Star, S.L. and Ruhleder, K. (1994) ‘Steps Towards an Ecology of Infrastructure: Complex Problems in Design and Access for Large-Scale Collaborative Systems’, Proceedings of the 1994 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, pp. 253–264.

Star and Ruhleder’s “Steps Towards an Ecology of Infrastructure” argues that infrastructure should not be understood as a neutral substrate beneath social or technical activity, but as a relational, contextual and politically saturated ecology that becomes visible when systems fail, exclude or demand translation across communities. Through the case of the Worm Community System, a collaborative software environment designed for geographically dispersed geneticists studying C. elegans, the article shows that even technically successful systems can encounter deep problems of access, uptake and use when designers mistake installation, connectivity and training for merely technical matters. Its central contribution is the claim that infrastructure is always relational: what appears simple to developers, such as downloading files, using UNIX or configuring X Windows, may become a complex organisational problem for biologists whose laboratories, funding, equipment, disciplinary habits and support networks differ radically. The authors develop Bateson’s levels of learning to distinguish between first-level resource problems, second-level contextual clashes and third-level political or epistemic disputes involving standards, trust, collaboration, competition and disciplinary identity. The Worm Community System becomes a case study in infrastructural double binds: a tool intended to democratise access may reinforce inequality when richer laboratories, stronger technical cultures and better institutional support make participation easier. Ultimately, Star and Ruhleder conclude that collaborative systems must be designed through an ecological understanding of work, where technical architecture, local practice, tacit knowledge, institutional power and community norms are treated as inseparable. Their argument remains decisive because it shifts infrastructure from background to foreground, revealing it as the negotiated condition through which knowledge work becomes possible, fragile or inaccessible.

Sutherland, T. (2017) ‘Making a Killing: On Race, Ritual, and (Re)Membering in Digital Culture’, Preservation, Digital Technology & Culture, 46(1), pp. 32–40.

Sutherland’s “Making a Killing” examines the circulation of digital records of Black death in the United States as a profoundly racialised problem of evidence, mourning, memory and commodification. The essay argues that cellphone videos, social media posts and online images documenting the deaths of Black Americans do not merely expose violence; they also reproduce traumatic spectacles within digital economies that profit from repetition, visibility and spectatorship. Drawing on critical race theory, performance studies, archival studies and digital culture studies, Sutherland frames Black bodies as both records and evidence, showing how viral images of deaths such as those of Alton Sterling, Philando Castile and Michael Brown transform rituals of grief into endlessly replayable digital events. Her discussion of lynching photography, Emmett Till, Henrietta Lacks and contemporary social media memorials demonstrates that the visualisation of Black suffering has long oscillated between bearing witness and exploitation. The central case of Michael Brown is especially powerful: his body, left in the street and repeatedly photographed, became part of a digital mourning ritual that galvanised protest while also reinscribing racial trauma through circulation, searchability and algorithmic persistence. Sutherland therefore identifies a crucial tension between memorialisation and commodification, asking who controls the digital afterlives of those whose lives have been stolen. Ultimately, the essay concludes that digital culture’s apparent permanence complicates any simple appeal to visibility or the “right to be forgotten”, because the same images that can support resistance may also intensify white supremacist spectacle. Its decisive contribution lies in insisting that ethical digital memory must centre ritual, consent, context and care rather than treating Black death as infinitely shareable content.

Mattern, S.C. (2022) Curriculum Vitae. New York: The New School.

Shannon Christine Mattern’s work can be understood as a sustained critique of computational reductionism in contemporary media, urbanism and knowledge infrastructures. Across her scholarship, teaching and public writing, she develops an intellectual programme that treats cities, libraries, archives, maps, dashboards, databases, furniture, soundscapes and maintenance systems not as neutral technical supports, but as culturally embedded forms through which societies organise perception, authority, memory and care. Her books, including The New Downtown Library, Deep Mapping the Media City, Code and Clay, Data and Dirt and A City Is Not a Computer, trace a consistent movement from media architecture and public knowledge spaces towards a broader anthropology of infrastructure, showing how urban intelligence has always exceeded the algorithmic fantasies of smart-city discourse. The recurring argument is that infrastructures are material and symbolic at once: they are composed of cables, shelves, sensors, screens, desks, archives and streets, yet they also encode values, exclusions, habits and political imaginaries. Her case-based attention to public libraries, urban dashboards, media archaeology, maintenance, care, mapping and sonic environments demonstrates that meaningful civic knowledge cannot be reduced to data extraction or optimisation. Rather, urban and informational systems require interpretative, historical and sensory forms of intelligence capable of recognising ambiguity, locality and embodied experience. Ultimately, Mattern’s corpus offers a powerful defence of plural urban knowledge, insisting that democratic infrastructure depends not on making cities behave like computers, but on cultivating institutions, practices and media ecologies that sustain public life, collective memory and ethical forms of coexistence.

 

Borgman, C.L. (2015) Big Data, Little Data, No Data: Scholarship in the Networked World. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Borgman’s Big Data, Little Data, No Data contends that the central problem of networked scholarship is not simply the accumulation of ever larger datasets, but the contested status, meaning and preservation of data across heterogeneous research cultures. Against the celebratory rhetoric of “big data”, Borgman argues that data acquire value only through use, interpretation and context; they are not self-evident objects, but representations of observations, artefacts or phenomena mobilised as evidence within particular scholarly practices. The book therefore distinguishes between big data, little data and no data in order to show that scale alone cannot determine intellectual significance: small, local, carefully curated datasets may be more valuable than vast but poorly documented collections, while “no data” may result from absence, inaccessibility, embargo, proprietary control, technical decay or inadequate curation. Its case-study logic across astronomy, sensor-networked science, social sciences, classical art, archaeology and Buddhist studies demonstrates that data practices depend upon disciplinary norms, instruments, metadata, provenance, ethics, property rights and incentives. Astronomy, for instance, shows how long-term standards and archives make centuries of observations interoperable, whereas humanities materials often resist standardisation because their evidential force depends upon context, interpretation and material specificity. Ultimately, Borgman’s argument is that sustainable scholarship requires robust knowledge infrastructures capable of supporting discovery, attribution, reuse and preservation, while recognising that data are simultaneously assets, liabilities and scholarly acts. The decisive conclusion is that future research policy must move beyond generic mandates for openness and instead address the diversity of data practices, values and responsibilities that shape what can be known, shared and kept.

Bush, V. (1945) ‘As We May Think’, The Atlantic Monthly, July.

Bush’s “As We May Think” proposes that the post-war vocation of science should move from the multiplication of destructive force towards the refinement of intellectual instruments capable of organising humanity’s expanding record of knowledge. Written against the background of wartime scientific mobilisation, the essay argues that civilisation is increasingly threatened not by a shortage of information but by the inadequacy of its methods for storing, selecting and retrieving it. Bush’s central claim is that inherited systems of classification are too rigid because they depend upon artificial alphabetical or numerical indexing, whereas the human mind works through association, moving from one idea to another by intricate trails of relevance. His imagined solution, the memex, is a private mechanised library in which books, records, notes, images and communications could be compressed through microfilm, rapidly consulted on screens, annotated, and, most importantly, linked into durable trails. The illustrative case of the scholar studying the Turkish bow demonstrates how knowledge would no longer be encountered as isolated documents, but as a navigable web of connections, side paths and interpretative sequences. This anticipates later hypertextual and digital knowledge systems by treating memory not as passive storage but as an active architecture of retrieval, recombination and shared intellectual labour. Ultimately, Bush concludes that science must help humanity wield its collective record wisely, for only through better instruments of selection can modern civilisation avoid being paralysed by the very abundance of knowledge it has produced.

Varela, F.J., Thompson, E. and Rosch, E. (1991) The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Varela, Thompson and Rosch’s The Embodied Mind challenges classical cognitive science by arguing that cognition cannot be understood as abstract information processing detached from lived experience. The book develops a dialogue between cognitive science, phenomenology and Buddhist meditative psychology in order to show that mind is enacted through the dynamic relation between body, world and practice. Its central claim is that cognition is not the representation of a pre-given external reality by an isolated inner subject, but an embodied activity arising from sensorimotor engagement, affective orientation and situated action. A key case is perception: seeing is not passive reception of data, but an active process shaped by bodily capacities, environmental affordances and histories of attention. This makes the book one of the early major statements of the embodied cognition approach, later central to debates in cognitive science and philosophy of mind. Its originality lies in refusing both reductionist neuroscience and purely introspective accounts of experience; instead, it seeks a disciplined encounter between first-person practice and scientific explanation. The conclusion is that mind must be studied as embodied, enacted and relational, because cognition emerges through lived coupling rather than detached computation. Human experience is therefore not an obstacle to science, but a necessary dimension of cognition itself.

 

Bowker, G.C., Timmermans, S., Clarke, A.E. and Balka, E. (eds.) (2016) Boundary Objects and Beyond: Working with Leigh Star. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Boundary Objects and Beyond presents Susan Leigh Star’s work as a decisive contribution to science and technology studies, especially through her analysis of infrastructure, marginality and boundary objects. The concept of the boundary object describes forms, tools, classifications or representations that can be shared across different social worlds while remaining flexible enough to carry different meanings for each group. This makes the concept especially useful for understanding collaboration without assuming consensus. The volume, edited by Bowker, Timmermans, Clarke and Balka, collects Star’s writings alongside essays by colleagues, showing how her work transformed the study of classification systems, invisible labour and infrastructural politics. A central case is scientific cooperation: researchers, administrators, technicians and institutions may all use the same object—a form, database, map, specimen or protocol—while interpreting it according to divergent local needs. Rather than seeing this ambiguity as failure, Star shows that such plasticity often makes cooperation possible. The book’s broader force lies in demonstrating that infrastructure is not merely technical support; it is a social and ethical arrangement that distributes visibility, authority and exclusion. Its conclusion is that knowledge depends on boundary objects capable of holding together heterogeneous communities without erasing difference, and on infrastructure that must be studied from the standpoint of those who maintain, inhabit or are marginalised by it.

Innis, H.A. (1950) Empire and Communications. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Innis’s Empire and Communications offers a foundational theory of media power by arguing that empires rise, stabilise and decline according to the dominant communication technologies through which they organise space, time and authority. His central concept is the “bias” of communication: durable media such as stone, clay and parchment favour continuity, tradition and temporal endurance, whereas lighter and more transportable media such as papyrus and paper favour administration, territorial expansion and spatial control. This framework allows Innis to reinterpret imperial history as a struggle between media forms, institutions and monopolies of knowledge. A revealing case is Rome, whose capacity to govern large territories depended upon transportable writing systems and administrative communication; yet the same spatial expansion also intensified bureaucratic fragility. Innis’s argument remains powerful because it refuses to treat communication as a mere instrument of politics; communication is the material condition through which political order becomes possible. The book therefore anticipates later media theory by showing that every civilisation rests upon a fragile equilibrium between memory and extension, tradition and administration, continuity and acceleration. Its conclusion is that imperial power depends on media bias, but also risks collapse when one bias becomes excessive. Communication, for Innis, is never innocent transmission; it is the architecture of empire itself.

Bowker, G.C. (2005) Memory Practices in the Sciences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Bowker’s Memory Practices in the Sciences argues that scientific knowledge is inseparable from the media, archives, classifications and infrastructures through which it remembers its own past. Rather than treating memory as simple retention, Bowker shows that scientific memory is actively produced: traces are selected, formatted, indexed, standardised, lost and later reactivated through changing information systems. The book examines how, over roughly two centuries, information technology has converged with the production of scientific knowledge, moving across historical regimes such as geology, cybernetics and biodiversity databases. Its central insight is that what science can claim to know depends partly on how it stores, retrieves and organises evidence; the archive is therefore not neutral background but an epistemic machine. A key case is the digital database, which promises unprecedented preservation while also producing new forms of forgetting, because what cannot be encoded, classified or linked may disappear from future knowledge. Bowker’s argument is especially valuable for contemporary research because it reveals memory as infrastructural labour rather than passive accumulation. The conclusion is that scientific objectivity requires attention not only to facts, but to the systems that decide which facts remain available, comparable and reusable. In this sense, science is sustained by infrastructure as much as by theory.

Attali, J. (1985) Noise: The Political Economy of Music. Translated by B. Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Attali’s Noise frames music not as ornamental culture but as a privileged site where political economy becomes audible before it becomes fully visible. Against the conventional treatment of music as autonomous art, he argues that sound is a mode of social organisation, a technology of order, and a prophecy of future economic forms. The opening chapter, “Listening”, establishes this method by insisting that noise is never merely acoustic disturbance: it is a sign of conflict, excess, danger and transformation, because every society must decide which sounds are authorised, regulated, commodified or silenced. Music therefore operates as both mirror and anticipation; it reflects existing power relations while prefiguring new regimes of production, exchange and control. Attali’s case of the musician is especially revealing. Across historical forms, the musician appears ambiguously as priest, entertainer, servant, commodity-producer and prophet, occupying a marginal but structurally decisive position because societies use music to channel violence, organise ritual, distribute pleasure and stabilise collective identity. In the visible pages of the uploaded text, Attali distinguishes major historical logics—sacrificing, representing, repeating and composing—through which music moves from ritual function to spectacle, then to mechanical reproduction and finally towards new forms of creative practice. The decisive argument is that noise marks the boundary where order encounters what it cannot yet absorb. When power captures sound, it converts it into code, property, entertainment or surveillance; when sound exceeds capture, it announces possible social mutation. Music is thus not secondary to economics but one of its laboratories. Attali concludes, in effect, that to listen politically is to hear the future struggling inside the present: every organisation of sound reveals a model of society, and every disturbance discloses the fragile architecture of power.

Haraway, D. (1988) ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’, Feminist Studies, 14(3), pp. 575–599.

Haraway’s “Situated Knowledges” intervenes in feminist debates about science by rejecting both disembodied objectivity and total relativism, arguing instead for a rigorous epistemology of partial, accountable, embodied vision. Her critique begins from the recognition that conventional scientific objectivity often performs what she calls the “god trick”: the fantasy of seeing everything from nowhere, an unmarked and irresponsible position historically aligned with masculinist, colonial, militarised and technoscientific power. Yet Haraway refuses the opposite temptation of claiming that all knowledge is merely rhetoric, construction or power-play, because feminism still needs faithful accounts of a real world in order to contest domination and build liveable futures. Her solution is situated knowledge, a form of objectivity grounded in location, embodiment, mediation and responsibility. Vision becomes her central case: scientific seeing is never passive or innocent, whether through eyes, microscopes, satellites, cameras or scanners; every apparatus organises the world through specific material-semiotic practices. This does not invalidate knowledge, but makes it answerable. Haraway’s strongest example is feminist science’s treatment of bodies and biological sex: rather than reducing bodies to inert matter or blank surfaces for social inscription, she insists that objects of knowledge must be understood as actors, agents and “material-semiotic” participants in knowledge production. The world neither speaks itself transparently nor disappears beneath human interpretation; it responds, resists, surprises and enters into non-innocent conversation with knowers. Thus, objectivity becomes a practice of partial perspective, not transcendence. The most reliable knowledge does not come from nowhere, but from accountable positioning, critical translation and solidarity across unequal locations. Haraway’s conclusion is that feminist objectivity must be simultaneously realist and constructivist: committed to the world’s agency, alert to the politics of seeing, and responsible for the visions it helps make possible.

Lloveras, A. (2026) Socioplastics Pentagon Series: Knowledge Infrastructure, Metabolic Legibility and Living Research Systems. Madrid: LAPIEZA-LAB.

The Socioplastics Pentagon Series argues that contemporary knowledge systems can no longer be understood as passive archives, searchable repositories, or accumulations of outputs; they must be designed as living infrastructures capable of absorbing, organising, stabilising and renewing abundance. Its central proposition is that digital scholarship now suffers less from scarcity than from disorientation: access has exceeded ordinary reading, while storage and search remain insufficient unless a corpus develops routes, thresholds, recurrent vocabularies, stable identifiers and zones of return. The series therefore proposes a metabolic model of research formation, in which archives ingest heterogeneous material, prune redundancy, recombine earlier traces and convert latency into structure. This process depends upon legibility, not as simplification, but as the capacity of a corpus to remain navigable for both human and machine readers. The case of the “digestive archive” is especially revealing: fragments, metadata, notes, drafts, citations and datasets do not possess equal epistemic force, but acquire changing functions as they move from accumulation to compression, from provisional periphery to durable nucleus. The later essays extend this argument by showing that a corpus becomes a field only when it crosses a grammatical threshold: concepts recur with variation, scales become nested, and certain objects close enough to become citable without becoming doctrinal. In AI-mediated environments, this architecture becomes even more urgent, because machines encounter scholarly work through identifiers, metadata, embeddings, links and semantic recurrence before human interpretation begins. Yet the series resists total transparency, insisting on strategic porosity: enough structure to enable traversal, enough ambiguity to preserve interpretation. Its final synthesis lies in the distinction between hardened nuclei and plastic peripheries. Living research systems require stable cores—definitions, indexes, datasets, protocols, persistent addresses—and experimental edges where language can mutate, fail, and discover new forms. The conclusion is that intellectual endurance depends on architecture: not rigid canonisation, but the careful design of differential speeds, where stability shelters openness and abundance becomes thought.

Luhmann, N. (1995) Social Systems. Translated by J. Bednarz Jr. with D. Baecker. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Luhmann’s theory of social systems proposes a radical shift from human-centred sociology towards an account of society as an autopoietic order composed not of individuals, intentions, or actions, but of communications. Against traditions that treat the subject as the foundation of social life, Luhmann argues that modern society can only be understood through the difference between system and environment: systems emerge by reducing complexity, selecting from an overwhelming field of possibilities, and reproducing their own operations recursively. This does not mean that people disappear, but that psychic systems and social systems operate differently; consciousness thinks, whereas society communicates. The crucial implication is that communication is not the transfer of inner meanings from one mind to another, but a synthesis of information, utterance, and understanding that generates further communication. In this sense, society is autopoietic, because it produces the elements from which it is made. Luhmann’s concept of double contingency clarifies the problem: when two actors encounter one another, each depends on the other’s unpredictable response, so social order cannot be grounded in certainty, consensus, or shared essence. Instead, order arises from recursive selections that stabilise expectations while remaining contingent. A useful case is modern functional differentiation: law, politics, science, economy, and art each observe the world through their own codes and cannot be reduced to one supreme viewpoint. Science seeks truth, law distinguishes legal from illegal, and politics processes power, yet none can fully control the others. Luhmann therefore replaces moral or humanist explanations of society with a theory of complexity, showing that modernity is not unified by a common subject but sustained by multiple self-referential systems. His conclusion is demanding but decisive: society has no external observer, no final centre, and no privileged language of total description; it can only observe itself through the partial operations of the systems that constitute it.

Simondon, G. (1958) On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects. Translated by N. Mellamphy. Paris: Aubier, Editions Montaigne.

Simondon argues that modern culture remains philosophically impoverished because it excludes technical objects from the domain of meaning, treating machines either as neutral tools or as threatening quasi-human rivals. Against this false opposition between culture and technics, he insists that technical objects contain “human reality”: they crystallise gestures, knowledge, invention, and relations between human beings and nature. The central problem is therefore not machinic domination but cultural misrecognition, since alienation arises when machines are reduced to utility while their modes of existence remain conceptually invisible. Simondon’s key intervention is to replace the myth of the robot with an account of technical genesis. A machine is not perfected by becoming more automatic; indeed, excessive automatism often marks a lower technical stage because it closes the object into rigid repetition. True technical perfection lies in openness, in the margin of indetermination that allows machines to receive information, adapt to circumstances, and enter into ensembles coordinated by human interpretation. His case of the engine clarifies this process: an early engine is “abstract” because its parts perform isolated functions, whereas the modern engine becomes “concrete” when its components enter reciprocal relations, each structure performing several compatible roles within a unified system. The cooling fin, for instance, is no longer an added device but simultaneously disperses heat and reinforces the cylinder head. Technical evolution therefore proceeds not by superficial complication but by concretisation, the progressive integration of functions into a coherent internal organisation. This argument transforms the status of the human operator: rather than master of mechanical slaves, the human being becomes the organiser, interpreter, and conductor of technical ensembles. Simondon consequently calls for a cultural reform in which technological understanding acquires the same dignity as literary or scientific education. Only by integrating technics into culture can society overcome both technocratic idolatry and anti-machine resentment, recognising machines as mediators through which human invention continues to inhabit the material world.

Bowker, G.C. (2000) ‘Memory Practices in the Sciences’. Unpublished manuscript/essay.

Bowker’s analysis of scientific memory practices argues that science does not simply preserve the past; it actively constructs usable pasts through infrastructures, classifications, archives, standards, and databases. Against the assumption that memory is merely conscious recollection, Bowker defines it as a dispersed set of social, technical, and institutional practices ranging from habitual procedure to hyper-detailed archival accumulation. Scientific knowledge depends upon this managed memory because facts must appear stable, transferable, and timeless, even though they are produced through historically situated labour. Time, therefore, becomes the “money of science”: a shared standard that allows experiments, observations, disciplines, and databases to be synchronised across different locations and temporal scales. The essay’s central tension lies between the mnemonic deep, where the past remains tangled, partial, and discontinuous, and the scientific aspiration to an eternal present in which laws of nature appear free from contingency. Bowker’s case of geology is especially revealing: Lyell’s earth functions as an imperfect archive, preserving traces of extinction, succession, and transformation, yet always through gaps, distortions, and uneven records. This geological example anticipates contemporary database science, where biodiversity records similarly claim comprehensiveness while excluding local, historical, or material traces that do not fit standardised categories. Bowker thus shows that archives are never neutral containers; they organise what can be remembered, compared, forgotten, or rendered scientifically invisible. His conclusion is that robust scientific databases must preserve traces of their own making, because the authority of science depends not on perfect memory but on recognising the infrastructural labour through which memory is produced.

Bourdieu, P. (1984) ‘The Market of Symbolic Goods’, in The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. New York: Columbia University Press.

Bourdieu’s account of cultural production demonstrates that art becomes socially intelligible only when understood as a field structured by tensions between autonomy, commerce, and legitimacy. Rather than treating artworks as isolated expressions of genius, he situates them within a competitive system in which producers, critics, publishers, academies, museums, and educational institutions struggle to define value. The crucial opposition is between restricted production, aimed primarily at other producers, and large-scale production, oriented towards the widest possible public. In the restricted field, value is generated through consecration by peers and institutions, often by rejecting immediate commercial success as vulgar or compromising. Conversely, large-scale cultural goods are shaped by market demand, accessibility, and profitability, making them culturally subordinated even when economically successful. This distinction reveals the paradox at the heart of modern art: the market grants artists independence from patrons, yet simultaneously exposes them to anonymous economic pressures. A revealing case is avant-garde art, whose difficulty, formal innovation, and limited audience become signs of distinction precisely because they require rare interpretative competences. Museums and schools later stabilise such works as legitimate culture, transforming once-heretical practices into classics. Thus, cultural value is never neutral; it is produced through institutional mediation and unequal access to the codes of appreciation. Bourdieu’s argument concludes that symbolic goods possess a double existence, as commodities and as distinction, and that their power lies in concealing the social struggles through which legitimacy is manufactured.

Glissant, É. (1997) Poetics of Relation. Translated by B. Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation advances a transformative proposition: identity is not a sealed root descending into a single origin, but an open, moving, plural Relation formed through crossings, displacements, languages, memories, and encounters. Against Western models of filiation, transparency, and totalizing universality, Glissant proposes an archipelagic imagination in which peoples do not become real by reducing themselves to one essence, but by entering into unpredictable contact with others. The foundational case is the Middle Passage, figured in “The Open Boat” as abyss, womb, and matrix: the slave ship destroys worlds, languages, gods, and familiar objects, yet from this catastrophe emerges not a triumphal origin myth, but a knowledge of Relation born from shared vulnerability and historical rupture. This abyss is not simply trauma; it becomes the dark alluvium from which Caribbean creolization, memory, and poetics arise. Glissant’s concept of creolization names a process of mutual transformation rather than mixture as fixed identity; it refuses purity, hierarchy, and universal assimilation. His defence of opacity is equally decisive: the other need not be made transparent, translated, classified, or possessed in order to be respected. A specific synthesis appears in his reflections on language, where Creole, French, oral traditions, translation, and endangered idioms reveal that linguistic diversity is not provincial residue but planetary intelligence. The conclusion is radical: the world is not a tower rebuilt under one language, but a chaos-monde of echoing differences, where relation opens freedom without demanding possession.

James, W. (1912) Essays in Radical Empiricism. New York: Longmans, Green, and Co.

William James’s Essays in Radical Empiricism advances a daring philosophical proposition: reality is not divided at its root into mind and matter, subject and object, consciousness and thing, but is composed of pure experience whose terms and relations are both directly given. The editor’s preface presents the volume not as a loose collection but as a coherent treatise, stressing that radical empiricism is an independent doctrine, more fundamental than pragmatism, and organised around three claims: philosophical debate must use terms drawn from experience; relations are experienced as directly as the things related; and experience possesses its own continuous structure without requiring any transcendent support. James’s opening essay, “Does ‘Consciousness’ Exist?”, is the decisive case study. He does not deny that thoughts occur; rather, he denies that consciousness names a special substance. What is called consciousness is a function within experience, a way in which one portion of experience knows, refers to, or leads toward another. The same “room”, for example, may function as part of a person’s biography or as part of the physical history of a house, without splitting into two metaphysical substances. James thus replaces dualism with relational contextualism: thought and thing are not separate materials, but different roles played by experience within different practical continuities. His conclusion is radical because it refuses both abstract monism and fragmented empiricism; the world is plural, continuous, relational, and known from within its own experiential tissue.

Noble, S.U. (2018) Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. New York: New York University Press.

Safiya Umoja Noble’s Algorithms of Oppression advances a decisive critique of digital culture: search engines are not neutral gateways to knowledge, but commercial classification systems that reproduce racism, sexism, and structural inequality under the guise of algorithmic objectivity. In the introduction, Noble names this process technological redlining, extending the history of discriminatory exclusion from housing and banking into the informational infrastructures of the web. Her argument begins from a concrete wound: a search for “black girls” produced pornographic and degrading results, revealing how advertising logics, corporate profit, and anti-Black misogyny converge in supposedly automated systems. The cover page itself intensifies this claim by juxtaposing streams of numerical code with Google-style autocomplete phrases such as “why are black women so angry”, “lazy”, “loud”, or “sassy”, visually demonstrating how racism can be naturalised as searchable common sense. Noble develops the case further through examples including Google Images misclassifying Black people as “gorillas”, Google Maps associating racist slurs with the White House during Barack Obama’s presidency, and search associations linking Michelle Obama with “ape”. These are not isolated glitches; for Noble, they disclose the architecture of algorithmic oppression, where human bias, corporate secrecy, and unregulated monopoly power shape public knowledge. Her conclusion is urgent: algorithms must be studied, challenged, regulated, and redesigned as matters of civil rights, because artificial intelligence has become a central human rights issue of the twenty-first century.

Whitehead, A.N. (1929) Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. New York: The Macmillan Company.

Alfred North Whitehead’s Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology advances one of the most ambitious metaphysical propositions of twentieth-century philosophy: reality is not composed primarily of enduring substances, but of actual occasions—events of becoming, relationally constituted through feeling, inheritance, and creative transformation. In the preface, Whitehead names his system the philosophy of organism, explicitly opposing the doctrine of “vacuous actuality”, the belief that things simply exist as inert, self-contained facts. Instead, every actuality is internally related to others; what has perished becomes objectively immortal by entering into new occasions of experience. The table of contents reveals the architecture of this speculative scheme: Part I establishes the categories, Part II applies them to nature, subjectivity, symbolism, propositions, and process, Part III develops the theory of prehension, Part IV treats extension and measurement, and Part V culminates in “God and the World”. Whitehead’s case study is philosophy itself: he revisits Descartes, Newton, Locke, Hume, Kant, Bergson, James, and Dewey not to repeat them, but to recover neglected insights and reorganise them within a cosmology of becoming. His decisive claim is methodological as well as ontological: speculative philosophy must be coherent, logical, applicable, and adequate to all experience. The conclusion is that existence is not a catalogue of things, but a creative advance in which relation precedes isolated quality and the world continually composes itself anew.