2002)

Why would a political theorist venture into the nexus between neuroscience and film? According to William Connolly — whose new book is itself an eloquent answer — the combination exposes the ubiquitous role that technique plays in thinking, ethics, and politics. By taking up recent research in neuroscience to explore the way brain activity is influenced by cultural conditions and stimuli such as film technique, Connolly is able to fashion a new perspective on our attempts to negotiate — and thrive — within a deeply pluralized society whose culture and economy continue to quicken.

In Neuropolitics Connolly draws upon recent brain/body research to explore the creative potential of thinking, the layered character of culture, the cultivation of ethical sensibilities, and the critical role of technique in all three. He then shows how a series of films — including Vertigo, Five Easy Pieces, and Citizen Kane — enhances our appreciation of technique and contests the linear image of time now prevalent in cultural theory.

Connolly deftly brings these themes together to support an ethos of deep pluralism within the democratic state and a politics of citizen activism across states. His book is an original and rigorous study that attends to the creative possibilities of thinking in identity, culture, and ethics.

Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 2002
ISBN 081664022X, 9780816640225
218 pages

Keywords and phrases
virtual memory, apodictic, amygdala, nontheistic, Kantian, Lucretius, Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza, Citizen Kane, neo-Kantians, Epicurus, Antonio Damasio, cultural theory, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ilya Prigogine, Henri Bergson, Isabelle Stengers, existential, immanent, intersubjective

More info (publisher)
More info (google books)

PDF (updated on 2012-7-14)

Andrew Pickering: The Science of the Unknowable: Stafford Beer’s Cybernetic Informatics (2006)

This essay derives from a larger project exploring the history of cybernetics in Britain in and after World War II. The project focusses on the work of four British cyberneticians—Grey Walter, Ross Ashby, Stafford Beer and Gordon Pask; here author focuses on Stafford Beer, the founder of the field he called management cybernetics, and his work in informatics.

includes:
Cybernetics and New Ontologies:
An interview session with Andrew Pickering
by Kristian Hvidtfelt Nielsen

Published by The Centre for STS Studies, Aarhus 2006.

PDF (updated on 2013-6-24, via R)