Horvat Branko: Politička ekonomija socijalizma (1982/84) [Croatian]

In this important book Branko Horvat advances a type of Yugoslav Marxism referred to by many as Yugoslav ‘Praxis’ Marxism, a name adopted from the journal Praxis that promoted a humanist style of socialist thought from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s. For years, Horvat has been directly associated with many of the authors who originally founded this journal, and his work illustrates his indebtedness to them.

Originally published as The Political Economy of Socialism, New York, 1982
Translated by Dubravko Mihaljek and Mia Miki
Publisher ČGP Delo, Globus, Izdavačka djelatnost, Zagreb
546 pages
via Ignorant Schoolmaster and His Committees

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Situation Room: Designing a Prototype of a Citizen Situation Room (2010) [English/Spanish]

The term Situation Room is normally used to designate a secret place used in times of crisis to assess and monitor data for decision making purposes. Its origins can be traced back to World War II with the invention of computers, digitalization, and the collaboration of architects and the military. These rooms are equipped with monitors and data boards used to control everything from flows crossing the strait of Gibraltar to nuclear fission processes in Nuclear Power plants and the life support mechanisms on board the International Space Station.

“Rather than being afraid of control, and technologies in general, we prefer to think in terms of social appropriation and implementation with research and creativity; we even think that, as Cybersyn shows, the source of technological creativity actually lies in social cooperation, and that it is only later captured by the military or capitalism.” -Hackitectura

Idea: José Pérez de Lama y Pablo de Soto
Editors Pablo de Soto & Hackitectura
Publisher dpr-barcelona, June 2010
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License
ISBN 9788461415045
112 pages

exhibition

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Bernard Stiegler: Decadence of Industrial Democracies. Disbelief and Discredit, vol. 1 (2004/2011)

“Bernard Stiegler is one of the most original philosophers writing today about new technologies and their implications for social, political and personal life. Drawing on sources ranging from Plato and Marx to Freud, Heidegger and Derrida, he develops a highly original account of technology as grammatology, as a technics of writing that constitutes our experience of time, memory and desire, even of life itself. Society and our place within it are shaped by technical reproduction which can both expand and restrict the horizons and possibilities of human agency and experience.

In the three volumes of Disbelief and Discredit Stiegler argues that this process of technical reproduction has become dangerously divorced from its role in the constitution of human experience. Radically challenging the optimistic view of new technologies as facilitators of learning and progress, he argues new marketing techniques short-circuit thought and disenfranchise consumers, programming them to seek short-term gratification. These practices of ‘libidinal economics’ have profound consequences for nature of human desire and they underpin the social and psychological malaise of contemporary industrial society.

In this opening volume Stiegler argues that the industrial model implemented since the beginning of the twentieth century has become obsolete, leading capitalist democracies to an impasse. A sign of this impasse and of the decadence to which it leads is the banalization of consumers who become ensnared in a perpetual cycle of consumption. This is the new proletarianization of the technologically infused, hyper-industrial capitalism of today. It produces a society cut off from its past and its future, stultifying human development and turning democracy into a farce in which disbelief and discredit inevitably arise.”

First published in French as Mécréance et Discrédit: Tome 1, La décadence des démocraties industrielles, Galilée, 2004.

Translated by Daniel Ross and Suzanne Arnold
Publisher Polity, 2011
ISBN 0745648096, 9780745648095
200 pages

Review: Tom Bunyard (Radical Philosophy, 2012).

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