Copyright © 2010–2015 All rights reserved. Jonathan Bennett [Brackets] enclose editorial explanations. Small ·dots· enclose material that has been added, but can be read as though it were part of the original text. Occasional •bullets, and also indenting of passages that are not quotations, are meant as aids to grasping the structure of a sentence or a thought. Every four-point ellipsis . . . . indicates the omission of a brief passage that seems to present more difficulty than it is (...) worth. (shrink)

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1979.

This article examines the financial technology of derivatives. Derivatives are financial products whose values are based on possible fluctuations in the values of underlying assets. Hence derivatives markets are markets that trade in the risks of other markets. In order for derivatives markets to function, forms of prognostication that can assess the possible future fluctuations of the underlying markets are necessary. What such prognostications do, the article argues, is to create information out of future possibilities. Building upon a notion of (...) virtuality derived from Gilles Deleuze, Ulrich Beck and Niklas Luhmann, the article shows how market risks and uncertainties, by means of prognostications, cease to be mere possibilities and instead come to have virtual existence. Through the technology of derivatives, uncertainty and risk can be rendered virtual and be traded. The article suggests that this technology is an example of a new way in which capitalism is now expanding self-referentially as it creates markets out of markets; and of how it is colonizing the future by developing new technologies for ‘hyper-speculation’, that is, speculation not in the possible developments of a given asset but simply in the risk of such speculation. (shrink)

This article analyses a specific piece of computer code, the Linux operating system kernel, as an example of how technical operationality figures in contemporary culture. The analysis works at two levels. First of all, it attempts to account for the increasing visibility and significance of code or software-related events. Second, it seeks to extend familiar concepts of performativity to include cultural processes in which the creation of meaning is not central, and in which processes of circulation play a primary role. (...) The analysis concentrates on the practices and patterns of circulation of Linux through versions, distributions, clones and reconfigurations. It argues that technical ‘culture-objects’ such as Linux take on a social existence within contemporary technological cultures because of the authorizing contexts in which the reading, writing and execution of code occur. The ‘force’ or performance of certain technical objects, their operationality, can be understood more as the stabilized nexus of diverse social practices, rules and personae than as a formal property of the objects themselves. (shrink)

A received criticism of information is that it is an instrumentalization of knowledge. This article questions the conditions for such a critique. Examining developmental systems theory, biology and social sciences, it argues that information is a situated event; that it is intrinsic to the development and structuring of mnemic organization at a number of levels; and that such developmental systems are epigenetically constituted. This concept of information leads to: a critique of the statistical-quantitative determination of information that is put forward (...) as its mathematical theorization; a review of characterizations of ‘information societies’; and comprehending instrumentalization as a variant of the event of information at the specific level of the constitution of the human understood as an anthropotechnical complex. (shrink)

This book demonstrates how and why vitalism—the idea that life cannot be explained by the principles of mechanism—matters now. Vitalism resists closure and reductionism in the life sciences while simultaneously addressing the object of life itself. The aim of this collection is to consider the questions that vitalism makes it possible to ask: questions about the role and status of life across the sciences, social sciences, and humanities and questions about contingency, indeterminacy, relationality and change. All have special importance now, (...) as the concepts of complexity, artificial life and artificial intelligence, information theory, and cybernetics become increasingly significant in more and more fields of activity. (shrink)