Frictions: Inquiries into Cybernetic Thinking and Its Attempts towards Mate[real]ization

Abstract

'Frictions' is a collective invitation to embrace the space of difference that both connects and separates techno-scientific discourses from their actual implementations - or even, from their non-implementations. Through a series of case studies focused on cybernetics, systems research, and some of their more contemporary inheritors, this book argues that such a middle space, the topology of frictions, offers significant insights to assess the historical and epistemological relevance of these interconnected fields. Characterized here as cybernetic thinking, this broad area of theoretical and applied projects would conceal, precisely within its frictions, the operational principles of our present.