Technopolitics

The housing-price collapse of 2008, the credit crunch, the bank failures, the downswing of the world economy, the fiscal crisis of the sovereign states, all have been expressed as wild gyrations in the global circulation of information, attention, emotion. Everything undergoes tremendous acceleration at the crucial moments, before the wave recedes into a blur.

These are attempts to create a narrative image of the four fields during a specific period (Fordism in this case), to be used as visual supports for a lecture.
The animated gif doesn't seem to work unless you click on the attachment.

Actually I wanted this to fit into the Book of "Narratives" just as a kind of note or whatever, but I don't quite know how to do it....

Diagram: Research Matrix Technopolitics; the terms slightly deviate from the outline for reasons of length and readability

At the beginning of the 1990s, the proclaimed crisis of the city marked a general crisis of governance: the discussion about the supposed “decline of cities” was characterised by a controversial debate about a possible loss of control. Paradoxically, all hopes have been pinned on those technologies that were held accountable for the dissolution of the urban space. That’s because, as in similar techno-utopias before, cyberspace was considered to be constructable and, therefore, controllable.

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.

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?

Excerpted from: The Economics of Industrial Innovation, 3rd Edition, by Chris Freeman and Luc Soete (MIT Press, 1997), table 3.5, pp. 65-67.

This article presents a review, summary and notes on Über Marx hinaus Arbeitsgeschichte und Arbeitsbegriff in der Konfrontation mit den globalen Arbeitsverhältnissen des 21. Jahrhunderts. Edited by Marcel van der Linden and Karl Heinz Roth, this book combines many heterodox thinkers of the left, who had a close engagement with Marx, but are convinced now that we need to go beyond Marx for a number of reasons. This carefully edited volume makes a very interesting contribution to the history and present of labour and deserves to receive enough attention so that it gets translated as a whole or some of the pieces in it.

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.