Anarchist Cybernetics

Anarchist Cybernetics
Author: Thomas Swann
Publisher: Policy Press
Total Pages: 190
Release: 2021-11-15
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1529208793

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.

Cybernetic-Existentialism

Cybernetic-Existentialism
Author: Steve Dixon
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 326
Release: 2019-11-14
Genre: Art
ISBN: 042963238X

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.

The Cybernetic Hypothesis

The Cybernetic Hypothesis
Author: Tiqqun
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 169
Release: 2020-04-14
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1635900921

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.

Perspectives on Anarchist Theory #33: Transitions

Perspectives on Anarchist Theory #33: Transitions
Author: Laura Messersmith-Glavin
Publisher: Institute for Anarchist Studies
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2023-03-31
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9781939202413

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."

Anarchy in Action

Anarchy in Action
Author: Colin Ward
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2018
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9781629632384

The argument of this book is that an anarchist society, a society which organises itself without authority, is always in existence. 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 organise themselves when left alone to do so.

Anarchism, Organization and Management

Anarchism, Organization and Management
Author: Martin Parker
Publisher:
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2020
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9781315172606

"You might think that anarchism and management are opposed, but this book shows how an understanding of the long history of anarchist ideas allows us to understand the problems of contemporary organizing much more clearly. Anarchism is a theory of organizing, and in times when global capitalism is in question, we need new ideas more than ever. The reader of this book will learn how anarchist ideas are relevant to today's management problems. In a series of student friendly short chapters on contemporary topics, the authors challenge the common sense that has allowed particular forms of organization and market to become globally dominant. Do we always need leaders? Is technological change always a good thing? Are markets the best way to arrange forms of exchange? This challenging book is essential for anyone who wants to understand what is wrong with business school theory, and what we might do about it. For students and teachers of management, the standard textbook reproduces the dominant ideas about the way that business should be done. This book turns those ideas on their head, asking awkward questions about authority, technology and markets, and demanding that its readers think hard about whether they want to reproduce those ideas too. Students of management, like everyone else, know that the current global system is broken but they don't know what they can do about it. This unique book uses two hundred years of anarchist ideas to give readers a clear guide for building the organizations and businesses of the future, and places choice and responsibility at the centre of making a new world for people and planet"--

Anarchist by Design: Technology and Human Nature

Anarchist by Design: Technology and Human Nature
Author: Mark Seely
Publisher: Lulu.com
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2013-04-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 0989233715

Technology lies at the heart of the issue. The technological order—the expanding web of physical technologies and bureaucratic systems of control that we call global civilization—exists despite our evolutionary preparation for a distinctly different kind of society: a society of near equals in which participation is voluntary. Anarchy—society founded on organic and direct relations with others, unmediated by artificial systems of power and authority—is the natural and preferred social state for human beings. Anarchist by Design promotes the intentional dismantling of technological society, not merely to provide relief from the corrosive effects it has on individual freedom, and not to be replaced by something else, but in order to allow natural modes of social organization—underwritten by evolved psychological systems that continue to limp along beneath the surface, deformed, repressed, and misdirected—to have healthy and unfettered expression.

Anarchism

Anarchism
Author: Daniel Guerin
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 186
Release: 1970-01-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1583674926