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Author: Thomas Swann
Publisher: Policy Press
Published: 2021-11-15
Total Pages: 190
ISBN-13: 1529208793
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Igniting a new field of scholarly inquiry, this pioneering book introduces cybernetic thinking to politics and organizational studies to explore the continuing development of the radical idea of participatory democracy within organizations.
Author: Steve Dixon
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-11-14
Total Pages: 326
ISBN-13: 042963238X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Cybernetic-Existentialism: Freedom, Systems, and Being-for-Others in Contemporary Arts and Performance offers a unique discourse and an original aesthetic theory. It argues that fusing perspectives from the philosophy of Existentialism with insights from the ‘universal science’ of cybernetics provides a new analytical lens and deconstructive methodology to critique art. In this study, Steve Dixon examines how a range of artists’ works reveal the ideas of Existentialist philosophers including Kierkegaard, Camus, de Beauvoir, and Sartre on freedom, being and nothingness, eternal recurrence, the absurd, and being-for-others. Simultaneously, these artworks are shown to engage in complex explorations of concepts proposed by cyberneticians including Wiener, Shannon, and Bateson on information theory and ‘noise’, feedback loops, circularity, adaptive ecosystems, autopoiesis, and emergence. Dixon’s groundbreaking book demonstrates how fusing insights and knowledge from these two fields can throw new light on pressing issues within contemporary arts and culture, including authenticity, angst and alienation, homeostasis, radical politics, and the human as system.
Author: Colin Ward
Publisher: PM Press
Published: 2018-01-15
Total Pages: 216
ISBN-13: 1629633186
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The argument of this book is that an anarchist society, a society which organizes itself without authority, is always in existence, like a seed beneath the snow, buried under the weight of the state and its bureaucracy, capitalism and its waste, privilege and its injustices, nationalism and its suicidal loyalties, religious differences and their superstitious separatism. Anarchist ideas are so much at variance with ordinary political assumptions and the solutions anarchists offer so remote, that all too often people find it hard to take anarchism seriously. This classic text is an attempt to bridge the gap between the present reality and anarchist aspirations, “between what is and what, according to the anarchists, might be.” Through a wide-ranging analysis—drawing on examples from education, urban planning, welfare, housing, the environment, the workplace, and the family, to name but a few—Colin Ward demonstrates that the roots of anarchist practice are not so alien or quixotic as they might at first seem but lie precisely in the ways that people have always tended to organize themselves when left alone to do so. The result is both an accessible introduction for those new to anarchism and pause for thought for those who are too quick to dismiss it. For more than thirty years, in over thirty books, Colin Ward patiently explained anarchist solutions to everything from vandalism to climate change—and celebrated unofficial uses of the landscape as commons, from holiday camps to squatter communities. Ward was an anarchist journalist and editor for almost sixty years, most famously editing the journal Anarchy. He was also a columnist for New Statesman, New Society, Freedom, and Town and Country Planning.
Author: Tiqqun
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2020-04-14
Total Pages: 169
ISBN-13: 1635900921
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →An early text from Tiqqun that views cybernetics as a fable of late capitalism, and offers tools for the resistance. The cybernetician's mission is to combat the general entropy that threatens living beings, machines, societies—that is, to create the experimental conditions for a continuous revitalization, to constantly restore the integrity of the whole. —from The Cybernetic Hypothesis This early Tiqqun text has lost none of its pertinence. The Cybernetic Hypothesis presents a genealogy of our “technical” present that doesn't point out the political and ethical dilemmas embedded in it as if they were puzzles to be solved, but rather unmasks an enemy force to be engaged and defeated. Cybernetics in this context is the teknê of threat reduction, which unfortunately has required the reduction of a disturbing humanity to packets of manageable information. Not so easily done. Not smooth. A matter of civil war, in fact. According to the authors, cybernetics is the latest master fable, welcomed at a certain crisis juncture in late capitalism. And now the interesting question is: Has the guest in the house become the master of the house? The “cybernetic hypothesis” is strategic. Readers of this little book are not likely to be naive. They may be already looking, at least in their heads, for a weapon, for a counter-strategy. Tiqqun here imagines an unbearable disturbance to a System that can take only so much: only so much desertion, only so much destituent gesture, only so much guerilla attack, only so much wickedness and joy.
Author: Martin Parker
Publisher:
Published: 2020
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9781138044111
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The book shows how anarchist ideas can turn management on its head, challenging business school assumptions about the theory and practice of organizing.
Author: Timcke, Scott
Publisher: Bristol University Press
Published: 2021-02-15
Total Pages: 198
ISBN-13: 1529215315
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →As the US contends with issues of populism and de-democratization, this timely study considers the impacts of digital technologies on the country’s politics and society. Timcke provides a Marxist analysis of the rise of digital media, social networks and technology giants like Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft. He looks at the impact of these new platforms and technologies on their users who have made them among the most valuable firms in the world. Offering bold new thinking across data politics and digital and economic sociology, this is a powerful demonstration of how algorithms have come to shape everyday life and political legitimacy in the US and beyond.
Author: Colin Ward
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2004-10-21
Total Pages: 128
ISBN-13: 0192804774
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →What do anarchists want? Can anarchy ever function effectively as a political force? Is anarchism more 'organized' and 'reasonable' than is currently perceived? Colin Ward explains what anarchism means and who anarchists are in this illuminating and accessible introduction to the subject.
Author: Andrew Culp
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Published: 2016-06-15
Total Pages: 95
ISBN-13: 1452953120
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →French philosopher Gilles Deleuze is known as a thinker of creation, joyous affirmation, and rhizomatic assemblages. In this short book, Andrew Culp polemically argues that this once-radical canon of joy has lost its resistance to the present. Concepts created to defeat capitalism have been recycled into business mantras that joyously affirm “Power is vertical; potential is horizontal!” Culp recovers the Deleuze’s forgotten negativity. He unsettles the prevailing interpretation through an underground network of references to conspiracy, cruelty, the terror of the outside, and the shame of being human. Ultimately, he rekindles opposition to what is intolerable about this world. Forerunners is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital works. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.
Author: Jeff Shantz
Publisher: Academica Press,LLC
Published: 2009
Total Pages: 229
ISBN-13: 1933146532
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Anarchism stands as one of the most vital social movements of the twentieth century. This book presents an analysis of contemporary anarchist movements in North America. It examines the possibilities and problems facing attempts to build DIY community-based social and political movements, which seek to transform social relations.
Author: Laura Messersmith-Glavin
Publisher: Institute for Anarchist Studies
Published: 2023-03-31
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9781939202413
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Perspectives on Anarchist Theory, N.33, on the theme of "Transformations," is over 200 beautiful pages and features the Abolitionist Tarot art of Kai Lumumba Barrow throughout. Describing what ties the thirteen essays in this issue together, Lara Messersmith-Glavin, in the introduction explains, "It is (the) push and pull of the old and the new that we see in this issue, a collection of investigations into both our histories and our futures, inquiries into the symbols and memories that have shaped the world in which we find ourselves, and visions for the ones we hope to create. We are also honored to share the work of a new set of archetypes, the Abolitionist Tarot, from which we may draw the clear understanding of the moment in which we find ourselves." The issue features Jesse Cohn's "Demodernizing Anarchism," as well as articles on consensus decision-making in the intentional community of Christiania; anarchist cybernetics; communicating climate catastrophe through performance; and explorations of how major social change happens and why. Using tarot as a guide, Messersmith-Glavin explains, "Our hope is that these works will help provide a path for us as we grow from fools to abolitionists and beyond."
