Research Journal of Brian Holmes

Four Pathways - first results

Submitted by Brian Holmes on Mon, 05/10/2010 - 00:26

The first full seminar of the series "Four Pathways through Chaos" was held in Toronto on May 1-2, under the auspices of the European Graduate School, with about 10 students attending. It was a great success, very interesting! And very directly related to the research into Technopolitics. What I did was to transform the Introduction on methodology and the lectures on Assembly-Line Mass Production into stand-alone PDFs, consisting mainly of quotes from books accompanied by images and transitional comments.

Double Ages

Submitted by Brian Holmes on Wed, 04/07/2010 - 20:38

Why is that each of the Industrial Ages identified by the technological innovation school (Mensch, Perez, Freeman, Soete etc) is marked by major innovations which are not considered to be among the mainstays of the period, but which do play a great role in it, to the point where they leave just as much of a stamp on popular memory as the dominant industrial process of that Age?

Cycles, Waves, Paradigms, Hegemonic Transitions

Submitted by Brian Holmes on Mon, 02/08/2010 - 10:17

The following is an annotated and hyperlinked bibliography, including brief statements on the general problematic and an introduction to each author. Full texts are provided whenever possible. The bibliography is intended as a shared resource, to be enlarged and improved by others as research continues.

Ten Postulates for Technopolitics

Submitted by Brian Holmes on Thu, 01/21/2010 - 10:44
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The point of the technopolitics project is not so much to carry out an original historical analysis of industrial capitalism, but instead, to test and modify the existing theories and then use them for engaged cultural critique. That requires a lot of reading and evaluating of ideas. To get through the existing literature without getting lost along the way, we’ll periodically have to reformulate what we're talking about. Each reformulation will add something, subtract something, forget something; but the essence is to keep on working cooperatively. To that end I want to propose ten postulates. They revisit what has already been written in the programmatic text on technopolitics, but with a different emphasis, mainly in terms of geography, culture and the cumulative nature of historical sequences. They're not set in stone, just some departure points, and it may be that a magical eleventh postulate is needed. Here they are:

Vision in Networks (1)

Submitted by Brian Holmes on Sat, 01/16/2010 - 22:33
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Whether it originates from statistical tabulation or remote sensors, whether it flows in real time or out of recombinant databases, whether it serves the needs of private individuals, globe-spanning corporations or government agencies, information visualization is the operative technology of the networked age, a language of vision for the control society. Infoviz proliferates on the screens of factory workstations, financial trading floors, military commands and surveillance watchspots, everywhere that decisive movements are subject to managerial scrutiny.

Chimerica Persists

Submitted by Brian Holmes on Sat, 12/12/2009 - 12:30
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In 2007 the conservative English historian Niall Ferguson and co-author Moritz Schularick wrote an article entitled 'Chimerica' and the Global Asset Market Boom, in International Finance, 10:3. A new text by Hung Ho-Fung gives a lot more depth to their analysis.

Continental Drift hypothesis - the turning point?

Submitted by Brian Holmes on Mon, 06/22/2009 - 15:52
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About four years ago, after the disastrous US elections in 2004, a group of us meeting at 16 Beaver Street in New York launched the idea of Continental Drift. The hypothesis: a coming "tectonic" shift in the geopolitical system, precipitated by the mismanagement of neoliberal globalization under the Bush-Blair regime. What we saw on the horizon was some kind of collapse of dollar hegemony -- "hegemoney," as Arrighi puts it -- and the rise of a multipolar order, with new possibilities and challenges for grassroots egalitarian movements around the world.

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