Gordon Pask: An Approach to Cybernetics (1961/1968)

“This book is not for the engineer content with hardware, nor for the biologist uneasy outside his specialty; for it depicts that miscegenation of Art and Science which begets inanimate objects that behave like living systems. They regulate themselves and survive: They adapt and they compute: They invent. They co-operate and they compete. Naturally they evolve rapidly.

Pure mathematics, being mere tautology, and pure physics, being mere fact, could not have engendered them; for creatures to live, must sense the useful and the good; and engines to run must have energy available as work: and both, to endure, must regulate themselves. So it is to Thermodynamics and to its brother SUM(p) log p, called Information Theory, that we look for the distinctions between work and energy and between signal and noise.

For like cause we look to reflexology and its brother feedback, christened Multiple Closed Loop Servo Theory, for mechanical explanation of Entelechy in Homeostasis and in appetition. This is that governance, whether in living creatures and their societies or in our lively artifacts, that is now called Cybernetics.

But under that title Norbert Wiener necessarily subsumed the computation that, from afferent signals, forecasts successful conducts in a changing world.

To embody logic in proper hardware explains the laws of thought and consequently stems from psychology. For numbers the digital art is as old as the abacus, but i came alive only when Turing made the next operation of his machine hinge on the value of the operand, whence its ability to compute any computable number.

For Aristotelian logic, the followers of Ramon Llull, including Leibniz, have frequently made machines for three, and sometimes four classifications. The first of these to be lively computes contingent probabilities.

With this ability to make or select proper filters on its inputs, such a device explains the central problem of experimental epistemology. The riddles of stimulus equivalence or of local circuit action in the brain remain only as parochial problems.

This is that expanding world of beings, man-made or begotten, concerning which Ross Ashby asked, ‘How can such systems organize themselves?’ His answer is, in one sense, too general and its embodiment, too special to satisfy him, his friends or his followers.

This book describes their present toil to put his ideas to work so as to come to grips with his question.” (Warren S. McCulloch, Preface)

With a preface by Warren S. McCulloch
Publisher Hutchinson & Co, London, 1961
This edition March 1968
ISBN: 0090868102, 0090868110
128 pages
via pangaro.com

PDF (updated on 2012-7-16)

Félix Guattari: Chaosophy: Texts and Interviews 1972–1977, new ed. (2008)

“Chaosophy is an introduction to Félix Guattari’s groundbreaking theories of “schizo-analysis”: a process meant to replace Freudian interpretation with a more pragmatic, experimental, and collective approach rooted in reality. Unlike Freud, who utilized neuroses as his working model, Guattari adopted the model of schizophrenia—which he believed to be an extreme mental state induced by the capitalist system itself, and one that enforces neurosis as a way of maintaining normality. Guattari’s post-Marxist vision of capitalism provides a new definition not only of mental illness, but also of the micropolitical means for its subversion.

Chaosophy includes Guattari’s writings and interviews on the cinema (such as ‘Cinema Fou’ and ‘The Poor Man’s Couch’), a group of texts on his collaborative work with Gilles Deleuze (including the appendix to the second edition of Anti-Oedipus, not available in the English edition), and his texts on homosexuality (including his “Letter to the Tribunal” addressing the French government’s censorship of the special gay issue of Recherches he edited, which earned him a fine for publishing “a detailed exposition of depravity and sexual deviations… the libidinous exhibition of a minority of perverts”). This expanded edition features a new introduction by François Dosse (author of a new biography of Guattari and Gilles Deleuze), along with a range of added essays—including ‘The Plane of Consistency,’ ‘Machinic Propositions,’ ‘Gangs in New York,’ and ‘Three Billion Perverts on the Stand’—nearly doubling the contents of the original edition.”

Edited by Sylvère Lotringer
Introduction by François Dosse
Publisher Semiotext(e), 2008
Foreign Agents series
ISBN 1584350601, 9781584350606
300 pages

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2017-6-26)

Jean-François Lyotard: The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979–) [IT, EN, BR-PT, CZ, GR, LV, CR]

“The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge is a short but influential philosophy book by Jean-François Lyotard in which he analyzes the epistemology of postmodern culture as the end of ‘grand narratives’ or metanarratives, which he considers a quintessential feature of modernity. The book was originally written as a report to the Conseil des universités du Québec. The book introduced the term ‘postmodernism’, which was previously only used by art critics, in philosophy with the following quotation: “Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity towards metanarratives”.

Among the metanarratives are reductionism and teleological notions of human history such as those of the Enlightenment and Marxism. These have become untenable, according to Lyotard, by technological progress in the areas of communication, mass media and computer science. Techniques such as artificial intelligence and machine translation show a shift to linguistic and symbolic production as central elements of the postindustrial economy and the related postmodern culture, which had risen at the end of the 1950s after the reconstruction of western Europe. The result is a plurality of language-games (a term coined by Wittgenstein), without any overarching structure. Modern science thus destroys its own metanarrative.

In the book, Lyotard professes a preference for this plurality of small narratives that compete with each other, replacing the totalitarianism of grand narratives. For this reason, The Postmodern Condidtion has been criticized as an excuse for unbounded relativism. However, Lyotard suggests that there is an objective truth, but because of the limited amount of knowledge that humans can understand, humans will never know this objective truth. In other words, Lyotard advocates that there is no certainty of ideas, but rather there are better or worse ways to interpret things.

The Postmodern Condition was written as a report on the influence of technology on the notion of knowledge in exact sciences, commissioned by the Québec government. Lyotard later admitted that he had a ‘less than limited’ knowledge of the science he was to write about, and to compensate for this knowledge, he ‘made stories up’ and referred to a number of books that he hadn’t actually read. In retrospect, he called it ‘a parody’ and ‘simply the worst of all my books’. Despite this, and much to Lyotard’s regret, it came to be seen as his most important piece of writing.”

First published as the report Les problèmes du savoir dans les sociétés industrielles les plus développées, 1979; consequently as La Condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir, Les Editions de Minuit, Paris, 1979.

English edition
Translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi
Foreword by Fredric Jameson
Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 1984
Theory and History of Literature series, Volume 10
ISBN 0719014506
135 pages

Wikipedia

La condizione postmoderna (Italian, trans. Carlo Formenti, 1981/2014, 5 MB, added on 2015-5-4)
The Postmodern Condition (English, trans. Geoff Bennington & Brian Massumi, 1984, updated on 2012-7-24)
O pós-moderno (Brazilian Portuguese, trans. Ricardo Correa Barbosa, 1986/1988, 8 MB, added on 2015-5-4)
O postmodernismu (Czech, trans. Jiří Pechar, 1993, added on 2015-5-4)
Η μεταμοντέρνα κατάσταση (Greek, trans. Κωστής Παπαγιώργης, 1993, added on 2015-5-4)
Postmodernus būvis (Lithuanian, trans. Marius Daškus, 1993, 4 MB, added on 2015-5-4)
Postmoderno stanje: izvještaj o znanju (Croatian, trans. Tatiana Tadić, 2005, added on 2017-7-27)