Cold War Legacies: Systems, Theory, Aesthetics(Technicities)

About the Book

From futures research, pattern recognition algorithms, nuclear waste disposal and surveillance technologies, to smart weapons systems, contemporary fiction and art, this book shows that we are now living in a world imagined and engineered during the Cold War.
Drawing on theorists such as Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Luce Irigaray, Friedrich Kittler, Michel Serres, Peter Sloterdijk, Carl Schmitt, Bernard Stiegler and Paul Virilio this collection makes connections between Cold War material and conceptual technologies, as they relate to the arts, society and culture.

Table of Contents:
List of FiguresSeries Editors’ PrefaceAcknowledgementsNotes on Contributors Introduction: The Long Cold WarJohn Beck and Ryan Bishop Part I: Pattern Recognition 1. The Future: RAND, Brand and Dangerous to KnowJohn Beck 2. Simulate, Optimise, Partition: Algorithmic Diagrams of Pattern Recognition from 1953 OnwardsAdrian Mackenzie 3. Impulsive Synchronisation: A Conversation on Military Technologies and Audiovisual ArtsAura Satz and Jussi Parikka Part II: The Persistence of the Nuclear 4. The Meaning of Monte BelloJames Purdon 5. Deep Geological Disposal and Radioactive Time: Beckett, Bowen, Nirex and OnkaloAdam Piette 6. Shifting the Nuclear Imaginary: Art and the Flight from Nuclear ModernityEle Carpenter 7. Alchemical Transformations? Fictions of the Nuclear State after 1989Daniel Grausam Part III: Ubiquitous Surveillance 8. ‘The Very Form of Perverse Artificial Societies’: The Unstable Emergence of the Network Family from its Cold War Nuclear BunkerKen Hollings 9. The Signal-Haunted Cold War: Persistence of the SIGINT OntologyJussi Parikka 10. ‘Bulk Surveillance’, or The Elegant Technicities of MetadataMark Coté Part IV: Pervasive Mediations 11. Notes from the Underground: Microwaves, Backbones, Party Lines and the Post Office TowerJohn W. P. Phillips 12. Insect Technics: War Vision MachinesFabienne Collignon 13. Overt ResearchNeal White and John Beck 14. Smart Dust and Remote Sensing: The Political Subject in Autonomous SystemsRyan Bishop Index

About the Author :
John Beck is Professor of Modern Literature at the University of Westminster. He has published widely on American cultural politics and intellectual history in relation to literature, art and visual culture. Books include Landscape as Weapon: Cultures of Exhaustion and Refusal (2021), Technocrats of the Imagination: Art, Technology, and the Military-Industrial Avant-Garde (co-authored with Ryan Bishop, 2020), and Dirty Wars: Landscape, Power and Waste in Western American Literature (2009). Ryan Bishop is Professor of Global Arts and Politics and Co-director of the research group Archaeologies of Media and Technology at the Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, United Kingdom. He co-edits the journal Cultural Politics (Duke UP), and is a series editor for Technicities (Edinburgh University Press) and Cultural Politics (Duke UP).

Review :
Examining the persistence of the Cold War’s massive restructuring of our lifeworld, this fascinating collection provides a series of incisive case studies that explores key sites of interaction between politics, technoscience and various modalities of cultural production since the mid-twentieth century. Taken together, these interlinked microhistories provide both a powerful demonstration of the book’s central thesis regarding the Cold War – the degree to which, even ‘after’, we continue to live within it – and an important resource for the challenge of thinking beyond its legacies.