David Golumbia: The Cultural Logic of Computation (2009)

Advocates of computers make sweeping claims for their inherently transformative power: new and different from previous technologies, they are sure to resolve many of our existing social problems, and perhaps even to cause a positive political revolution.

In The Cultural Logic of Computation, David Golumbia, who worked as a software designer for more than ten years, confronts this orthodoxy, arguing instead that computers are cultural “all the way down”—that there is no part of the apparent technological transformation that is not shaped by historical and cultural processes, or that escapes existing cultural politics. From the perspective of transnational corporations and governments, computers benefit existing power much more fully than they provide means to distribute or contest it. Despite this, our thinking about computers has developed into a nearly invisible ideology Golumbia dubs “computationalism”—an ideology that informs our thinking not just about computers, but about economic and social trends as sweeping as globalization.

Driven by a programmer’s knowledge of computers as well as by a deep engagement with contemporary literary and cultural studies and poststructuralist theory, The Cultural Logic of Computation provides a needed corrective to the uncritical enthusiasm for computers common today in many parts of our culture.

Publisher Harvard University Press, 2009
ISBN 0674032926, 9780674032927
Length 257 pages

review (Marilyn Lombardi)
review (Rob Horning)

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Bernard Stiegler: Technics and Time, 2: Disorientation (1996–) [FR, EN, ES]

“Disorientation is the first publication in English of the second volume of Technics and Time, in which French philosopher Bernard Stiegler engages in a close dialogue with Husserl, Derrida, and other philosophers who have devoted their energies to technics, such as Heidegger and Simondon. The author’s broad intent is to respond to Western philosophy’s historical exclusion of technics and techniques from its metaphysical questionings, and in so doing to rescue critical and philosophical thinking. For many years, Stiegler has explored the origins and philosophical, ethical, and political stakes of a global process he calls ‘the industrial temporalization of consciousness.’ Here, demonstrating that technology—including alphabetical writing—is memory, he argues that through new technologies of retention and inscription we have come to live in a world where time devours space, a disoriented world in which we have lost our bearings. Immersed in the multimedia of an over-connected world, with time and space as we know them abolished, we no longer find ‘cardinal points’ to guide us and may even be led where we do not wish to go. We must therefore prepare to confront new spheres of ideological control and discover new possibilities in the digital environment.”

Publisher Galilée, Paris, 1996

English edition
Translated by Stephen Barker
Publisher Stanford University Press, 2009
Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics series
ISBN 0804730121, 9780804730129
288 pages

Publisher (EN)

La Technique et le temps 2. La Désorientation (French, 1996, updated on 2012-7-19)
Technics and Time, 2: Disorientation (English, 2009, updated on 2020-8-7)
La tecnica y el tiempo, II. La desorientacion (Spanish, updated on 2012-7-19)

Culture Machine, 12: The Digital Humanities: Beyond Computing (2011)

“The field of the digital humanities embraces various scholarly activities in the humanities that involve writing about digital media and technology as well as being engaged in digital media production. Perhaps most notably, in what some are describing as a ‘computational turn’, it has seen techniques and methods drawn from computer science being used to produce new ways of understanding and approaching humanities texts. But just as interesting as what computer science has to offer the humanities is the question of what the humanities have to offer computer science. Do the humanities really need to draw so heavily on computer science to develop their sense of what the digital humanities might be? These are just some of the issues that are explored in this special issue of Culture Machine.”

Edited by Federica Frabetti
Publisher Open Humanities Press, 2011
Open Access
ISSN 1465-4121

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