Arndt Niebisch: Media Parasites in the Early Avant-Garde: On the Abuse of Technology and Communication (2012)

“The avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century inhabited the media discourses of their time like parasites, constantly irritating and taking from them. Dadaists ripped images of a mechanically reproduced world out of newspapers and magazines and reassembled them in their collages. Futurists instrumentalized the brevity of telegraph messages for their free word poetics. Artists such as F.T. Marinetti, Raoul Hausmann and Luigi Russolo constantly abused existing media technologies and hijacked public communication. This study traces these subversive tactics from avant-garde poetry to media technological experiments with radio tubes.”

Publisher Palgrave Macmillan, 2012
Avant-Gardes in Performance series
ISBN 1137276851, 9781137276858
250 pages

Publisher

PDF, PDF (updated on 2016-3-15)

Thomas P. Hughes: Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880-1930 (1983)

“A unique comparative history of the evolution of modern electric power systems. Networks of Power not only provides an accurate representation of large-scale technological change but also demonstrates that technology itself cannot be understood or directed unless placed in a cultural context. For Thomas Hughes, both the invention of the simplest devices (like the lightbulb itself) and the execution of the grandest schemes (such as harnessing the water power of the Bavarian Alps) fit into an overarching model of technological development. His narrative is an absorbing account of the creative genius, scientific achievements, engineering capabilities, managerial skills, and entrepreneurial risks behind one of the most commonplace amenities of the modern age.” (from the back cover)

The book was awarded the Dexter Prize by the Society for the History of Technology.

Publisher The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993
ISBN 0801846145, 9780801846144
474 pages

Review (John Neufeld, EH.net)
Review (Barry Barnes, Social Studies of Science)
Review (ZH, Innovation Group CNS UCSB)
Review (Stephen H. Cutcliffe, Technology and Culture)
Review (Mercedes Arroyo, Biblio 3W, in Spanish)

Publisher
Google books

PDF (updated on 2013-9-16 to OCR’d version)

Bruno Latour: An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns (2012–) [FR, EN]

“In this new book, Bruno Latour offers answers to questions raised in We Have Never Been Modern, a work that interrogated the connections between nature and culture. If not modern, he asked, what have we been, and what values should we inherit? Over the last twenty-five years, Latour has developed a research protocol different from the actor-network theory with which his name is now associated—a research protocol that follows the different types of connectors that provide specific truth conditions. These are the connectors that prompt a climate scientist challenged by a captain of industry to appeal to the institution of science, with its army of researchers and mountains of data, rather than to “capital-S Science” as a higher authority. Such modes of extension—or modes of existence, Latour argues here—account for the many differences between law, science, politics, and other domains of knowledge.

Though scientific knowledge corresponds to only one of the many possible modes of existence Latour describes, an unrealistic vision of science has become the arbiter of reality and truth, seducing us into judging all values by a single standard. Latour implores us to recover other modes of existence in order to do justice to the plurality of truth conditions that Moderns have discovered throughout their history. This systematic effort of building a new philosophical anthropology presents a completely different view of what Moderns have been, and provides a new basis for opening diplomatic encounters with other societies at a time when all societies are coping with ecological crisis.”

French edition
Publisher La découverte, Paris, 2012
504 pages

English edition
Translated by Catherine Porter
Publisher Harvard University Press, 2013
ISBN 0674724992, 9780674724990
520 pages

Reviews: Muecke (of FR ed., Los Angeles Review of Books, 2012), Norton (Interstitial, 2013), Hennion (Science, Technology, & Human Values, 2013), Davis (Reviews in Cultural Theory, 2014), Dusek (NDPR, 2014), Hebbing (Diffractions, 2014), Foster (Science and Technology Studies, 2014), Choat (Global Discourse, 2014).
Commentary: Skirbekk (Radical Philosophy, 2015).

Another Turn after ANT: An Interview with Bruno Latour by John Tresch (Social Studies of Science)
An Introduction to AIME by Latour, video, 16 min.

Participatory web platform of the project
Author
Publisher (FR)
Publisher (EN)

Enquête sur les modes d’existence. Une anthropologie des Modernes (French, added on 2013-9-26)
English translation was removed on 2013-9-20 upon request of the publisher.