Jacques Ellul: The Technological Bluff (1990)

This poignant critique of modern society shows how we have mistakenly allowed technology to fool us into thinking about all of our problems in terms of technical progress. This technological bluff, Ellul claims, deprives us of active adaptation to and criticism of technical growth.

The author argues that “an easily distracted consumer society is caught up in a rapidly developing, uncontrollable technological system. … Everyproblem generates a technological solution; computers breed ever larger, morefragile, and vulnerable systems. But the solutions raise more and greater problems than they solve. … Responsibility, contemplation, civility, and spirituality suffer.” (Choice)

Published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1990
ISBN 080280960X, 9780802809605
436 pages

Key terms:
Minitel, telematics, Le Monde, Third World, technopolis, genetic engineering, independent local radio, technocrats, videotex, microcomputers, entropy, Testart, Jacques Ellul, gross national product, Nomenklatura, artificial intelligence, University of Bordeaux, technostructure, vitro fertilization, Paris

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PDF (updated on 2012-8-11)

The Myth of the Machine, 2 Vols: Technics and Human Development & The Pentagon of Power (1967/1970–) [DE, YU, RU, ES]

Mumford explains the forces that have shaped technology since prehistoric times and shaped the modern world. He shows how tools developed because of significant parallel inventions in ritual, language, and social organization.

Publisher Harcourt, Brace & Jovanovich, 1967 and 1970
342 and 496 pages

Wikipedia (EN)

Mythos der Maschine. Kultur, Technik und Macht (German, trans. Liesl Nürenberger and Arpad Hälbig, both volumes, 1977, updated on 2014-3-19)
Pentagon moći: Mit o mašini 2 (Serbo-Croatian, trans. Nikica Petrak, 1986/2009, added on 2014-3-19)
Mif mashiny: tekhnika i razvitie chelovechestva (Russian, trans. T. Azarkovich and B. Skuratov, 2001, DJVU, added on 2014-3-19)
El mito de la máquina. Técnica y evolucion humana (Spanish, trans. Arcadio Rigodón, 2010, added on 2014-3-19)
El mito de la máquina. El pentágono del poder (Spanish, trans. Javier Rodríguez Hidalgo, 2011, added on 2014-3-19)

Lewis Mumford: Mumford on Modern Art in the 1930s (2007)

Although Lewis Mumford is widely acknowledged as the seminal American critic of architecture and urbanism in the twentieth century, he is less known for his art criticism. He began contributing to this field in the early 1920s, and his influence peaked between 1932 and 1937, when he was art critic for the New Yorker. This book, for the first time, assembles Mumford’s important art criticism in a single volume. His columns bring wit and insight to bear on a range of artists, from establishment figures like Matisse and Brancusi to relatively new arrivals like Reginald Marsh and Georgia O’Keeffe. These articles provide an unusual window onto the New York art scene just as it was casting off provincialism in favor of a more international outlook. On a deeper level, the columns probe beneath the surface of modern art, revealing an alienation that Mumford believed symptomatic of a larger cultural disintegration.
Many of the themes Mumford addresses overlap with those of his more familiar architectural criticism: the guiding role of the past in stimulating creativity in the present, the increasing congestion of the modern metropolis, the alarming lack of human control over modern technology, and the pressing need to restore organic balance to everyday living. Though he was open to new movements emanating from Europe, Mumford became the chief advocate of a progressive American modernism that was both socially aware and formally inventive.

Edited and with an Introduction by Robert Wojtowicz
Published by University of California Press, 2007
ISBN 0520258088, 9780520258082
265 pages

Key terms:
Lewis Mumford, Alfred Stieglitz, John Marin, abstract art, Yorker, Winslow Homer, Julien Levy Gallery, surrealist, Walter Pach, William Gropper, Grant Wood, Thomas Eakins, Arthur Dove, Mary Cassatt, Cubist, Armory Show, Le Corbusier, Casey Nelson Blake, painter, Impressionism

publisher
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PDF (updated on 2012-8-2)