MachineMachine /stream - tagged with foucault http://machinemachine.net/stream/feed en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Sweetcron therourke@gmail.com Noise; Mutation; Autonomy: A Mark on Crusoe’s Island http://machinemachine.net/text/research/a-mark-on-crusoes-island

This mini-paper was given at the Escapologies symposium, at Goldsmiths University, on the 5th of December

Daniel Defoe’s 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe centres on the shipwreck and isolation of its protagonist. The life Crusoe knew beyond this shore was fashioned by Ships sent to conquer New Worlds and political wills built on slavery and imperial demands. In writing about his experiences, Crusoe orders his journal, not by the passing of time, but by the objects produced in his labour. A microcosm of the market hierarchies his seclusion removes him from: a tame herd of goats, a musket and gunpowder, sheafs of… ]]> Wed, 07 Dec 2011 09:50:14 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/text/research/a-mark-on-crusoes-island The Chomsky-Foucault Debate [excerpt, part 1/2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WveI_vgmPz8&feature=youtube_gdata ]]> Sun, 02 Oct 2011 14:40:12 -0700 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WveI_vgmPz8&feature=youtube_gdata Death Is Not the End (Long Live theory!) http://nplusonemag.com/death-not-end Was theory a gigantic hoax? On the contrary. It was the only salvation, for a twenty year period, from two colossal abdications by American thinkers and writers. From about 1975 to 1995, through a historical accident, a lot of American thinking and mental living got done by people who were French, and by young Americans who followed the French. The two grand abdications: one occurred in academic philosophy departments, the other in American fiction. In philosophy, from the 1930s on, a revolutionary group had been fighting inside universities to overcome the “tradition.” This insurgency, at first called “logical positivism” or… ]]> Tue, 30 Aug 2011 09:08:16 -0700 http://nplusonemag.com/death-not-end Death Is Not the End (Long Live theory!) http://nplusonemag.com/death-not-end Was theory a gigantic hoax? On the contrary. It was the only salvation, for a twenty year period, from two colossal abdications by American thinkers and writers. From about 1975 to 1995, through a historical accident, a lot of American thinking and mental living got done by people who were French, and by young Americans who followed the French.

The two grand abdications: one occurred in academic philosophy departments, the other in American fiction. In philosophy, from the 1930s on, a revolutionary group had been fighting inside universities to overcome the “tradition.” This insurgency, at first called… ]]> Thu, 18 Aug 2011 01:48:43 -0700 http://nplusonemag.com/death-not-end Giorgio Agamben. What is a Paradigm. 2002 1/10 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9Wxn1L9Er0&feature=youtube_gdata ]]> Fri, 12 Aug 2011 07:50:19 -0700 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9Wxn1L9Er0&feature=youtube_gdata Kipple and Things: How to Hoard and Why Not To Mean http://machinemachine.net/text/ideas/kipple-and-things

This is paper (more of an essay, really) was originally delivered at the Birkbeck/London Consortium ‘Rubbish Symposium‘, 30th July 2011

Living at the very limit of his means, Philip K. Dick, a two-bit, pulp sci-fi author, was having a hard time maintaining his livelihood. It was the 1950s and Dick was living with his second wife, Kleo, in a run-down apartment in Berkley, California, surrounded by library books Dick later claimed, “They could not afford to pay the fines on.”

In 1956, Dick had a short story published in a brand new pulp magazine: Satellite Science Fiction. Entitled, ]]> Sun, 31 Jul 2011 10:28:32 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/text/ideas/kipple-and-things The Pathology of Collecting http://newhumanist.org.uk/2565/favourite-things What I’ve learned, the hard way, is that the one thing you must never ask a collector is “why?” It’ll get you nowhere. They’ll just stare at you in baffled amazement before returning to contemplation of their most recent acquisition, or dreaming of the next one. These are people who thrive on making classifications, pondering the arrangements of their trophies and annotating them with informative labels. Often their obsession seems to derive from a need to impose order on a chaotic world, from the fear of death and oblivion. The collection will ward off mortality, carrying the illusion of eternity.… ]]> Mon, 11 Jul 2011 04:54:06 -0700 http://newhumanist.org.uk/2565/favourite-things “Everything on the Face of the Earth” http://machinemachine.net/text/ideas/everything-on-the-face-of-the-earth

This reflection is intended to bind together two recent posts of mine:

John Carpenter’s 1982 film, The Thing, is a claustrophobic sci-fi masterpiece, containing all the hallmarks of a great horror film. The film depicts a sinister turn for matter, where the chaos of the replicating, cancerous cell is expanded to the human scale and beyond. In The Thing we… ]]> Sun, 12 Jun 2011 10:36:15 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/text/ideas/everything-on-the-face-of-the-earth Digital Autonomy http://art-research.co.uk/digital-autonomy-a-reponse-to-hito-steyerl

“Is an ephemeral image, a moment in a streaming video, a thing? Or if the image is frozen as a still, is it now a thing? Is a dream, a city, a sensation, a derivative, an ideology, a decay, a kiss? I haven’t the least idea.”

Extract from David Miller, Materiality : An Introduction [1]

In A Thing Like You and Me, Hito Steyerl plays out her ongoing obsession with the copy, skirting briefly over her wider, yet more implicit concern: the digital. Echoing the work of Bruno Latour, Steyerl acknowledges the materiality by which… ]]> Sat, 11 Jun 2011 04:02:00 -0700 http://art-research.co.uk/digital-autonomy-a-reponse-to-hito-steyerl/is-an-ephemeral-image-a-moment-in-a-streaming-video-a Foucault, Deleuze, and the Ethics of Digital Networks http://www.fims.uwo.ca/people/faculty/frohmann/Documents/ICIE%20IV%20Foucault%20Deleuze.pdf Information ethics has become a scholarly growth industry in recent years, especially through the work of Rafael Capurro, the  founder of the International Center forInformation Ethics (ICIE). The maturity of the debate is reflected in the leading question of the International ICIE Symposium 2004 in Karlsruhe, Germany: how isembodied human life possible within local cultural traditions and the horizon of a global digital environment? The Symposium  explores ethical ramifications of thisquestion by encouraging research and reflection on effects of the Internet and postInternet developments of digital networks on a wide range of phenomena, includingcommunity, democracy, customs, language, media, economic development,… ]]> Sat, 11 Jun 2011 02:32:11 -0700 http://www.fims.uwo.ca/people/faculty/frohmann/Documents/ICIE%20IV%20Foucault%20Deleuze.pdf Headless Research http://machinemachine.net/text/ideas/headless-research

This is an extract from a collaborative text I recently worked on, to be published (soon) in Texte Zur Kunst :

The animal of research, being nourished from its root, springs up from the dirt of discourse, the direction of growth pandering to a supposed head. “Humans see the world through language, but do not see language.” [1] What exactly do the bees mean when they pollinate the blossom?

For art meaning tends to be expressed through… ]]> Sun, 15 May 2011 10:26:51 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/text/ideas/headless-research A Genealogy of Homo-Economicus: Neoliberalism and the Production of Subjectivity http://rauli.cbs.dk/index.php/foucault-studies/article/viewFile/2465/2463/untitled-httpraulicbsdkindexphpfoucault-studiesarticleviewfile24652463

RT “@IlllllllllllllI: A Genealogy of Homo-Economicus: Neoliberalism and the Production of Subjectivity" #Foucault

]]> Thu, 12 May 2011 05:28:59 -0700 http://rauli.cbs.dk/index.php/foucault-studies/article/viewFile/2465/2463 The Information Essay http://nplusonemag.com/the-information-essay Just as this is an age of great wealth inequality, it is also an age of great inequality of knowledge or, more exactly, factual information. For all its democratic potential, the fact-filled internet has only heightened the pre-Google asymmetry between those, on one side, loyal to Baconian methods of patient, inductive gathering of facts — the ways of the card catalog and the archive, of the analysis and evaluation of empirical data — and those, on the other side, who didn’t need to read Foucault or the Frankfurt School to nurture a suspicion that positivist orders of knowledge mask a hierarchy of power in… ]]> Mon, 18 Apr 2011 09:42:57 -0700 http://nplusonemag.com/the-information-essay Of Other Spaces: Heterotopias http://foucault.info/documents/heteroTopia/foucault.heteroTopia.en.html (Michel Foucault, 1967)

The great obsession of the nineteenth century was, as we know, history: with its themes of development and of suspension, of crisis, and cycle, themes of the ever-accumulating past, with its great preponderance of dead men and the menacing glaciation of the world. The nineteenth century found its essential mythological resources in the second principle of thermaldynamics- The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of… ]]> Wed, 19 Jan 2011 05:32:41 -0700 http://foucault.info/documents/heteroTopia/foucault.heteroTopia.en.html