Meaning Systems

"Google is a champion of cultural democracy, but without culture and without democracy." In this witty and polemical critique the philosopher Barbara Cassin takes aim at Google and our culture of big data. Enlisting her formidable knowledge of the rhetorical tradition, Cassin demolishes the Google myth of a "good" tech company and its "democracy of clicks," laying bare the philosophical poverty and political naiveté that underwrites its founding slogans: "Organize the world's information," and "Don't be evil." For Cassin, this conjunction of globalizing knowledge and moral imperative is frighteningly similar to the way American demagogues justify their own universalizing mission before the world. While sensitive to the possibilities of technology and to Google's playful appeal, Cassin shows what is lost when a narrow worship of information becomes dogma, such that research comes to mean data mining and other languages become provincial "flavors" folded into an impoverished Globish, or global English.

From biology to economics to information theory, the theme of interdependence is in the air, framing our experiences of all sorts of everyday phenomena. Indeed, the network may be the ascendant metaphor of our time. Yet precisely because the language of interdependence has become so commonplace as to be almost banal, we miss some of its most surprising and far-reaching implications. In Interdependence, biologist Kriti Sharma offers a compelling alternative to the popular view that interdependence simply means independent things interacting. Sharma systematically shows how interdependence entails the mutual constitution of one thing by another-how all things come into being only in a system of dependence on others. In a step-by-step account filled with vivid examples, Sharma shows how a coherent view of interdependence can help make sense not only of a range of everyday experiences but also of the most basic functions of living cells. With particular attention to the fundamental biological problem of how cells pick up signals from their surroundings, Sharma shows that only an account which replaces the perspective of "individual cells interacting with external environments" with one centered in interdependent, recursive systems can adequately account for how life works. This book will be of interest to biologists and philosophers, to theorists of science, of systems, and of cybernetics, and to anyone curious about how life works. Clear, concise, and insightful, Interdependence: Biology and Beyond explicitly offers a coherent and practical philosophy of interdependence and will help shape what interdependence comes to mean in the twenty-first century.

This book offers a conceptual interrogation of how capital navigates its cybernetic environment. Taking an immanent perspective, the book develops a unique synthesis between Niklas Luhmann's systems theory and the critical theory tradition. Overwijk shows how neoliberal capitalism's version of rationalization depends on the organization and management of society on the basis of cybernetic principles. Overwijk seeks to update earlier critiques of cybernetic capitalism that stressed the system's colonization of its environment, its making the entirety of social life communicable. Under today's cybernetic rationalization, things are radically different. Neoliberal political economy aims to incite the incalculability of the market; platform capitalists venture to capitalize on the unpredictable efforts of their users; and post-Fordist management seeks to encourage the creativity of service workers. As this book uniquely shows, capital no longer aims at total communicability, but instead seeks to provoke and exploit the incommunicability of its environment. In this sense, it offers an ecological theory of capitalism, laying conceptual the groundwork for understanding the extractivist logic of the Anthropocene. Cybernetic Capitalism shows how the cultural obsession with incommunicability that animates cybernetic rationalization has taken an irrationalist turn, resurfacing in the mysticism of conspiracy theory and radical-right politics. The book offers a novel and compelling materialist interpretation of today's paradoxical connections between neoliberal rationalism and radical-right irrationalism.

"A strikingly original . . . collection of essays, which places the work and broad intellectual interests of Lynne Margulis in a variety of contexts." -Stacy Alaimo, author of Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times Exploring the broad implications of evolutionary theorist Lynn Margulis's work, this collection brings together specialists across a range of disciplines, from paleontology, molecular biology, evolutionary theory, and geobiology to developmental systems theory, archaeology, history of science, cultural science studies, and literature and science. Addressing the multiple themes that animated Margulis's science, the essays within take up, variously, astrobiology and the origin of life, ecology and symbiosis from the microbial to the planetary scale, the coupled interactions of earthly environments and evolving life in Gaia theory and earth system science, and the connections of these newer scientific ideas to cultural and creative productions. "Altogether, Earth, Life, and System offers a series of often fascinating, always stimulating . . . invariably enriching essays in an incisive and unruly science and its existential repercussions. It is a fitting tribute to one of modern science's most generative and productive independent spirits, a gadfly like Socrates whose ultimate concern was to ensure that enquiry and debate were never stifled by received opinion and 'normal' expectations." -The British Society for Literature and Science "A vital contribution to interdisciplinary knowledge about life, evolution, and the planetary imaginary." -Tyler Volk, award-winning author of Quarks to Culture "Contributors include biologists, philosophers, historians, and even Margulis's son, a science writer who sets the tone for the rest of the text in an intimate first chapter about his mother. Clarke's sought-after interdisciplinarity shines in the finished product." -Isis Review

In a crucial shift within post-humanistic media studies, Bernhard Siegert dissolves the concept of media into a network of operations that reproduce, displace, process, and reflect the distinctions fundamental for a given culture. Cultural Techniques aims to forget our traditional understanding of media so as to redefine the concept through something more fundamental than the empiricist study of a medium's individual or collective uses or of its cultural semantics or aesthetics. Rather, Siegert seeks to relocate media and culture on a level where the distinctions between object and performance, matter and form, human and nonhuman, sign and channel, the symbolic and the real are still in the process of becoming. The result is to turn ontology into a domain of all that is meant in German by the word Kultur. Cultural techniques comprise not only self-referential symbolic practices like reading, writing, counting, or image-making. The analysis of artifacts as cultural techniques emphasizes their ontological status as "in-betweens," shifting from first-order to second-order techniques, from the technical to the artistic, from object to sign, from the natural to the cultural, from the operational to the representational. Cultural Techniques ranges from seafaring, drafting, and eating to the production of the sign-signal distinction in old and new media, to the reproduction of anthropological difference, to the study of trompe-l'oeils, grids, registers, and doors. Throughout, Siegert addresses fundamental questions of how ontological distinctions can be replaced by chains of operations that process those alleged ontological distinctions within the ontic. Grounding post-humanist theory both historically and technically, this book opens up a crucial dialogue between new German media theory and American post-cybernetic discourses.

Heinz von Foerster was the inventor of second-order cybernetics, which recognizes the investigator as part of the system he is investigating. The Beginning of Heaven and Earth Has No Name provides an accessible, nonmathematical, and comprehensive overview of von Foerster's cybernetic ideas and of the philosophy latent within them. It distills concepts scattered across the lifework of this scientific polymath and influential inter-disciplinarian. At the same time, as a book-length interview, it does justice to von Foerster's élan as a speaker and improviser, his skill as a raconteur. Developed from a week-long conversation between the editors and von Foerster near the end of his life, this work playfully engages von Foerster in developing the difference his notion of second-order cybernetics makes for topics ranging from emergence, life, order, and thermodynamics to observation, recursion, cognition, perception, memory, and communication. The book gives an English-speaking audience a new ease of access to the rich thought and generous spirit of this remarkable and protean thinker.

Science's conventional understanding of environment as an inert material resource underlies our unwillingness to acknowledge the military-industrial role in ongoing ecological catastrophes. In a crucial challenge to modern science's exclusive attachment to materialist premises, Bateson reframed culture, psychology, biology, and evolution in terms of feedback and communication, fundamentally altering perception of our relationship with nature. This intellectual biography covers the whole trajectory of Bateson's career, from his first anthropological work alongside Margaret Mead through the continuing relevance of his late forays into biosemiotics. Harries-Jones shows how the sum of Bateson's thinking across numerous fields turns our notions of causality upside down, providing a moral divide between sustainable creativity and our current biocide.

Exterranean concerns the extraction of stuff from the Earth, a process in which matter goes from being sub- to exterranean. By opening up a rich archive of non-modern texts and images from across Europe, this work offers a bracing riposte to several critical trends in ecological thought. By shifting emphasis from emission to extraction, Usher reorients our perspective away from Earthrise-like globes and shows what is gained by opening the planet to depths within. The book thus maps the material and immaterial connections between the Earth from which we extract, the human and nonhuman agents of extraction, and the extracted matter with which we live daily. Eschewing the self-congratulatory claims of posthumanism, Usher instead elaborates a productive tension between the materially situated homo of nonmodern humanism and the abstract and aggregated anthropos of the Anthropocene. In dialogue with Michel Serres, Bruno Latour, and other interdisciplinary work in the environmental humanities, Usher shows what premodern material can offer to contemporary theory. Examining textual and visual culture alike, Usher explores works by Ronsard, Montaigne, and Rabelais; early scientific works by Paracelsus and others; and objects, engravings, buildings, and the Salt Mines of Wieliczka. Both historicist and speculative in approach, Exterranean lays the groundwork for a comparative ecocriticism that reaches across and untranslates theoretical affordances between periods and languages.

Winner, French Voices Award for excellence in publication and translation. The Anthropocene announces a post-natural planet that can be remade at will through the process of geoengineering. With it, a new kind of power, geopower, takes the entire Earth, in its social, biological, and geophysical dimensions, as an object of knowledge, intervention, and governmentality. This shift has been aided, wittingly or not, by theorists of the constructivist turn who have likewise called into question the divide between nature and culture and have thus found themselves helpless against the project to replace Earth with Earth 2.0. Against both camps, this book confronts the unconstructable Earth, proposing an "ecology of separation" that acknowledges the wild, subtractive capacity of nature. Against technocratic delusion, but equally against a racially tinged organicism, Neyrat shows what it means to appreciate Earth as an unsubstitutable becoming that cannot be replicated in a laboratory and that always escapes the hubris of those who would remake and master it.