Jacques Rancière: The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (2000/2006)

“The Politics of Aesthetics rethinks the relationship between art and politics, reclaiming “aesthetics” from the narrow confines it is often reduced to. Jacques Rancière reveals its intrinsic link to politics by analysing what they both have in common: the delimitation of the visible and the invisible, the audible and the inaudible, the thinkable and the unthinkable, the possible and the impossible.

Presented as a set of inter-linked interviews, The Politics of Aesthetics provides the most comprehensive introduction to Rancière’s work to date, ranging across the history of art and politics from the Greek polis to the aesthetic revolution of the modern age.”

First published as Le Partage du sensible: Esthétique et politique, La Fabrique-Editions, 2000.

Translated with an introduction by Gabriel Rockhill
With an afterword by Slavoj Žižek
Published by Continuum, 2006
ISBN 0826489540, 9780826489548
116 pages

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2012-7-14)

Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri: Empire (2001–) [EN, DE, CR]

“Imperialism as we knew it may be no more, but Empire is alive and well. It is, as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri demonstrate in this bold work, the new political order of globalization. It is easy to recognize the contemporary economic, cultural, and legal transformations taking place across the globe but difficult to understand them. Hardt and Negri contend that they should be seen in line with our historical understanding of Empire as a universal order that accepts no boundaries or limits. Their book shows how this emerging Empire is fundamentally different from the imperialism of European dominance and capitalist expansion in previous eras. Rather, today’s Empire draws on elements of U.S. constitutionalism, with its tradition of hybrid identities and expanding frontiers.

Empire identifies a radical shift in concepts that form the philosophical basis of modern politics, concepts such as sovereignty, nation, and people. Hardt and Negri link this philosophical transformation to cultural and economic changes in postmodern society–to new forms of racism, new conceptions of identity and difference, new networks of communication and control, and new paths of migration. They also show how the power of transnational corporations and the increasing predominance of postindustrial forms of labor and production help to define the new imperial global order.

More than analysis, Empire is also an unabashedly utopian work of political philosophy, a new Communist Manifesto. Looking beyond the regimes of exploitation and control that characterize today’s world order, it seeks an alternative political paradigm–the basis for a truly democratic global society.”

Key words and phrases: biopolitical, labor power, Antonio Negri, postmodern, Michael Hardt, proletariat, postmodernist, Gilles Deleuze, capitalist, deterritorialized, plane of immanence, nation-states, biopower, U.S. Constitution, Fordist, Felix Guattari, Fredric Jameson, ontological, surplus value, cold war

Publisher Harvard University Press, 2001
ISBN 0674006712, 9780674006713
478 pages

Reviews: Ernesto Laclau (Diacritics, 2001), more.

Wikipedia
Publisher

Empire (English, 2001, updated on 2012-7-27)
Empire. Die neue Weltordnung (German, trans. Thomas Atzert and Andreas Wirthensohn, 2002, added on 2012-7-27)
Imperij (Croatian, trans. Živan Filippi, 2003, updated on 2017-7-27)

W. Ross Ashby: An Introduction to Cybernetics (1957–) [EN, PT]

“W. Ross Ashby is one of the founding fathers of both cybernetics and systems theory. He developed such fundamental ideas as the homeostat, the law of requisite variety, the principle of self-organization, and the principle of regulatory models. Many of these insights were already proposed in the 1940’s and 1950’s, long before the presently propular “complex adaptive systems” approach arrived at very similar conclusions. Whereas the concepts surrounding the complexity movement are often complicated and confuse, Ashby’s ideas are surprisingly clear and simple, yet deep and universal.

This elegance of thought is illustrated in particular by the present book, which is still the only real textbook on cybernetics (and, one might add, system theory). It explains the basic principles with concrete examples, elementary mathematics and exercises for the reader. It does not require any mathematics beyond the basic high school level. Although simple, the book formulates principles at a high level of abstraction. For more concrete and extensive illustrations of systems principles, you may refer to other books, The Macroscope and The Phenomenon of Science. For a similar abstract, high-level, but technically simple approach, this time to physics, you can check Representation and Change.” (source)

Key words and phrases: entropy, transducer, Markov chain, cybernetics, isomorphic, dynamic system, Black Box theory, equilibrium, cerebral cortex, channel capacity, homomorphism, homeostat, machine of desired, degrees of freedom, ovum, diagram of immediate, logarithmically, Markovian machine, Shannon’s theorem, servo-mechanism

Publisher John Wiley and Sons, 1957
250 pages

An Introduction to Cybernetics (English, 1957)
Introdução à cibernetica (Portuguese, trans. Gita K. Ghinzberg, 1970, added on 2013-8-10)