The Empire of Non-sense

The Empire of Non-sense
Author: Jacques Ellul
Publisher: Papadakis Dist A/C
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2014
Genre: Art and technology
ISBN: 9781906506407

Many modern artists and architects continue to imagine and build the world technologically. Their beliefs remain firmly rooted in their assumption that the liberating forces of technology freed them from previous artistic traditions while making available vast means of production and a plethora of materials. All artistic traditions were seemingly put aside by the paintings of Cézanne, the poetry of Baudelaire, and the architecture of Le Corbusier. Behind this apparent freedom French critic Jacques Ellul, author of the classic The Technological Society, found an absolute slavery. The artist was the handmaiden of technology, a relation the artist no longer understood, like other citizens of technological culture. Artists acclaimed their unbridled individualism while being intensely determined by the forces of technological culture. Ellul examines this process in modern art from the beginning of the 20th century where the sense of art - its meaning and embodiments - is reduced to non-sense. Ellul's study is in the tradition of Guy Debord's The Society of Spectacle and Theodor Adorno's Aesthetic Theory but moves significantly beyond their Marxist perspectives that were, from Ellul's view, co-opted by technique.

The No-nonsense Guide to World History

The No-nonsense Guide to World History
Author: Chris Brazier
Publisher: Verso
Total Pages: 148
Release: 2001
Genre: Civilisation
ISBN: 9781859843550

This guide integrates concisely the conventional narratives of history with the stories of the continents and communities of Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Jacques Ellul and the Technological Society in the 21st Century

Jacques Ellul and the Technological Society in the 21st Century
Author: Helena M. Jerónimo
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2013-07-08
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9400766580

This volume rethinks the work of Jacques Ellul (1912-1994) on the centenary of his birth, by presenting an overview of the current debates based on Ellul's insights. As one of the most significant twentieth-century thinkers about technology, Ellul was among the first thinkers to realize the importance of topics such as globalization, terrorism, communication technologies and ecology, and study them from a technological perspective. The book is divided into three sections. The first discusses Ellul’s diagnosis of modern society, and addresses the reception of his work on the technological society, the notion of efficiency, the process of symbolization/de-symbolization, and ecology. The second analyzes communicational and cultural problems, as well as threats and trends in early twenty-first century societies. Many of the issues Ellul saw as crucial – such as energy, propaganda, applied life sciences and communication – continue to be so. In fact they have grown exponentially, on a global scale, producing new forms of risk. Essays in the final section examine the duality of reason and revelation. They pursue an understanding of Ellul in terms of the depth of experience and the traditions of human knowledge, which is to say, on the one hand, the experience of the human being as contained in the rationalist, sociological and philosophical traditions. On the other hand there are the transcendent roots of human existence, as well as “revealed knowledge,” in the mystical and religious traditions. The meeting of these two traditions enables us to look at Ellul’s work as a whole, but above all it opens up a space for examining religious life in the technological society.

The No-nonsense Guide to World Food

The No-nonsense Guide to World Food
Author: Wayne Roberts
Publisher: New Internationalist
Total Pages: 193
Release: 2008
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1904456960

A world tour of fast food, health food, junk food, school food, slow food and even more food. It shows how real food' has become increasingly hard to find, dominated in the West by agri-business and supermarkets. With a history of world food production and consumption, this Guide explains current debate and controversies and introduces the principle of 'food security', fast becoming a global movement to make food provision fair, safe and nutritious for all the world's population at all times.'

Sense & Nonsense in Australian History

Sense & Nonsense in Australian History
Author: John Hirst
Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com
Total Pages: 422
Release: 2015-01-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 1458798577

Sense and Nonsense in Australian History represents a lifetime's original reflection by Australia's most innovative and penetrating historian. Included here are classic essays on the pioneer legend, Australian egalitarianism and colonial culture. There are celebrated critiques of The Tyranny of Distance, multiculturalism and nationalistic history, as well as a substantial essay on Aboriginal dispossession and the history wars. In Sense and Nonsense in Australian History, John Hirst overturns familiar conceptions and deepens our sense of Australia's development from convict society to distinctive democracy.

The No-nonsense Guide to Sexual Diversity

The No-nonsense Guide to Sexual Diversity
Author: Vanessa Baird
Publisher: New Internationalist
Total Pages: 161
Release: 2007
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1904456642

Demystifies all the colors of the sexual rainbow, tracking the campaigns for rights and equality worldwide.

The No-Nonsense Guide to Equality

The No-Nonsense Guide to Equality
Author: Danny Dorling
Publisher: New Internationalist
Total Pages: 128
Release: 2012-04-17
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1780260725

The No-Nonsense Guide to Equality discusses the positive effects that equality can have, using examples and case studies from across the globe, including many from the United States. It examines the lessons of history and covers race, gender and ethnicity, age, and wealth. Danny Dorling considers, realistically, just how equal it is possible to be, the challenges we face, and the factors that will lead to greater equality for all. Danny Dorling is professor of human geography at the University of Sheffield, United Kingdom, and one of the leading international experts on inequality. He has written extensively about the widening gap between rich and poor and his work regularly appears in the Guardian. He is author of several books, including Injustice: Why Social Inequality Persists and The Atlas of the Real World.

Boring Formless Nonsense

Boring Formless Nonsense
Author: Eldritch Priest
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2013-02-14
Genre: Music
ISBN: 144112408X

Boring Formless Nonsense intervenes in an aesthetics of failure that has largely been delimited by the visual arts and its avant-garde legacies. It focuses on contemporary experimental composition in which failure rubs elbows with the categories of chance, noise, and obscurity. In these works we hear failure anew. We hear boredom, formlessness, and nonsense in a way that gives new purchase to aesthetic, philosophical, and ethical questions that falter in their negative capability. Reshaping current debates on failure as an aesthetic category, eldritch Priest shows failure to be a duplicitous concept that traffics in paradox and sustains the conditions for magical thinking and hyperstition. Framing recent experimental composition as a deviant kind of sound art, Priest explores how the affective and formal elements of post-Cagean music couples with contemporary culture's themes of depression, distraction, and disinformation to create an esoteric reality composed of counterfactuals and pseudonymous beings. Ambitious in content and experimental in its approach, Boring Formless Nonsense will challenge and fracture your views on failure, creativity, and experimental music.

The Nonsense Factory

The Nonsense Factory
Author: Bruce Cannon Gibney
Publisher: Hachette Books
Total Pages: 604
Release: 2019-05-14
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0316475254

A withering and witty examination of how the American legal system, burdened by complexity and untrammeled growth, fails Americans and threatens the rule of law itself, by the acclaimed author of A Generation of Sociopaths. Our trial courts conduct hardly any trials, our correctional systems do not correct, and the rise of mandated arbitration has ushered in a shadowy system of privatized "justice." Meanwhile, our legislators can't even follow their own rules for making rules, while the rule of law mutates into a perpetual state of emergency. The legal system is becoming an incomprehensible farce. How did this happen? In The Nonsense Factory, Bruce Cannon Gibney shows that over the past seventy years, the legal system has dangerously confused quantity with quality and might with legitimacy. As the law bloats into chaos, it staggers on only by excusing itself from the very commands it insists that we obey, leaving Americans at the mercy of arbitrary power. By examining the system as a whole, Gibney shows that the tragedies often portrayed as isolated mistakes or the work of bad actors -- police misconduct, prosecutorial overreach, and the outrages of imperial presidencies -- are really the inevitable consequences of law's descent into lawlessness. The first book to deliver a lucid, comprehensive overview of the entire legal system, from the grandeur of Constitutional theory to the squalid workings of Congress, The Nonsense Factory provides a deeply researched and witty examination of America's state of legal absurdity, concluding with sensible options for reform.

Sense and Nonsense about Angels and Demons

Sense and Nonsense about Angels and Demons
Author: Kenneth D. Boa
Publisher: Zondervan
Total Pages: 161
Release: 2009-05-26
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0310298202

Are you sure you really know? How do you know? Information on angels and demons is rampant today, but much of it is anything but trustworthy. Sense and Nonsense about Angels and Demons helps you cut through the clutter to see what the Bible actually reveals about spiritual beings both good and evil. Learn about• the fascinating history of “angelology”• what an angel is—and isn’t• what angels do and why• what angels may look like at the rare times when they appear• the “Angel of the Lord”: when an angel is more than an angel• the devil and his angels• the origins of Satan: what the Bible really says