W. Ross Ashby journal (1928-1972)
Filed under personal journal | Tags: · complex systems, cybernetics, psychiatry, self-organization, systems theory
On Monday, 7th May 1928, while a 24 year old medical student at Barts Hospital in London, Ross started writing a journal. In it he recorded his thoughts, theorems, and goals that would eventually bring him recognition as a pioneer in the fields of Cybernetics and Systems Theory. 44 years later, his journal had 7,400 pages, in 25 volumes.
In 1972, shortly after Ross died, Stafford Beer wrote in his condolence letter to Ross’s wife, Rosebud, “Look after Ross’s papers. I have no idea what should be done with them, but they are very precious.” — For the next 30 years, only members of his family had access to his journals.
Eventually, scans were made of all original archive material, and in January 2003, Ross’s daughters gave the whole archive to The British Library, in London. Then, in March 2004, at the end of the W. Ross Ashby Centenary Conference, his daughters announced that they would make Ross’s Journal available on the Internet. Now, in 2008, the digitally restored images of all 7,400 pages and 1,600 index cards are available on this web site in various views, with extensive cross-linking that is based on the keywords in Ross’s original alphabetical index.
View online (HTML)
View online (Bookshelf view; HTML)
View online (Index view; HTML)
View online (Summaries view; HTML)
View online (Timeline view; HTML)
Félix Guattari: Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics (1984)
Filed under book | Tags: · abstract machine, anti-psychiatry, desire, machine, philosophy, politics, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, schizoanalysis, subjectivation, subjectivity
A collection of essays on social psychiatry includes discussions of the capitalist system, class struggle, and institutional psychotherapy. Selected from Psychanalyse et transversalité (1972) and La révolution moléculaire (1977).
Publisher Penguin, 1984
A Peregrine Book
ISBN 0140551603, 978-0140551600
308 pages
PDF (updated on 2012-7-15)
PDF (2008 edition; added on 2012-7-15)
Andrew Pickering: The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future (2010)
Filed under book | Tags: · brain, cybernetics, history of computing, history of technology, machine, ontology, philosophy, psychiatry, psychology, schizophrenia
“Cybernetics is often thought of as a grim military or industrial science of control. But as Andrew Pickering reveals in this beguiling book, a much more lively and experimental strain of cybernetics can be traced from the 1940s to the present.
The Cybernetic Brain explores a largely forgotten group of British thinkers, including Grey Walter, Ross Ashby, Gregory Bateson, R. D. Laing, Stafford Beer, and Gordon Pask, and their singular work in a dazzling array of fields. Psychiatry, engineering, management, politics, music, architecture, education, tantric yoga, the Beats, and the sixties counterculture all come into play as Pickering follows the history of cybernetics’ impact on the world, from contemporary robotics and complexity theory to the Chilean economy under Salvador Allende. What underpins this fascinating history, Pickering contends, is a shared but unconventional vision of the world as ultimately unknowable, a place where genuine novelty is always emerging. And thus, Pickering avers, the history of cybernetics provides us with an imaginative model of open-ended experimentation in stark opposition to the modern urge to achieve domination over nature and each other.”
Publisher University of Chicago Press, 2010
ISBN 0226667898, 9780226667898
526 pages
Reviews: M. Beatrice Fazi (Computational Culture, 2011), Jon Goodbun (Radical Philosophy, 2011).
PDF (updated on 2020-4-17)
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