Trans-end collabouration in cyberspace

Trans-end has just launched its collabourative cyber studio.

This project is growing from strength to strength with team members jet setting all over South Africa to move the work along.

www.trans-end.org.za

Archaeology of business practices (MBA short course)

This short course presented as part of the MBA program relates directly to the method and role of case histories, produced in this course of study, focused on business practices.

This short course is concerned with a style of reasoning which identifies systems of thinking, acting and saying in business practices through an analysis of an archive of evidence.

The analytical criteria proposed to construct insights about a business practice (through a case history) are: the formation of objects, the formation of a unique subject position, the formation of concepts in the practice, the formation of techniques in the practice and the formation of strategies employed by the practice. The elements of the archive are identified for their communicative functions, not for their meaning within the practice. Thus each element offered up for analysis is interrogated in its context, in order to reveal its role in the definition and limitation of the business practice.

This method is aimed at establishing systemic relationships between the symbolic practices and material practices of a business, and to reveal what limits the former establishes for the imaginary practices of the enterprise.

The course objective is to show how this style of reasoning may be used to stimulate innovation in business practice.

Having said that, this course will refer to the writings of Michel Foucault to find evidence of the application of such a style of reasoning or attitude – which is not exactly a method – toward the production of case histories related to business practices. In that sense, it is not a course for readers but a course for doers. Reading - a core activity preceding each lecture - is not directed at what was said by whom, but focused on the function and effects of the style of reasoning employed while producing case histories.

The primary question asked throughout the course is: how does it function? This course is not concerned with another question often asked: what does it mean?

I Ching for the 'African Renaissance' - first edition - out of print

The first edition of "I Ching for the 'African Renaissance'" published in November 2006 is now out of print.

An EBook version is now available from the internet archive via HTTP and FTP.

http://www.archive.org/ and search for "African Renaissance"

Also see the WIKI

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_Renaissance

The theme of % as a philosophico-art project

It is becoming clearer that two terms that have emerged so far (%Chance and %Trance) are usefull in a discussion about the limits of trance-formation, chance-formation and trans-formation, also new terms.

Although no definition can be given as yet these notions are broadly concerned with:

(1) trance-formation: the predicative character of metaphor in the formation of 'new metaphors' applied in transformative thinking and communicative acts.

(2) chance-formation: the liberating practices required to escape the former.

(3) trans-formation: is the product of the force balance between trance-formation and chance-formation. It is a vector in the present, pointing to the future.