All posts filed under: control

Technoscience and Expressionism

Wednesday, July 16, 2014
by Joseph Weissman
comments 12
acceleration / becoming / control / Deleuze / machine / Nietzsche / subjectivity / virtual

Technology and Control The technocrat is the natural friend of the dictator—computers and dictatorship; but the revolutionary lives in the gap which separates technical progress from social totality, and inscribed there his dream of permanent revolution. This dream, therefore, is itself action, reality, and an effective menace to all established order; it renders possible what it dreams about (Gilles Deleuze, Logic of Sense) Gilles Deleuze’s indication of a certain affinity between technocrats and dictators seems […]

Firestorm

Thursday, July 2, 2009
by Joseph Weissman
comments 16
automation / capitalism / control / desire / exchange / immanence

Twins. Capitalism is nihilism, an endless betrayal of production in favor of an infinite — imaginary — debt or Void, which implies the transcendental equivalence of all processes, their essential or characteristic meaninglessness. Indeed the hostility towards life evinced in the machinations of capitalism are strictly correlate to the heterogeneous means by which nihilism achieves its destructive victory: through a generalized deterritorialization which can barely halt before its radically external, schizophrenic limit. Firestorm. Heidegger reminds […]

Who’s in Control?

Sunday, February 3, 2008
by Joseph Weissman
comments 4
being / control / energy / essence / flux / function / ground / heidegger / machine / order / power / revolution / technology

Who’s in Control? Heidegger and Technology We have for a very long time presumed to be in control of machines. We have claimed to be the masters, and pretended to “govern” technology. So Heidegger is more poignant than usual when he reminds us (in the 1969 Der Spiegel interview) that we do not even control that within us which drives us towards technicity. We are not masters of the secret desire which compels us to […]

Thinking Cybernetics

Saturday, February 2, 2008
by Joseph Weissman
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algorithm / apparatus of capture / authority / biopolitics / call for papers / code / control / cybernetics / desiring machines / einstein / ethics / humanity / language / media / metaphysics / technology

(Matt Dixon) Thinking Cybernetics: Mapping the Intersections between Metaphysics, Technology, Biopolitics (abstract for panel) The purpose of this panel is to gather together ideas, perspectives, and questions from a diverse variety of thinkers and disciplines relating to the theory and practice of cybernetics. Our goal is to raise a series of critical questions concerning the intersection between biopolitics, metaphysics, and technology. While each paper is devoted to a specific author or authors and is generally […]

Outline for a Philosophy of History

Wednesday, January 30, 2008
by Joseph Weissman
comments 2
becoming / celerity / confinement / control / history / humanity / intensity / multiplicity / nature / Politics / power / production / spirit / swarm

If we listen closely to the breath of the spirit as well as to the word of being, an entirely new kind of history may become possible. Disclosing a lethal truth (into) power, organization trembles before the disorganized generativity of decentralized multiplicity. Are we transmitting history backwards through time? Are languages transforming themselves through us? Is it by nature that we are socially-oriented creatures? Or does “humanity” on the contrary mark with precision a moment […]

Systems of Control: Derrida and Machines

Wednesday, January 16, 2008
by Joseph Weissman
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automation / control / cybernetics / derrida / history / human / machine / metaphysics / nonhuman / system

(notes for an abstract) If the theory of cybernetics is by itself to oust all metaphysical concepts — including the concepts of soul, of life, of value, of choice, of memory — which until recently served to separate the machine from man, it must conserve the notion of writing, trace, written mark, or grapheme, until its own historico-metaphysical character is also exposed. […[E]ven before being determined as human… or nonhuman, the gramme — or the […]

Empiricism and Power

Tuesday, October 9, 2007
by Joseph Weissman
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becoming / control / empirical / fascism / freedom / health / history / liberalism / power / Science / Mathematics / Technology / tradition / transhuman

The modern break with the authority of the past begins with critical history and the possibility of an empirical investigation into reality. A clinical eye belongs to the properly empirical, trans-historical observer — the one who is provocatively “unpersuaded” by traditional interpretations, metaphysical narratives of becoming, who is skeptical of all foundation myths. Through empirical investigation one discovers the curious historical double-articulation of religion and philosophy, i.e., spiritual or psychic forms and collective authority or […]