Book Review - Transductions: Bodies and Machines at Speed

[Henry Secularpeturbations]

--- John Bailey <jbailey at theage.fairfax.com.au> wrote:
> (this review drops a bunch of stuff which seems of
> great interest to
> Pynchon, or at least crops up in his novels with
> regularity)

> 
> Mackenzie, Adrian (2002) Transductions: bodies and
> machines at speed.
> London and New York: Continuum.
> 
> By Chris Chesher (c.chesher at unsw.edu.au)
> Originally written for *Poststructuralism and
> radical politics* --
> http://homepages.gold.ac.uk/psrpsg/index.html
> January 2003
 
> What’s the difference between a hand-axe and a
> thermonuclear bomb?

Thanks John, intersting, but  it sounds like old stuff
dressed up with some new fancy language and an odd
mixture of ideas. 

Wonder why he chose the hand-axe and not the Hammer.
The hammer is the tool traditionally used in this
debate/discussion. 



And how could a historian of technics fail to
recognize the operation of technics within  history? 

That's an absured calim. 

His onto-language game is silly too. It's not ontic?
Come now, it's Platonic coming into being. 

Can a computer play chess? 

NO! It can not play chess. A computer does not defeat
a man at chess. A few men and women with the aid of a
computer defeat a man without the aid of a calculating
machine. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/21/science/21CHES.html


Technology is entirely
> imbricated with historical
> transformations in language, society and culture.


Of course it is.  This has been obvious since the day
Cane killed Able. We now call call sending a  letter
by postal mail, "snail mail."  Technics are entirely
inbricated in human history, language, culture,
society. To be human is to  be technological. We are
tool, machine-tool, and machine makers. And all
technologies introduced change the world, change our
language, our society, our culture, how we think and
what we think about.  But techics is not something 
un-human. It's as human as wiping your ass. Go into
the woods naked and live for a week without techics. 
Bet you can't do it w/o making a tool. Why should you?
Why walk aroud with crap in your crack when you can
grab a hunk of grass and wipe? 

Shall I project a world? Reflect upon it? Break the
glass? It's easy to see how glass changed our world.
But, Alice, how did it alter our concept of the self?
Ah, Richard II with his looking glass, Hamlet with
his, Joyce with his broken glass, echo, LP and his
camera, Narcissus.  Ah, death looking back. Polish
your lense, Spinoza, and smile for Rembrandt. 


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