Ronald E. Day: The Modern Invention of Information: Discourse, History, and Power (2001)

“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

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2012-8-1)

Félix Guattari: The Three Ecologies (1989–) [FR, PT, DE, EN]

Just as rare species are disappearing at an alarming rate, so whole areas of human thought, feeling and sensibility are becoming extinct through the power of an infantalizing mass media and the social exclusion of the old, the young and the unemployed. Extending the definition of ecology to encompass social relations and human subjectivity as well as environmental concerns, Guattari argues that the ecological crises that threaten our planet are the direct result of the expansion of a new form of capitalism and that a new ecosophical approach must be found which respects the differences between all living systems.

A powerful critique of capitalism and a manifesto for a new way of thinking, The Three Ecologies is also an ideal introduction to the work of one of Europe’s most radical thinkers. This edition of The Three Ecologies includes a chronology of Guattari’s life and work, introductions to both his general philosophy and to the work itself and extended notes to the original text.

French edition
Publisher Éditions Galilée, Paris, 1989
ISBN 2718603518
74 pages

English edition
Translation by Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton
Publisher Athlone Press, London, 2000
ISBN 0485004089, 9780485004083
174 pages

Google books (EN)

Les trois écologies (French, 1989, added on 2014-3-21)
As três ecologias (Portuguese, trans. Maria Cristina F. Bittencourt, 1990, updated on 2012-10-18)
Die drei Ökologien (German, trans. Alec A. Schaeret, 1994, added on 2016-4-27)
The Three Ecologies (English, trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton, 2000, updated on 2012-10-18)

Bernard Stiegler: Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus (1994–) [EN, ES]

“What is a technical object? At the beginning of Western philosophy, Aristotle contrasted beings formed by nature, which had within themselves a beginning of movement and rest, and man-made objects, which did not have the source of their own production within themselves. This book, the first of three volumes, revises the Aristotelian argument and develops an innovative assessment whereby the technical object can be seen as having an essential, distinct temporality and dynamics of its own.

The Aristotelian concept persisted, in one form or another, until Marx, who conceived of the possibility of an evolution of technics. Lodged between mechanics and biology, a technical entity became a complex of heterogeneous forces. In a parallel development, while industrialization was in the process of overthrowing the contemporary order of knowledge as well as contemporary social organization, technology was acquiring a new place in philosophical questioning. Philosophy was for the first time faced with a world in which technical expansion was so widespread that science was becoming more and more subject to the field of instrumentality, with its ends determined by the imperatives of economic struggle or war, and with its epistemic status changing accordingly. The power that emerged from this new relation was unleashed in the course of the two world wars.

Working his way through the history of the Aristotelian assessment of technics, the author engages the ideas of a wide range of thinkers—Rousseau, Husserl, and Heidegger, the paleo-ontologist Leroi-Gourhan, the anthropologists Vernant and Detienne, the sociologists Weber and Habermas, and the systems analysts Maturana and Varela.”

Originally published in French under the title La Technique et le temps. Vol. 1: La faute d’Epiméthée, 1994.

English edition
Translated by Richard Beardsworth and George Collins
Publisher Stanford University Press, 1998
ISBN 0804730415, 9780804730419
316 pages

Publisher (EN)
Wikipedia (EN)

Technics and Time 1: The Fault of Epimetheus (English, 1998, updated on 2012-7-19)
La tecnica y el tiempo, I. El Pecado de Epimeteo (Spanish, updated on 2012-7-19)