Luciana Parisi: Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Biotechnology and the Mutations of Desire (2004)
Filed under book | Tags: · abstract machine, biotechnology, cybersex, cyborg, desire, deterritorialization, philosophy, sex
“Astract Sex investigates the impact of advances in contemporary science and information technology on conceptions of sex. Evolutionary theory and the technologies of viral information transfer, cloning and genetic engineering are changing the way we think about human sex, reproduction and the communication of genetic information. Abstract Sex presents a philosophical exploration of this new world of sexual, informatic and capitalist multiplicity, of the accelerated mutation of nature and culture.”
Publisher Continuum, 2004
ISBN 0826469906, 9780826469908
227 pages
Interview with author (Matthew Fuller, 2004).
Reviews: Andrew Goffey (Mute 2003), Stella Sandford (Radical Phil 2004), Paul Hegarty (n.d.).
PDF, PDF (updated on 2016-9-3)
Comment (0)Ronald E. Day: The Modern Invention of Information: Discourse, History, and Power (2001)
Filed under book | Tags: · capitalism, critical theory, cybernetics, cyberspace, cyborg, deterritorialization, information society, information technology, information theory, mass media, technological determinism, utopia
“Ronald E. Day provides a historically informed critical analysis of the concept and politics of information in the twentieth century. Analyzing texts in Europe and the United States, his critical reading method goes beyond traditional historiographical readings of communication and information by engaging specific historical texts in terms of their attempts to construct and reshape history.
After laying the groundwork and justifying his method of close reading for this study, Day examines the texts of two pre-World War II documentalists, Paul Otlet and Suzanne Briet. Through the work of Otlet and Briet, Day shows how documentation and information were associated with concepts of cultural progress. Day also discusses the social expansion of the conduit metaphor in the works of Warren Weaver and Norbert Wiener. He then shows how the work of contemporary French multimedia theorist Pierre Lévy refracts the earlier philosophical writings of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari through the prism of the capitalist understanding of the “virtual society.”
Turning back to the pre-World War II period, Day examines two critics of the information society: Martin Heidegger and Walter Benjamin. He explains Heidegger’s philosophical critique of the information culture’s model of language and truth as well as Benjamin’s aesthetic and historical critique of mass information and communication. Day concludes by contemplating the relation of critical theory and information, particularly in regard to the information culture’s transformation of history, historiography, and historicity into positive categories of assumed and represented knowledge.”
Publisher SIU Press, 2001
ISBN 0809323907, 9780809323906
152 pages
PDF (updated on 2012-8-1)
Comment (0)Sarah Kember: Cyberfeminism and Artificial Life (2003)
Filed under book | Tags: · artificial life, cyberfeminism, cyborg, ethics, feminism, life, posthumanism, wetware
Cyberfeminism and Artificial Life examines construction, manipulation and re-definition of life in contemporary technoscientific culture. It takes a critical political view of the concept of life as information, tracing this through the new biology and the changing discipline of artificial life and its manifestation in art, language, literature, commerce and entertainment. From cloning to computer games, and incorporating an analysis of hardware, software and ‘wetware’, Sarah Kember demonstrates how this relatively marginal field connects with, and connects up global networks of information systems.
As well as offering suggestions for the evolution of [cyber]feminism in Alife environments, the author identifies the emergence of posthumanism; an ethics of the posthuman subject mobilized in the tension between cold war and post-cold war politics, psychological and biological machines, centralized and de-centralized control, top-down and bottom-up processing, autonomous and autopoietic organisms, cloning and transgenesis, species-self and other species. Ultimately, this book aims to re-focus concern on the ethics rather than on the ‘nature’ of life-as-it-could-be.
Publisher Routledge, 2003
ISBN 0415240263, 9780415240260
257 pages
Keywords and phrases
evolutionary psychology, epistemology, ALife, sociobiology, autopoiesis, posthuman, cyberfeminism, norns, Steve Grand, science wars, SimLife, feminism, ontology, SimEarth, Risan, natural selection, cyborg, connectionism, feminist, autonomous agents
PDF (updated on 2013-3-16)
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