Helmut Gruber: Red Vienna: Experiment in Working-Class Culture, 1919-1934 (1991)

“From 1919 to 1934, the Socialist government in Vienna sought to create a comprehensive working-class culture, striving to provide a foretaste of the socialist utopia in the present. In Red Vienna, Gruber critically examines the impact of this experiment in all areas of life, from massive public housing projects and health and education programs to socialist parades, festivals, and sporting events designed to create a ‘new’ working class.”

Publisher Oxford University Press, 1991
ISBN 0195069145, 9780195069143
x+270 pages

Reviews: Mark Emanuel Blum (Central European History, 1992), George V. Strong (History of European Ideas, 1993), William D. Bowman (Journal of Social History, 1993), Alfred Diamant (American Historical Review, 1993), J. Robert Wegs (Austrian History Yearbook, 1993), Karen J. Vogel (American Political Science Review, 1993), Albert Lindemann (International Labor and Working-Class History, 1993).

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WorldCat

PDF (12 MB, updated on 2021-4-22, via Libcom.org)
PDF (6 MB, added on 2021-4-22, via ZLibrary)

See also Eve Blau’s The Architecture of Red Vienna, 1919-1934, MIT Press, 2000 (PDF, 18 MB)

Kostas Axelos: Introduction to a Future Way of Thought: On Marx and Heidegger (1966/2015)

“‘Technologists only change the world in various ways in generalized indifference; the point is to think the world and interpret the changes in its unfathomability, to perceive and experience the difference binding being to the nothing.’

Anticipating the age of planetary technology Kostas Axelos, a Greek-French philosopher, approaches the technological question in this book, first published in 1966, by connecting the thought of Karl Marx and Martin Heidegger. Marx famously declared that philosophers had only interpreted the world, but the point was to change it. Heidegger on his part stressed that our modern malaise was due to the forgetting of being, for which he thought technological questions were central. Following from his study of Marx as a thinker of technology, and foreseeing debates about globalization, Axelos recognizes that technology now determines the world. Providing an introduction to some of his major themes, including the play of the world, Axelos asks if planetary technology requires a new, a future way of thought which in itself is planetary.”

First published as Einführung in ein künftiges Denken: Über Marx und Heidegger, Niemeyer, Tübingen, 1966.

Edited and with an Introduction by Stuart Elden
Translated by Kenneth Mills
Publisher meson press, Lüneburg, June 2015
Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0 License
ISBN 9783957960061
178 pages

Review: George Tomlinson (Marx & Philosophy 2016).

Publisher

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Olga Goriunova (ed.): Fun and Software: Exploring Pleasure, Paradox and Pain in Computing (2014)

“Fun and Software offers the untold story of fun as constitutive of the culture and aesthetics of computing. Fun in computing is a mode of thinking, making and experiencing. It invokes and convolutes the question of rationalism and logical reason, addresses the sensibilities and experience of computation and attests to its creative drives. By exploring topics as diverse as the pleasure and pain of the programmer, geek wit, affects of play and coding as a bodily pursuit of the unique in recursive structures, Fun and Software helps construct a different point of entry to the understanding of software as culture. Fun is a form of production that touches on the foundations of formal logic and precise notation as well as rhetoric, exhibiting connections between computing and paradox, politics and aesthetics. From the formation of the discipline of programming as an outgrowth of pure mathematics to its manifestation in contemporary and contradictory forms such as gaming, data analysis and art, fun is a powerful force that continues to shape our life with software as it becomes the key mechanism of contemporary society.”

Texts by Andrew Goffey, Simon Yuill, Matthew Fuller, Luciana Parisi and M. Beatrice Fazi, Adrian Mackenzie, Michael Murtaugh, Geoff Cox and Alex McLean, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Andrew Lison, Christian Ulrik Andersen, Brigitte Kaltenbacher, Annet Dekker, and Olga Goriunova.

Publisher Bloomsbury, New York and London, 2014
New Media and Technology series
ISBN 1623560942, 9781623560942
285 pages

Software studies page on Monoskop

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