From Modernism to Postmodernism and Philosophy of Technology

2012 Talks

What Happened to the Big Idea in Music Technology? (with Dave Allen, David Ewald, Rick Moody, Jesse von Doom, and Anthony Batt)
2pm, March 14th, Room 17A
Austin Convention Center
SXSW
Austin, TX

My Books

I was Assistant Editor on Paul D. Miller a.k.a DJ Spooky's Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture, which is available from The MIT Press and fine bookstores all over.

My first book, Follow for Now: Interviews with Friends and Heroes, is an anthology of interviews with all kinds of minds. Disinformation named it "among the most important books published in 2007," and Erik Davis called it "a crisp and substantial remix of the major memes of the last decade or so."

I have a little piece in Disinformation's first book, You Are Being Lied To, a compendium of dissent, which also includes essays by Noam Chomsky, Howard Bloom, Douglas Rushkoff, Howard Zinn, Richard Metzger, Alex Burns, and Mark Pesce, among many others.

Shutter to Think

From Modernism to Postmodernism and Philosophy of Technology

January 15th, 2003 | No Comment | Category: Reviews

In short, that contradictions must be accepted. — David Jones

To unify the thing that is postmodernism might sound futile at the outset, but Lawrence Cahoone’s anthology From Modernism to Postmodernism (Blackwell) sets out to do just that. The very term “postmodernism” is fraught with misconception, misuse, and implies an adherence to fragmentation over unity. Cahoone’s selections combat this by demonstrating postmodernism’s origins, its disparate applications and definitions in different fields, and the ongoing debates about what exactly it all means. From Descartes and Hume to Nietzche and Sartre, and from the post-structuralists (e.g., Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze and Guittari, etc.) to the architects (e.g., Le Corbusier and Robert Venturi), Cahoone’s anthology provides an excellent overview of an inherently fractured lens on the world.

Similarly, Robert C. Scharff and Val Dusek’s anthology of philosophy of technology readings brings together a stellar collection of writers from the origins of the field up to the most current theorists, including Martin Heidegger, Herbert Marcuse, Lewis Mumford, Jacques Ellul, Albert Borgmann, Langdon Winner, Hubert Dreyfus, and Michael Heim, among many others. A personal favorite included here is Pinch and Bijker’s “The Social Construction of Facts and Artifacts,” and our friend Andrew Feenberg revisits technology and democracy in his “Democratic Rationalization: Technology, Power, and Freedom.” Philosophy of Technology is an invaluable collection for anyone interested in how technology is influencing the pursuit of knowledge.

Blackwell publishes many similar and equally essential anthologies. If you’re looking for an excellent starting point, or a supplement to your readings in a certain area, check them out.

Further Posting:

Respond / React:

I marshal the middle between Mathers and McLuhan.

I am currently an Assistant Instructor corrupting the youth at The University of Texas at Austin, where I am also pursuing a Ph.D. in Communication Studies. My main interests are figurative language use and the social impacts of technology. My main goal as a writer is to entertain and as a scientist is to find novelty. I’m more of the former than the latter and more of a fan than a critic. This site is where all of these things play out. It’s where I think aloud about all of the above.

I’m an aging BMX/skateboard 'zine kid. That’s where I learned to turn events and interviews into pages with staples. The pages and staples have long since given way to links and scrollbars, but the rest is basically the same. I still ride bikes, and I still skateboard. I do still commit quite a bit to actual pages, too. Read on »