Andrés Vaccari

“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, [...]

“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 [...]

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. [...]

“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.

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

Evening in the Palace of Reason
by James Gaines
(The Weekend Australian May 6-7, 2006)
History is a messy business that rarely offers neat closures or a good story. Nonetheless, the exceptions can be more wonderful than any fiction. One such case is the meeting of Johann Sebastian Bach and Frederick the Great of Prussia, the subject of [...]

The World According to Y
by Rebecca Huntley (Allen & Unwin)
(Weekend Australian 18 march 2006)
While the notion of a ‘generation’ is largely a fabrication, it is useful to market researchers and sociologists as a way to study populations who lived through similar historical circumstances, and share certain attitudes and beliefs.
Just as I was beginning to figure [...]

He dreamed. Dreaming was for free and perfectly unproductive. In the dream it was the Future®. In the Future® everything looked strange to him. For a start it was all monochrome, and it took him some time to work out this was because everything—the buildings, the clothes and faces of passerbys, the roads, cars, his [...]

Descartes: The Life of René Descartes and its Place in his Times
By A. C. Grayling
(The Australian January 14-15, 2006)
Three and a half centuries after his death, René Descartes still has some surprises under his wig. Descartes was, without doubt, one of the founders of the modern world. An exceptional philosopher, scientist and mathematician, he was [...]

The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology
By Ray Kurzweil
(The Australian December 17-18, 2005)
Our bodies will soon be obsolete. Genetic engineering, smart drugs and nanotechnology will reverse the ageing process and make us immortal. Machines will do all the unpleasant work for us, producing all the energy we need. We will download our minds into [...]

K. (2005)
By Roberto Calasso
Translated from the Italian by Geoffrey Brock.
The work of Franz Kafka seems custom made for endless interpretation. Indeed, no other modern author has inspired such a feeding frenzy of critical exegesis. Kafka’s disturbing and enigmatic worlds immediately compel the reader to search for explanations and possible meanings. We are certain that something [...]

I am Alive and You are Dead: A Journey into the Mind of Philip K. Dick
By Emmanuel Carrère. Translated from the French by Timothy Bent.
Bloomsbury.
(The Australian, 22-23 October 2005)
Since his death in 1982, the stature and popularity of American science fiction writer Philip K. Dick have been growing exponentially. Most of his books (forty-four novels [...]

MOREL’S INVENTION (1940) (”La Invención the Morel”)
By Adolfo Bioy Casares
(Sydney Morning Herald, date unknown, 2005)
This short novel is one of the great landmarks of Latin American literature, yet it remains virtually unknown in the Anglophone world. It is about time some publisher wised up and reissued it.
Written in 1940, Morel’s Invention is a prescient articulation [...]

Recently I’ve come across a piece by one of my favorite authors, J. G. Ballard, on a show I’ve become addicted to against my better judgement: Crime Scene Investigation (you can access Ballard’s article here). I was pleased and disappointed by Ballard’s analysis. Although a lot of his comments are perceptive, I think he missed [...]