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Introduction Cold War Cold World A Project of Reason
"Introduction Cold War Cold World A Project of Reason" uses feedback, automation, or machinic desire to describe modernity as a recursive system rather than a human-centered project.
Archive condition
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Core idea
The key claim is that cybernetic process and capitalist abstraction belong to the same field. Feedback, machinic desire, and recursive automation describe how modernity runs through distributed systems rather than sovereign subjects.
These pages make recursion operational by tying desire, signal, and control to technical process. Cybernetics becomes a vocabulary for understanding how abstraction feeds back through bodies, media, and institutions.
That matters because the archive's account of meltdown depends on feedback rather than simple linear progress. The future arrives here as recursive escalation, not as planned development.
How to read this text
Begin with the page's account of feedback or machinic desire, then move outward to its claims about culture or politics.
Track how automation, recursion, or systems language displaces centered agency. That shift usually reveals why the text sits in this section.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 8
8 z -l ::0 0 0 c () -l 0 z external to the internal via a 'cybernetics of control', but 'rather than unveiling the real of the image' as a component in the Cold World's machinic network, art tends to 'present us with a hypnotic collage that offers the thrill of the real', replaying the Cold War scenario by offering an edifying spectacle that ultimately traps us in the closed circles traced out by Beech.
Definition · paragraph 1
James Wiltgen and Robin Mackay Introduction: Cold War/Cold World A Project of Reason?
Definition · paragraph 5
Finally, it demands an understanding of how this 'new' reason. perhaps a neo-reason, functions within the continuum running from the manifest to the scientific image. This distinction, which we owe to Wilfrid Sellars's understanding of the two basic ways in which humans view themselves and the world, is already implicated in the Cold War home invasion described by Alliez and Lazzara
Stakes · paragraph 4
The existential global threat of annihilation and an internal machinic slaving based upon a proliferating consumer 'dream-world' would form the architecture of the globalizing project: America would become the principle avatar of a continually mutating capitalism based upon the potential ontological absolute of annihilation and the febrile seduction of a consumer cornucopia.
Stakes · paragraph 3
They demonstrate clearly how. in deploying the political. economic. and technological spoils of the arms race into the social and domestic sphere via a militarization of peace and a cyberneticization of the social, the Cold War was instrumental in engineering a Cold World to come. and that both are best seen as phases in an ongoing mutation of the war machine constitutive of capitalism itself (the thesis of Wars and Capital, from which the text is excerpted).5 With Truman's tenure marked by domes
Appears in sections
Capital, Meltdown, and Cybernetic Modernity Primary section
Capitalist abstraction, deterritorialization, cybernetics, and the archive's account of runaway modernity.