1. For a concise review of Ampere's selection of this term, and a partial translation of Ampere's description of its coinage, see Dyson (5–7).
2. For a remarkable history of the origins of the cybernetics group and the Macy Conference meetings, see Heims.
3. See Beers for the history of Project Cyberin.
4. A compelling argument for the significant and wide-ranging influence of cybernetics on mid-century poststructuralist thought can be found in Lafontaine.
5. For an overview of this position and its detractors, see Schiappa.
6. Despite what might seem to be a fairly intuitive connection between rhetoric as a series of feedback-based techniques of persuasion and the variety of forces associated with contemporary technology and new media that also seem to emphasize flexibly-responsive forms of communication and interaction, there has been a surprisingly small amount of work on these similarities. New media scholar and video game designer Ian Bogost, for instance, has recently suggested that procedural rhetoric seems to be a primary technique used in structuring our interactions with video games and software more generally. However, perhaps more common is the perspective suggested by Lev Manovich in his highly influential The Language of New Media, that rhetoric seems to be on the “decline” in post-literate culture because of our tendency to associate it with oral communication, and later, traditional print media (77). For notable exceptions to this trend within rhetorical scholarship, see, in particular, Brooke and Welch for two works that explicitly retrofit ancient rhetorical principles to new media.
1. See Henderson for details.
2. Reported in, among other places, Meek.
3. For coverage see Weiss.
4. The group's preliminary findings were subsequently published in 2005 by the National Research Council as part of the volume Guidelines for Embryonic Stem Cell Research.
5. For coverage of Woolley's death, see Miller.
6. Although media accusations that video games are addictive and/or encourage violent behavior are numerous, the Woolley case reflects recent technoscientific research into the neurology of video gaming. See Koepp for the relationship between video gaming and dopamine.
7. See the coverage in Cass.
8. See also, for instance, Penn's descripton of “psychographic microtargeting” in Clinton's 2006 campaign (145–146). For an overview of microtargeting written during the run-up to the 2008 presidential election, see Svoboda.
9. See, for instance, Discipline (181). “Capacitation,” read as a “rendering capable,” also has the advantage of having extant implications within a variety of discourse that we will encounter below, such as denoting potential action in the life sciences (particularly in relation to reproduction), machine technologies (such as in electronic capacitors), and legal discourse (to qualify or legitimate an individual or a law).
10. See, for example, Critique (387–390).
11. Interestingly enough, as Horgan does not fail to mention early in The End of Science, Gunther Stent was also one of the scientists who participated in the conference at Gustavus Adolphus College that is behind the similarly named collection also under review here.
12. See CBC News for text from Goodyear's proposal.
13. See, in particular, Marx's planned “seventh part” of the first volume of Capital, “Results of the Immediate Process of Production,” included as an appendix in Capital (941–1084).
14. Antonio Ceraso and I have developed this idea more generally around the question of “open source” as a production method; see Ceraso and Pruchnic.
15. For a concise history of neuromarketing and its attendant controversies, see Fisher et al.; for a recent overview by a practitioner, see Lindstrom.
16. For the critical contrast between affect and ideology, in addition to Massumi and Sedgwick, see, for instance, Grossberg (79–108).
17. See Simon, and Marcus, Neuman, and MacKuen.
18. There is much in the history of both contemporary computer science and contemporary affect theory to support such a conclusion. On the one hand, Silvan Tompkins immensely influential work on human affect, as Sedgwick herself notes, emerged from his initial interests in the possibility of simulating human qualities in mechanical realms (see Sedgwick and Frank). On the other side of the equation, much prototypical work in computer science was based around the simulation of human nervous and neural systems activity (see, e.g., Anderson and Rosenfeld).
1. See Derrida, “Letter” (270–271), and Heidegger, Being (41– 49).
2. The comparison below was greatly informed by Crosby (12–19).
3. For instance, according to historian John North, the announcement of such items as curfew times or the close of the public market via the chimes of the famous fourteenth-century clock in the abbey of St. Albans took the place of earlier signals produced manually by bell-wringers (219–220).
4. Deleuze seems to be suggesting something of this idea in stating in that “in Baroque the coupling of material-force is what replaces matter and form” (The Fold 29).
5. To give just two more examples, computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum, whose invention, the the ELIZA natural-language process system, inspired more than a few outsized claims for the viabilty of artificial intelligence in computing environments, subtitled his 1976 critique of this trend “From Judgment to Calculation”; Ian Hacking has emphasized the risk that we may “replace judgment by computation” in overemphasizing the supposed objectivitiy of policy and military actions supported by “decision theory couched in terms of probability” (4).
6. For the Greek case, see, in particular, Nightingale.
7. See de Man (Blindness); Zizek (Parallax); Lyotard, “The Return”; and Levinas, Totality (121–142).
8. As architect Mutsoro Sasaki suggests, referring to his own use of computer-aide design, such techniques allow one “to create unknown but logical structural forms beyond our empirical knowledge” (68–69).
9. Rem Koolhaas, for instance, has remarked on how the Chinese Central Television headquarters building (2002) he helped designed would have been impossible to realize ten years ago, not because of advances in structural materials or design principles, but because of “the sheer time of computing required” to generate the structure's design (qtd. in Anderson).
10. See Habermas, Structural (168–175).
11. See for instance Braudel's survey of “early” world economies (71–88).
12. For early controversies over futures markets see Levy, and Mulherin et al. (620–624).
13. To give just one quick, but important example, consider Marx, surely one of the prime contenders for “first” or prototypical critical theorist. Although we might tend to think of Marx's treatment of ideology as one in which the ideological covering of material life is subjected to critique and thus eliminated, as Althusser emphasizes, for Marx ideology was a necessity for human existence, and this necessity demanded that politically-minded theorists “act on ideology and transform ideology into an instrument of deliberate action on history” (232).
1. Burke's description of the “unending conversation” can be found in The Philosophy of Literary Form (110 –112).
2. See Burke, “Order,” for his discussion of kind/degree differences between humans and animals (171).
3. For an account of first-wave cyberneticists' response and resistance to behaviorism, see Heims (1–13, 201–247).
4. Burke comments on both of these impulses in “Counter-Gridlock”: “That's where the deconstructionist guys are cutting in, on that sort of thing. I want to stay halfway there. Destroy it, yes, if you will. But first let us see it as having the form it does, with its particular kind of beginning, middle, and end” (22).
5. Of course, Burke does provide prescription in the “Program” essay of Counter-Statement (although he would later advise that this essay is effective only if not taken “literally”). Hicks famously condemned this aspect of the book as well, arguing that “it merely describes the social attitudes of a man who is principally interested in technique.”
6. Burke outlines his hypothesis concerning the decline of formal interest in rhetoric in the conclusion to his “Lexicon Rhetorica” (Counter-Statement, 210–213), attributing the “revolt” against rhetoric as the unfortunate side-effect of a more specific resistance to the ceremonious, and associating the return of rhetoric with a renewed interest in reconsidering aesthetics and persuasion as discourses aimed at producing particular effects rather than transmitting knowledge or information.
7. Burke quotes from both an 1852 letter to Louise Colet (The Letters of Gustave Flaubert, 1830–1857, 154–155) and an 1876 letter to George Sand (The Letters of Gustave Flaubert, 1857–1880, 232–233).
8. One could, of course, productively contrast Massumi's satirical take on this reductive definition with Burke's own exhaustively extended “Definition of Man.”
9. See Worsham for nuanced accounts of this conception.
10. See Ballif (153–194) and Davis (21–115) for examples of the former movement.
11. Burke refers to Bergson and Nietzsche as practitioners of “perspectivism” in the afterword to Permanence and Change (311).
1. The duo's press releases were previously available at the now inactive home-lessweek.com site.
2. Weeks' former site, droppingbombsonyourmom.com, is currently inactive.
3. See also Galloway for a similar analysis that uses the network configuations of the Internet as a synecdoche for power in network society.
4. Of course, the homeless can—and certainly have been—disciplined in a Fou-cauldian sense. For example, a large portion of Mike Davis' City of Quartz is devoted to detailing ways in which the homeless in Los Angeles have been corralled to disparate sites of confinement through various attraction and repulsion mechanisms.
5. This is not to suggest that the homeless and poor do not participate in capitalism as consumers. As Deleuze and Guattari (drawing on the work of Baran and Sweezy) explain in Anti-Oedipus, “What on the contrary is called the co-opting power of capitalism can be explained by the fact that its axiomatic is not more flexible, but wider and more englobing. In such a system no one escapes participation in the activity of antiproduction that drives the entire productive system” (236). Though the impoverished may not be considered “good” consumers in certain economic formulations—as their power of choice is certainly diminished—they certainly at the very least participate in antiproduction through the benefices of various governmental and nongovernmental agencies.
6. Deleuze writes that “Burroughs was the first to address” this new formation (“Control” 174) and that “Control” was the title “proposed by Burroughs to characterize the new monster” that is control society (“Postscript” 178).
7. Here I refer to Deleuze's oft-noted tendency to produce creative interpretations of other canonical thinkers works as seen, for instance, in his extended studies of such figures as Nietzsche, Foucault, Spinoza, and Bergson.
8. Foucault makes his critique of ideology as a critical concept clear in the interview “Truth and Power,” highlighting the “longing for a form of power innocent of all coercion, discipline, and normalization” he finds to be implicit in its use in analyzing culture (117).
9. One of the most influential, Foucault-inspired strategies of this kind is, of course, Judith Butler's suggestion of methods for “subverting” gender identities in Gender Trouble (see, in particular 171–190).
10. See, for instance, Barthes, “Rhetoric of the Image,” and Williams, “Advertising: The Magic System.”
11. Consider, for instance a contemporary marketing text chosen more or less at random: Andreas Buchholz and Wolfram Wördemann's What Makes Wining Brands Different? This book contains a chapter titled “Perceptions & Programs,” a title that of course would not be out of place in What Is Philosophy? One of the fi ve strategies outlined is this chapters is “Inverting a Negative,” which asks the reader to consider, “Are the weaknesses consumers perceive in your brand really weaknesses? Are the strengths they perceive in your competitor's product really strengths? You can turn a perceive liability of your brand into an asset by changing the consumer's perception. The converse is true when it comes to effectively fending of competitors” (76). This is, of course, the sophistic rhetorical tactic of “making the weaker argument the stronger.”
12. Agamben, “Bartleby, or On Contingency,” The Coming Community (37), Homo Sacer (48), and Idea of Prose (65, 78); Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster (17); Derrida, The Gift of Death (65); Hardt and Negri, Empire (203–204); and Zizek, “Notes” and The Parallax View (375–383). Deleuze's own reading of “Bartleby” can be found in Deleuze, “Bartleby; or, The Formula.”
1. See Cohan and Sweet for estimates.
2. See also Steiner and Kurke.
3. For examples of the recuperation of the sophists as neo-relativists or “proto-postmodernists,” see, for instance, Vitanza (particularly 27–55), Ballif, and McComiskey. For examples of the relatively rarer works that take up the Sophists as moral philosophers, see Bett and McKirahan (353–389)
4. Indeed, Nietzche would echo more or less all of Callicles' critiques, arguing in “Homer's Contest” that Socrates' indulgence in rhetoric against the sophists is primarily done in order to proclaim superiority over them, “his finally being able to say ‘Look: I, too can do what my great rivals do; yes, I can do it better than them’” (179); Nietzsche will also indict the “disrespect and superiority” implicit in Socrates' condemnation of the popular in The Birth of Tragedy (66).
5. Again, Badiou is the exception, given his explicit commitment to Plato's views on the role of philosophy and the importance of pursuing “truth” and “thought” as categories (see, e.g., Badiou and Hallward 119–120).
6. Recall, for instance, how in one of the “founding texts” of critical theory, Adorno gets the endeavor off of the ground via a rejection of “that question which today is called radical and which is really the least radical of all: the question of being (Sein) itself” (“Actuality” 121).
7. These examples found, among other places, in Zizek, Sublime (116–118), Fragile (151–160), and Ticklish (382–292).
8. Derrida's formal consideration of Marx's theories of commodification and the relation between commodity fetishism and religious fetishism and messianism in Spectres of Marx also in many ways forms the segue to his late work on ethics and justice. See Spectres (186–210).
9. As Strathausen writes, those taking part in what he calls neo-left ontology share an emphasis on imagining the “historically contingent construction of a different ‘nature’ from the one we presently inhabit” (19).
10. For Derrida on “messianic time” see Spectres (61–95). For the “future to come” (l'a-venir) see, for instance, Archive Fever (68). For “democracy to come,” Politics (232–233).
11. Despite his subsequent association with a creative design think-tank and other religiously-inclined organizations, in The Physics of Immortality, Tipler suggests he should be best considered “an atheist” at present because his work suggests only that a something fulfilling the criteria of “God” does not yet exist and his predictions that something like this will occur have not been definitively proven (305–306).
12. Notable in this regard is the work of Robert Ettinger, who as the “inventor” of cryonics could be claimed to be the first in such a series. His mid-′60s and mid-′70s works The Prospect of Immortality and Man Into Superman show a consistent interest in questions of ethics and sociopolitical crises. For a more contemporary iteration see, in addition to Kurzweil, Aubrey de Grey's “Life Extension, Human Rights, and the Rational Refinement of Repugnance.”
13. For a particularly prominent example of the former, see Agamben, Homo Sacer, for the latter, see Hardt and Negri, Empire (22–41).
14. Or, as Nealon states it more directly, what Heidegger seems to be arguing in this case is that the “essence of techne, in other words, is poesis” (Alterity 98).
15. Nealon, in writing about the general problem of the “examplary” in (post) postmodern culture has emphasized the strangeness of Jameson failing to mention that the Van Gogh painting referred to by Heidegger is itself part of a larger series of similar works by the artist (Alterity 100–109).
16. To give one more example, the Unicef Tap Project® is a campaign in which participating restaurants sell a glass of (usually complimentary) tap water to customer for $1; this water is typically served in special glass that advertises the patron's contribution and the money is devoted to improving international access to clean water by impoverished communities.
17. For coverage, see Applebaum.
18. See A. Denny Ellerman's study Pricing Carbon.
19. For an example of the latter view, see Rasch (146–147).
20. The Complimentary Currency Resource Center currently houses a database of worldwide local exchange trading systems on their website.