animation

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXIl8yEtjvg

some titles from how we became posthuman

sherry turkle, Life on the Screen： identity in the Age of the Internet (1995)

David Porush The soft machine: Cybernetic Fiction

Authur Kroker Hacking the Future： Stories for the flesh-eating 90s 1996

my mother was a computer N Katherine Hayles

The Regime of computation
p17 "Computation" in the sense ... connotes far more than the digital computer, which is only one of many platforms on which computational operations can run....p18 The computational regime continues in the tradition of Turing's work by considering computation to be a process that starts with a parsimonious set of elements and a relatively small set of logical operations. Instantiated into some kind of platform, these components can be structured so as to build up increasing levels of complexity, eventually arriving at complexity so deep, multilayered, and extensive as to simulate the most complex phenomena on earth, from turbulent flow and multiagent social systerms to reasoning processes one might legitimately call thinking.


p25 "emergence".. refers to properties that do not inhere in the individual components of a system; rather, these properties come about from interactions between components. Emergent properties thus appear at the global level of the system itself rather than at the local level of a system's components.

p28 The central problem of achiving emergence through more than one level is bound up tightly with issues of representation. As Nicholas Gessler, among others, has pointed out, one way to think about this process is to imagine a mechanism whereby the patterns that emerged at the first level are represented by a different kind of mechanism, which then uses these representations as primitive to create new emergent patterns, which in turn would undergo further re-representation and be turned into primitives for the third level, and so on.

p31 An important aspect of intermediation is the recursivity implicit in the coproduction and coevolution of multiple causalities. Complex feedback loops connect humans and machines, old technologies and new, language and code, analog processes and digital fragmentations. Although these feedback loops evolve over time and thus have a historical trajectory that arcs from one point to another, it is important not to make the mistake of privileging any one point as the primary locus of attention, which could easily result in flattening complex interactions back to linear casual chains. The contemporary indoctrination into linear causality is so strong that it continues to exercise a fatal attraction for much of contemporary thought. It must be continually resisted if we are fully to realize the implications of multicausal and multilayered hierarchical systems, which entail distributed agency, emergent processes, unpredictable coevolutions, and seemingly paradoxical interactions between convergent and divergent processes.


Gessler, Nicholas, "Evolving Artificial Cultural things- that-think and work by dynamical Hierarchical synthesis"

Aarseth, Espen J. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature 1997

McGann, Jerome J. Radiant Textuality: Literature after the world wide Web 2001

when our eyes no longer see (2)

Worster, Donald. Nature's economy: A history of Ecological ideas cambridge University press1994

Jameson, Frederic. "Cognitive Mapping" in Marxism and the interpretation culture edited by cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg university of Illinois Press 1988

Aesthetics and Politics edited by Ronald Taylor including Ernest Bloch and Georg Lukacs

when our eyes no longer see

When Our Eyes No Longer See: Realism, science, and Ecology in Japanese Literary Modernism Gregory Golley 2008 Harvard University Press


some books:
Peter Galison Einstein's clocks, Poincare's Maps: Empires of Time 2003 New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2003
Image & Logic: A Material Culture of Microphsics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997

list of world literature

意）艾柯《玫瑰的名字》（《玫瑰之名》）
（法）波伏娃《女宾》（《女客》）
（法）杜拉斯《情人》
（法） 加谬《鼠疫》
（英）多丽丝·莱辛《金色笔记》（《女性的危机》）
（意）卡尔维诺《看不见的城市》（《隐形城市》）
（俄）艾赫马托娃《安魂曲》
（德）聚斯金德《香水》
（美）海明威《永别了，武器》
（新西兰）《曼斯菲尔德小说选》
（美）福克纳《喧哗与骚动》
（哥伦比亚）马尔克斯《百年孤独》
（奥地利）卡夫卡《审判》
（巴西）普依格《蜘蛛女之吻》
（英）奥维尔《1984》
（英）赫胥黎《美丽的新世界》
（日）村上春树《世界尽头与冷酷仙境》
（捷克）米兰·昆德拉《生命中不能承受之轻》（《沉重浮生》）
（英）福尔斯《法国中尉的女人》
（英）伍尔芙《奥兰多》（《美丽佳人奥兰多》）
（瑞士）杜仑马特《法官和他的刽子手》
（美）小库特·冯尼格《猫的摇篮》
（美）约瑟夫·海勒《第二十二条军规》
（英）大卫·洛奇《小世界》

The long Twentieth century: Money, power, and the origins of our time

Giovanni Arrighi London and New York: Verso 1994

P4 More specifically, the starting point of our investigation has been Fernard Braudel's contention that the essential feature of historical capitialism over its longue duree-- that is, over its entire lifetime- has been the "flexibility" and "eclecticism" of capital rather than the concrete forms assumed by the latter at different places and at different times....

p5 It seems to me that these passages can be read as a restatement of Karl Marx's general fomular of captial: MCM'. Money capital (M) means liquidity, flexibility, freedom of choice. Commodity capital (C)means capital invested in a particular input-output combination in view of a profit. Hence, it means concreteness, rigidity, and a narrowing down or closing of options. M' means expanded liquidity, flexibility, and freedom of choice.
...
P6. Marx's general formula of capital (MCM') can therefore be interpreted as depicting not just the logic of individual capitalist investments, but also a recurrent pattern of historical capitalism as world system.The central aspect of this pattern is the alternation of epochs of material expansion (MC phases of capital accumulation) with phases of financial rebirth and expansion (CM'phases).... Together, the two epochs of phases constitute a full systemic cycle of accumulation(MCM').
p6 Four systemic cycles of accumulation will be identified, each characterized by a fundamental unity of the primary agency and structure of world-scale processes of capital accumulation: a Genoese Style, from the fifteenth to the early seventeenth centuries; a Dutch Cycle, from the late sixteenth century through most of the eighteenth century; a British cycle, from the latter half of the eighteenth century through the early twentieth century; and a US cycle, which began in the late nineteenth century and has continued into the current state of financial expansion.

P8 An agency is capitalist in virtue of the fact that its money is endowed with the "power of breading" (Marx's expression) systematically and persistently, regardless of the nature of the particular commodities and activities that are incidentally the medium at any given time. The notion of systemic cycles of accumulation which we have derived from Braudel's historical observation of recurrent financial expansions follows logically from this strictly instrumental relationship of capitalism to the world of trade and production, and emphasizes it. That is to say, financial expansions are taken to be symptomatic of a situation in which the investment of money in the expansion of trade and production no longer serves the purpose of increasing the cash flow to the capitalist stratum as effectively as pure financial deals can. In such a situation, capital invested in trade and production tends to revert to its money form and accumulate more directly, as in Marx's abridged formula MM'.