Readings that Matter to Me

Readings for Inventing Systems, Spring 2006

• Readings Packet [PDF file, 4.9 Mb]
  1. Marianne Brun: Paradigms: The Inertia of Language
  2. Heinz von Foerster: Perception of the Future and the Future of Perception
  3. Heinz von Foerster: Ethics and 2nd-order Cybernetics
  4. Heinz von Foerster: Disorder/Order: Discovery or Invention?
  5. Heinz von Foerster: Metaphysics of an Experimental Epistemologist
  6. Herbert Brun: The Need of Cognition for the Cognition of Needs
  7. Herbert Brun: Drawing Distinctions Links Contradictions
  8. Stafford Beer: Fanfare for Effective Freedom
  9. Stafford Beer: Desiging Freedom
  10. Humberto Maturana: Ontology of Observing
  11. Humberto Maturana: Cognitive Strategies
  12. Warren Weaver: Recent Contributions to the Mathematical Theory of Communication
  13. Friedrich Engles: Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State
  14. Franklin D. Roosevelt: The Economic Bill of Rights
  15. Karl Mark: Wage Labor and Capital
  16. Heinrich von Kleist: On the Marionette Theatre
  17. Franz Kafka: The Trial
  18. Bertolt Brecht: The Street Scene
  19. Bertolt Brecht: On Everyday Theatre
  20. M.C. Escher: Eight Drawings
• Readings Packet 2 (ToMaTo) [PDF file, 9.9 Mb]
  1. Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead: For God's Sake, Margaret!
  2. Gregory Bateson: The Position of Humor in Human Communication
  3. Arturo Rosenblueth, Norbert Weiner and Julian Bigelow: Behavior, Purpose and Teleology
  4. Heinz von Foerster: On Constructing a Reality
  5. Heinz von Foerster: Invitation to the Dance
  6. Ernst von Glasersfeld: Distinguishing the Observer
  7. William S. Condon: Communication: Rhythm and Structure
  8. Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness
  9. Herbert Brun: Declarations
  10. Marianne Brun: Designing Society
  11. Mark Enslin: Teaching Composition: Facing the Power of the Respondent
  12. Friedrich Engles: The Part Played by Logor in the Transition from Ape to Man
  13. Friedrich Engles: Socialism: Utopian and Scientific
  14. Karl Marx: The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof
  15. Mark Sullivan: The Performance of Gesture: Musical Gesture Then and Now

Pages on Chile under Allende (1970-73)

Allende's Chile, 1972 (John Foran)

History of Chile under Salvador Allende and the Popular Unity (1970-73) (Ewin Torre)

• Welcome
• Allende wins the elections
• The Popular Unity government
• El Tanquetazo: June 29, 1973
• The definitive coup
• Resources and links

CIA Covert action in Chile: 1963-1973 (Ralph McGehee)

Chile 1964-1973 (William Blum)

Cybernetics

• Stafford Beer:
  1. Designing Freedom
  2. Fanfare for Effective Freedom
  
  
• Heinz von Foerster:
  1. Perception of the Future and The Future of Perception
  2. On Constructing a Reality
  3. Interview with Heinz von Foerster
  4. Thoughts and Notes on Cognition [extract]
  5. Disorder/Order: Discovery or Invention?
  6. Ethics and Second-Order Cybernetics
  7. Cybernetics of Cybernetics
  8. Communication Amongst Automata (1962)
  9. Biological Principles of Information Storage and Retrieval (1967)
  10. Perception of Form in Biological and Man-Made Systems (1962)
  11. Responsibilities of Competence (1972)
  12. Notes on An Epistemology For Living Things (1972)
  13. Heuristics: A Report on a Course on Knowledge Aquisition (1970)
  14. From Stimulus to Symbol: The Economy of Biological Computation (1966)
  15. Logical Structure of Environment and Its Internal Representation (BCL 096)
  16. Metaphysics of an Experimental Epistemologist (1996)
      (on Warren McCullough)
  17. Form: Perception, Representation and Symbolization (1962)
      
  
  
• Warren Weaver: Recent Contributions to the Mathematical Theory of Communication
  
  
• Claude Shannon: A Mathematical Theory of Communication (1948)
  
  
• Norbert Wiener, Arturo Rosenblueth, and Julian Bigelow: Behavior, Purpose and Teleology (1943)
  
  
• J.Y. Lettvin, H.R. Maturana, W.S. McCulloch, W.H. Pitts: What the Frog's Eye Tells the Frog's Brain (1959)
  
  
• Humberto Maturana:
  1. Cognitive Strategies (1974)
  2. Ontology of Observing (1988)
  3. The Nature of Time (1995)
  4. The Biology of Language (1978)
  5. Cognition (1978)
  6. Biology of Cognition (1970)
  
  
• W. Ross Ashby:
  
  1. An Introduction to Cybernetics (complete book)
  2. The Contribution of Information Theory to Pathological Mechanisms in Psychiatry (BCL #164) [1968]
  
  
  
• Gregory Bateson: The Position of Humor in Human Communication (1952)
  
  
• Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead: Conversation with Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead (1976)
  
  
• Arun Chandra: Poetry for Puppets
  
  
• Marianne Brun: Designing Society

Articles by Herbert Brun

1. The Listener's Interpretation of Music
2. Teaching the Function of Time in Art
3. Wayfaring Sounds
4. ... to hold discourse---at least---with a computer...
5. Drawing Distinctions Links Contradictions
6. Existentialism and the Arts (two fragments)
7. Gustav Mahler and the Virtues of Ambiguity (two fragments)
8. Musical Ideas for Synthetic Sound (1964)
9. my words and where I want them (1986)
10. Brun Book Draft Dec 2002 (PDF) [12Mb]

Composition

• Mark Enslin:
  • When is Audience?
  • Teaching Composition: Facing the Power of the Respondent
    • PDF file
    • HTML file
    
    
    
• Susan Parenti
  1. The Relationships Between An Objectivity-Conditioned Language And the Present State of New Music
     • HTML file
     • PDF file
  2. Self-Reference and the Language About New Music
     • HTML file
     • PDF file
  3. Touchy, in eight parts, for four voices
     • HTML file
     • PDF file
  4. Proposals for a Feminist Composition Curriculum
  
  
  
• Mark Sullivan:
  1. Questions to Ask a Piece of Music (Poem)
  2. The Performance of Gesture: Musical Gesture, Then, And Now (1984)
  
  
  
• Elie Siegmeister: Music and Society
  
  
• Arnold Schoenberg:
  • New Music, Outmoded Music, Style and Idea
  • English translation of Pierrot Lunaire poems
  
  
  
• Leon Botstein: Schoenberg and the Audience
  
  
• John Cage
  • Experimental Music
  • Experimental Music (Doctrine)
  
  
  
• Kenneth Gaburo: Whole Language Language
  
  
• Hector Berlioz: Program notes to "Symphony Fantastique"
  
  
• Iannis Xenakis and Morton Feldman: In Conversation
• Suggested Listening List
• Suggested Readings List
  
  
• Stefan Wolpe:
  1. To Understand Music (1953)
  2. On Proportions (1960)
  3. Recollections of Stefan Wolpe (Austin Clarkson, Ed.)
  
  
  
• Liberetto to Offenbach's Orpheus in the Underworld
  
  
• Alban Berg:
  1. What is Atonality?
  2. Why is Schoenberg's Music So Difficult to Understand?
  3. A Guide to "Wozzeck" (by Willi Reich)

Composition and Technology

• Pierre Boulez: Technology and the Composer
• Gottfried Michael Koenig: Compositional Processes

Theater

• Bertolt Brecht:
  1. Writing The Truth: Five Difficulties
  2. The Street Scene
• Franco Rame: An Introduction to Dario Fo's "We Won't Pay!"
• David Greenspan: The Myopia
• William Gillespie, Mark Enslin, Rick Burkhardt, Joe Futrelle: Theater Therapy
• Daniel Berrigen: Trial of the Catonsville Nine

Aesthetics and Social Criticism

• Walter Benjamin:
  1. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
  2. The Storyteller
• Theodor Adorno
  1. Education after Auschwitz
  2. Commitment
  3. Music and Language
  4. The Culture Industry (with Max Horkheimer)
  5. Elements of Aesthetics (with Hanns Eisler)
• Herbert Marcuse:
  1. Repressive Tolerance
  2. The Language of Total Administration (from "One-Dimensional Man")
• Roland Barthes: Elements of Semiology

Writers

• Arundhati Roy
  1. Come September
  2. Confronting Empire
• Sherman Alexie Relevant Contradictions
• Lewis Carroll: The Mad Gardener's Song
• Oscar Wilde
  1. On the Decay of Lying
  2. The Soul of Man Under Socialism
• Franz Kafka:
  1. The Hunger Artist
  2. The Trial
• Heinrich von Kleist: On the Marionette Theater
• Karl Kraus: The Artist, the Public, and the Fool
• Gertrude Stein
  1. Tender Buttons (excerpts)
  2. Composition as Explanation
• Toni Morrison On Contemporary Racism
• Kurt Vonnegut Interview
• Michael Holloway Hyper Post Meta
• Adrienne Rich Divisions of Labor
• Jonathan Swift: A Modest Proposal
• James Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Chap. 5)

Politics

• Marianne Brun: Paradigms: The Inertia of Language
• Noam Chomsky and David Barsamian: Collateral Language
• Eric Foner: Not All Freedom is Made in America
• Franklin D. Roosevelt: The Economic Bill of Rights (Jan. 11, 1944)
• Friedrich Engles:
  1. The Part Played by Labor in the Transition from Ape to Man
  2. Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880)
• Karl Marx:
  1. Wage Labor and Capital (1849)
  2. The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof (1890)
• Leo Huberman:
  1. The ABC of Socialism
  2. How to spread the word
• Major General Smedley Butler: War Is A Racket
• Bertrand Russell:
  1. In Praise of Idleness
  2. Why I am not a Christian
  3. What Desires Are Politically Important?
• Theodor Adorno: Excerpts from "The Authoritarian Personality"
  1. Prejudice in the Interview Material
  2. Politics and Economics in the Interview Material
  3. Some Aspects of Religious Ideology As Revealed in the Interview Material
  4. Types and Syndromes

GREAT HYMN OF THANKSGIVING composed by Rick Burkhardt from H.P. Mendoza on Vimeo.

GREAT HYMN OF THANKSGIVING composed by Rick Burkhardt from H.P. Mendoza on Vimeo.