<nettime> Short bibliography on analytical/digital thinking vis-a-vis semiotics.

[Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>]

Short bibliography on analytical/digital thinking vis-a-vis semiotics.


Most of this material is fairly old; use with care! The concepts are
there, hovering in the background, however.

Barthes, Roland, Elements of Semiology, Noonday, 1967. As with S/Z a 'lit-
erary' semiotics, not so useful epistemologically, but phenomenologically
of great value.

Barthes, Roland, S/Z, Hill and Wang, 1974. On literary codes, of some use.
As with Elements of Semiology, the definitions are largely philosophical,
somewhat inexact, but more than useful in considerations of the lifeworld.
(See The Fashion System as well.)

Bateson, Gregory, and Mead, Margaret, Balinese Character: A Photographic
Analysis, New York Academy of Sciences, 1962 (1942). Sign/psychoanalytics/
culture/signifiers/rites/rituals. A seminal work.

Bateson, Gregory, Gregory Bateson's Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity,
Bantam, 1980. I find Bateson fun, frustrating, useful. Good material on
hierarchy, logical types, analog/digital, etc.

Bateson, Gregory, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Ballantine, 1972. Equally
frustrating, fun, and useful. Much on the epistemology of cybernetics,
coding, redundancy, etc.

Bruck, R. Hubert, A Survey of Binary Systems, Springer-Verlag, 1966. Like
the Piaget volume, analysis and classification of binary relations, from
groupoids on.

Colapietro, Vincent, Glossary of Semiotics, Paragon, 1993. Succinct defin-
itions, glossary, useful as a beginning.

Eco, Umberto, A Theory of Semiotics, Indiana, 1976. Probably the most use-
ful work on code, language, sign production.

Gardenfors, Peter, Conceptual Spaces: The Geometry of Thought, MIT, 2000.
Material on Semantics, properties, Voronoi tessellations, and other
material incredibly useful.

Kristeva, Julia, Le texte du roman, Mouton, 1970. Literary semanalyse,
covers actants, operators of recit, etc.

Kristeva, Julia, Rey-Debove, Josette, and Uniker, Donna, editors, Essays
in Semiotics / Essais de Semiotique, Mouton, 1971. Essays by Todorov,
Sebeok, Birdwhistle, Genette, Hymes, Metz, Pontalis, von Bertanlanffy,
Guiraud, Derrida, Lotman, Kristeva, and others. Extremely useful.

Piaget, Jean, Essai de Logique Operatoire, Dunod, 1971. Valuable book on
the fundamental processes of propositional logic etc, and its relationship
to trellises, processes, etc.

Ruesch, Jurgen, Semiotic Approaches to Human Relations, Mouton, 1972. I
find this oddly useful; it presents a theory of communication, analysis of
rules, etc., all from a psychoanalytical / semiotic position.

Ruesch, Jurgen, and Bateson, Gregory, Communication: The Social Matrix of
Psychiatry, Norton, 1968 (1951). An early work by both, including a chap-
ter by Bateson on 'Information and Codification.'

Schreider, Ju. A., Equality, Resemblance, and Order, Mir, 1975. An amazing
book on order, equivalence, tolerance, 'General Concept of a Text.' This
book should be much better known; it was published in Moscow and might be
hard to find today.

Sebeok, Thomas, and Ramsay, Alexandra, editors, Approaches to Animal Com-
munication, Mouton, 1969. Essays by Sebeok, Bateson, Moles, Carpenter,
etc. Outdated of course (like many of the books here) but valuable for the
approach.

Simon, Herbert A., The Sciences of the Artificial, MIT, 1969. Development
of the idea of nearly-decomposable hierarchies.

Sondheim, Alan, The Structure of Reality, NSCAD and Williams College, 1977
(bound xerox). Coming to grips with structure, transformation, 'immersive'
and 'experiential' hierarchies, etc.

The Way Things Work Book of the Computer: An Illustrated Encyclopedia of
Information Science, Cybernetics, and Data Processing, Simon and Schuster,
1974, from the original 1969 German edition. This is very little about
computers and a great deal about information, processing, and so forth.
Heavily illustrated and a fun/useful read.

Thom, Rene, Modeles mathematiques de la morphogenese, Inedit, 1974. Addi-
tional essays on catastrophe theory, including material on linguistics.

Thom, Rene, Paraboles et Catastrophes, Flammarion, 1980. Interviews with
Thom on science, catastrophe, epistemology, philosophy. A follow-up to the
other work.

Thom, Rene, Structural Stability and Morphogenesis: An Outline of a Gener-
al Theory of Models, Benjamin, 1975. What, today, is most of use here is
the section "From Animal to Man: Thought and Language" which develops a
fundamental morphology of language/behavior, stemming from his 'elemen-
tary' catastrophes.

Waddington, C. H., editor, Towards a Theoretical Biology, 4 volumes,
Aldine, International Union of Biological Sciences, 1968. A seminal col-
lection that appeared over several years; contributors include Waddington,
Bateson, Thom, Pattee, etc. While Waddington's chreod theory is somewhat
discredited, it had a great influence on Thom. These books exist at the
intersection of biology, cybernetics, fledgling computer science and
cognitive science.

Wark, McKenzie, A Hacker Manifesto, Harvard, 2004. Information/production/
property/class/etc. I've found this valuable in its relation to both Marx
and abstraction.

Werner, Heinz, and Kaplan, Bernard, Symbol Formation: An Organismic-Devel-
opmental Approach to Language and the Expression of Thought, Wiley, 1963.
Another early but extremely relevant book. The phenomenology of language,
visual sign, etc. In other words, a philosophical approach to specificity
from a broadened psychology.

Wiener, Norbert, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal
and the Machine, MIT, 1948 (first edition). The classic of cybernetics,
with material on information, society, self-organizing systems, and a
great deal of mathematics.

Wiener, Norbert, The Human Use of Human Beings, Cybernetics and Society,
Anchor, 1950/54. Philosophical and social implications of cybernetics.

Wilden, Anthony, System and Structure: Essays in Communication and Ex-
change, 2nd edition, Tavistock, 1980. Contains just about the only
detailed analysis of analog and digital orders. Wilden is an early
interpreter of Lacan.

Wolfram, Stephen, A New Kind of Science, Wolfram Media, 2002. What is
ultimately a radically new way of thinking through the real of fundamental
physics and the discrete.


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