Meaning Systems

Published in 1970, Expanded Cinema was the first book to capture the explosion of video, computers, and holography as filmmaking technologies, inaugurating media arts as an artistic and scholarly discipline. The introductory essay by R. Buckminster Fuller established an encompassing 1960s countercultural context. The new Introduction of the 50th anniversary edition brings Expanded Cinema into the twenty-first century by exploring the social, cultural, and political implications of today’s expanded cinema technologies.

Exterranean concerns the extraction of stuff from the Earth, a process in which matter goes from being sub- to exterranean. By opening up a rich archive of nonmodern texts and images from across Europe, this work offers a bracing riposte to several critical trends in ecological thought.

By shifting emphasis from emission to extraction, Usher reorients our perspective away from Earthrise-like globes and shows what is gained by opening the planet to depths within. The book thus maps the material and immaterial connections between the Earth from which we extract, the human and nonhuman agents of extraction, and the extracted matter with which we live daily.

Eschewing the self-congratulatory claims of posthumanism, Usher instead elaborates a productive tension between the materially-situated homo of nonmodern humanism and the abstract and aggregated anthropos of the Anthropocene. In dialogue with Michel Serres, Bruno Latour, and other interdisciplinary work in the environmental humanities, Usher shows what premodern material can offer to contemporary theory. Examining textual and visual culture alike, Usher explores works by Ronsard, Montaigne, and Rabelais, early scientific works by Paracelsus and others, as well as objects, engravings, buildings, and the Salt Mines of Wieliczka. Both historicist and speculative in approach, Exterranean lays the groundwork for a comparative ecocriticism that reaches across and untranslates theoretical affordances between periods and languages.

This book contributes to the environmental humanities field by offering an analysis of the Anthropocene fantasy: the idea that the Anthropocene is an opportunity to remake our terrestrial environment thanks to the power of technology. The author argues that the earth always escapes the human desire to remake and master it.

This essay collection further familiarizes the English-speaking world with the work of late German media scholar Friedrich Kittler. It features well-established and emergent scholars who present investigations that traverse all of Kittler’s major phases, from early studies of German romanticism to his recent volumes on ancient Greece.

A witty, philosophically-informed, and openly polemical critique by Barbara Cassin of Google that looks at Google’s claims to organize knowledge, and its alleged ethical basis. This critique goes to the heart of the assumed benefits to humanity of increasingly advanced internet technology.

Human survival requires a reorientation of science away from its exclusive technical and materialist premises focused on control, towards feedback and relational processes of organism-plus-environment. Gregory Bateson’s holistic approach unites culture, communication, psychology, biology and ecology within a single trans-disciplinary enquiry substituting pattern, perceptual difference, and relations for ‘thinginess’ of scientific data.

Earth, Life & System: Evolution and Ecology on a Gaian Planet explores the multiple themes of Lynn Margulis’s science: microbial evolution, ecology and symbiosis, the coupled interactions of environment and life in Gaia theory, and the connections of these newer scientific ideas to cultural and creative productions.

A coherent and practical philosophy of interdependence, drawing on vivid examples from the biological sciences.

This volume designates a shift within posthumanistic media studies, that dissolves the concept of media into a network of operations, that reproduce, process and reflect the distinctions that are fundamental for a given culture, e.g. the anthropological difference, the distinctions between natural object and cultural sign, noise and information, eye and gaze.

Heinz von Foerster was the inventor of second-order cybernetics, which recognizes the investigator as part of the system he is investigating. The Beginning of Heaven and Earth Has No Name provides an accessible, nonmathematical, and comprehensive overview of von Foerster’s cybernetic ideas and of the philosophy latent within them. It distills concepts scattered across the lifework of this scientific polymath and influential interdisciplinarian. At the same time, as a book-length interview, it does justice to von Foerster’s élan as a speaker and improviser, his skill as a raconteur.

Developed from a week-long conversation between the editors and von Foerster near the end of his life, this work playfully engages von Foerster in developing the difference his notion of second-order cybernetics makes for topics ranging from emergence, life, order, and thermodynamics to observation, recursion, cognition, perception, memory, and communication.

The book gives an English-speaking audience a new ease of access to the rich thought and generous spirit of this remarkable and protean thinker.