Short Circuit: A Counterlogistics Reader (2015)

““Counter-logistics is not simply a matter of blocking all flows, of stopping movement, of locking things in place where they are. It is a matter of blocking those flows that constitute the material and metaphysical tissue of this world, while simultaneously enhancing our own ethical connections, movement, and friendship. Helping migrants to cross borders and remain undetected, helping information to cross through and within prison walls, destroying surveillance cameras, defending the basis of new worlds seized in opposition to the old—these are as important as blocking rail lines and disrupting commerce.”

This book is a collection of critical texts focused on logistics, counter-logistics, and cybernetics. It attempts to combine some disparate groups and tendencies that have all taken a recent turn towards evaluating infrastructure and logistics as a crucial element in the perpetuation of capital and control, and as vulnerable points worthy of study, evaluation, and attack.”

With texts by Anonymous, Jasper Bernes, Max L’Hameunasse, Tiqqun, Leon de Mattis, Out of the Woods, 1882 Woodbine, and Degenerate Communism.

Publisher No New Ideas, Aug 2015
xiii+245 pages
via pht

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single PDF (4 MB)
PDF chapters

Jean-Hugues Barthélémy: Life and Technology: An Inquiry Into and Beyond Simondon (2015)

“The philosophy of Gilbert Simondon has reinvigorated contemporary thinking about biological and technological beings. In this book, Jean-Hugues Barthélémy takes up Simondon’s thought and shows how life and technology are connected by a transversal theme: individuation. In the first essay, Barthélémy delivers a contemporary interpretation of Simondon’s concept of ontogenesis against the backdrop of biology and cybernetics. In the second essay, he extends his reflections to propose a non-anthropological understanding of technology, and so sets up a confrontation with the work of Martin Heidegger.”

Translated by Barnaby Norman
Publisher meson.press, Lüneburg, Dec 2015
After Simondon series
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (Part 1 under CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0)
ISBN 9783957960702 (Print), 9783957960719 (PDF)
71 pages

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For more on Simondon see Monoskop wiki.

Matteo Pasquinelli (ed.): Alleys of Your Mind: Augmented Intelligence and Its Traumas (2015)

“One day, it will not be arbitrary to reframe twentieth century thought and its intelligent machines as a quest for the positive definition of error, abnormality, trauma, and catastrophe—a set of concepts that need to be understood
 in their cognitive, technological and political composition. It may be surprising for some to find out that Foucault’s history of biopower and technologies of the self share common roots with cybernetics and its early error friendly universal machines. Or to learn that the desiring machines, which “continually break down as they run, and in fact run only when they are not functioning properly” (Deleuze and Guattari), were in fact echoing research on war traumas and brain plasticity from the First World War. Across the history of computation (from early cybernetics to artificial intelligence and current algorithmic capitalism) both mainstream technology and critical responses to it have shared a common belief in the determinism and positivism of the instrumental or technological rationality, to use the formulations of the Frankfurt School. Conversely, the aim of this anthology is to rediscover the role of error, trauma and catastrophe in the design of intelligent machines and the theory of augmented cognition. These are timely and urgent issues: the media hype of singularity occurring for artificial intelligence appears just to fodder a pedestrian catastrophism without providing a basic epistemic model to frame such an “intelligence explosion”.”

With texts by Benjamin Bratton, Orit Halpern, Adrian Lahoud, Jon Lindblom, Catherine Malabou, Reza Negarestani, Luciana Parisi, Matteo Pasquinelli, Ana Teixeira Pinto, Michael Wheeler, Charles Wolfe, and Ben Woodard.

Publisher meson.press, Lüneburg, November 2015
Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 License
ISBN 9783957960658 (print) 9783957960665 (PDF)
212 pages

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