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“Unweaving the Program: Stiegler and the Hegemony of Technics”
Published in Transformations #17: “Bernard Stiegler and the Question of Technics” (2009)
Full text: http://www.transformationsjournal.org/journal/issue_17/article_08.shtml
This paper examines the empirical and historical aspects of Bernard Stiegler’s philosophy of technology, arguing that it consolidates, rather than challenges, a number of traditional ontological distinctions; in particular, those between living and technological, genetic and non-genetic, and nature and culture. The two main foci of criticism are Stiegler’s historical claims regarding the trajectory of technological development, and his questionable use of informatic models and writing metaphors to think about technics. The notion of ‘program’ is examined, as well as its applicability in the context of enculturation. Finally, the paper offers an alternative myth of technics that aims to rescue what Stiegler’s philosophy forgets: the irreducible heterogeneity of technology.
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“Prolegomena to a Future Robot History: Stiegler, Epiphylogenesis and Technical Evolution”
(coauthored with Belinda Barnet)
Published in Transformations #17: “Bernard Stiegler and the Question of Technics” (2009)
Full text: http://www.transformationsjournal.org/journal/issue_17/article_09.shtml
How does one tell the story of a machine? Can we say that technical artefacts have their own genealogies, their own evolutionary dynamic? Bernard Stiegler feels this question is [...]
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As any blogger and email user would now, there is a tremendous amount of spam out there. Apparently, 97% of the volume of all email correspondence consists of unsolicited emails. Anyway, I’ve been quite intrigued lately by a series of spam messages that have been sent both to my email account and to this site. [...]
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“Legitimating the Machine: The Epistemological Foundations of Technological Metaphor in the Natural Philosophy of René Descartes”
Philosophies of Technology: Francis Bacon and his Contemporaries.
Edited by Claus Zittel. Volume 11: Intersections - Yearbook for Early Modern Studies (Brill: Leiden and Boston: 2008).
I post here a draft version, uncorrected.
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Reensamblar lo Social: Una Introducción a la Teoría del Actor-Red
Bruno Latour
Ediciones Manantial, 2008, 390 páginas
(Revista de Ciencia, Tecnología y Sociedad, number 11, vol 4, July 2008)
¿Qué es lo social? ¿Qué es una sociedad? ¿Qué quieren decir los científicos “sociales” cuando hablan de ciertos fenómenos como “enmarcados en lo social”, socialmente “construidos”, “constituidos” o “determinados”?
La respuesta [...]
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H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life
By Michel Houellebecq
(The Australian December 2-3, 2006)
In this short but eventful study of H.P.Lovecraft, Michel Houellebecq suggests the pioneering writer created modern horror while exhausting its possibilities. Perhaps the horror genre never lived up to its early promise because practitioners such as Edgar Allan Poe and Lovecraft are [...]
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The Brain Takes Shape: An Early History
By Robert L. Martensen (Oxford University Press, 2004)
(Published in Metascience 15:3, December 2006)
Few people nowadays would dispute that the brain is the seat of personhood, the locus of all cognitive, sensory and emotional processes. This commonsensical, distinctively Western idea has had a relatively short but convoluted history, beginning in [...]
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Is there anything NEW to say about 2001: A Space Odyssey?
I watched it again the other day for the fiftieth time. It occurred to me that we can read the film as presenting a synoptic, imagined history of technology. This imagined history perpetuates many myths about technology, as well as offering a comprehensive range [...]
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Micronations
By John Ryan, Simon Sellars and George Dunford
Lonely Planet Publications, 144pp, $24.95
(The Australian September 23 2006)
THIS latest offering by Lonely Planet Books is a curious creature. Ostensibly a travel book, it turns out on closer inspection to be an exploration of the idea of nationhood. In our post-colonial, globalised times, some people see the nation [...]
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COOLING DOWN
Andrés Vaccari (2006, unpubished)
Others collect stamps, train tickets, Star Wars figurines; Michael Mikelos collects entropy. The idea has haunted him ever since he encountered the laws of thermodynamics at university. It’s one of the few things he remembers from his failed attempt at becoming a scientist.
“Entropy,” he explains to the team, “is the sexiest, [...]